Coincidence Makes Small World Go 'Round

In 1981, Bill and Laurine Cooke took a trip to the Holy Land. Their first stop was Amman, Jordan. To get there, they caught a plane from New York City's Kennedy Airport.

At some point during the flight, Laurine had her passport out on the tray table in front of her. The gentleman in the next seat, a man with whom she'd made only polite small talk, seemed to be sneaking peeks at it.

"He got more and more interested and less and less subtle about it," Laurine told me. "And finally he said, 'Excuse me, I don't mean to stare, but is your address 3406 Murdock Road in Kensington, Maryland?' "

Laurine said that it was. And then the man said, "I used to live in that house."

She thought at first that he might be mistaken, but he pointed out details that only someone who had lived in the house would know.

"Here we were on a plane out of Kennedy Airport and the guy sitting next to me happened to have lived in the same house," Laurine said. "How much of a coincidence is that? . . . It just kind of blew my mind."

Twenty-three years later, Bill and Laurine were preparing to visit their daughter Alicia in a tiny village in the African nation of Niger, where she is a Peace Corps volunteer. Alicia had asked that her parents bring a shortwave radio, so she could listen to the BBC.

Bill is a hiker. He had noticed that an Internet chat room devoted to the Appalachian Trail featured a discussion about shortwave radios and their utility for trail hikers. He posted this message on the forum: "My daughter serving in the Peace Corps in Africa has asked us to bring a short wave radio when we visit her next week. She's in a remote village in Niger w/o electricity about 150-200 miles from the capital. So will these radios work for that distance?"

About five hours later, this message appeared, addressed to Bill: "you're not from MD by any chance, are you? If so I think I might've met your daughter."

It turns out that this fellow had. After Alicia graduated from New York University and before she started her Peace Corps training, she spent several months working odd jobs in Galway, Ireland. There she met a young American named John who was from Parkville, Md. Months later, John would see Bill's posting.

Bill and Laurine now live in Silver Spring, in the neighborhood my family just moved from. One day a few years back, my colleague Marty Barrick, an art director here at The Post, said that I probably knew her daughter's preschool teacher, since she lived on my street and her name was . . . Laurine Cooke.

I like hearing tales like this, interesting coincidences, unusual twists of fate, stories that make me say, "Small world, isn't it?" (And not in the snotty, facetious tone of voice I usually use when I say, "Small world, isn't it," but in a truly sincere way.)

I know that a statistician would say there's nothing that unusual about the tiny synchronicities we encounter. Even ending up on a jet plane next to someone who used to live in the same house as you is probably statistically irrelevant. But I don't need to see any cosmic legerdemain in these little spatial and temporal quirks to enjoy them.

In 1990, when I worked in The Post's Weekend section, a co-worker named Jeanne Cooper found a bird's nest on the ground. Woven into it was a little scrap of newsprint. On the newsprint was a byline. And the byline said, "By Caryle Murphy, Washington Post Foreign Service." At the time, Caryle was in hiding in Kuwait City, filing stories after the Iraqi invasion.