Every once in a while something happens to remind me just how tiny the universe is.
Last time, we were in Amsterdam, wandering across the bridge from the train station (we'd just bought tickets for Luxembourg), when the first woman (girl, at the time) I ever fell in love with appeared behind us, screaming my name.
I recognized her walk before any of us really figured out what was happening.
This time, I was standing out on the front stoop, talking to little one-year-old Nicky and his grandma, explaining computer things to grandma and singing to Nicky who in all his cleverness starting humming along to whatever Vaccaj was in my head.
The guy who brings the local newspaper by, climbed up the stairs, and I went to meet him halfway, scooping a handful of newsprint from his outstretched hand.
Flirtatiously he asked if I remembered him from last year.
No, I said, I was living in Europe last year, it must have been someone else.
This line works on just about every "don't I know you from somewhere" I've gotten so far, what with my oooooh so familiar face. (sarcasm drips freely)
Not this time.
THis time he said "no, it was in France, at Chamonix. In the irish pub. You were with a long-haired woman and a bunch of Quebecois men. You were very nice to me when I was drunk and clinging to the bar."
Squinting, I realized, he was the rock-climber from Alberta that had spent our first night in Chamonix telling me how beautiful he thought I was.
Telling me about rock-climbing, then ice-climbing, then the way he wanders the planet looking for new ways to churn out that extra drop of adrenaline.
When I first started climbing here, and we went to MEC to buy my equipment, and I fingered the ice axes carefully, dreaming of climbing a glacier with my skis strapped to my back -- I was thinking of him, if someone I knew could do it, so could I.
This morning, I didn't have the guts to tell him that.
But I smiled much wider than I would have expected to, and watched him wander off up the street with his little red wheelbarrow.
How tiny this universe, and yet, it has taken me twenty six years to meet some of the immense spirits that I have met so recently.
If this paradox doesn't enforce my absolute love for Quantum theory, maybe it's the cuddles I got last night.
The ones that made everything okay, which makes no sense, and yet makes all the sense in the universe.