Small Worlds

Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction. This weekend my mother and I drove out to California to celebrate my aunt’s fiftieth birthday. To meet her you would never believe this of course because no one in our family looks their age, but I digress.

Southern California was where I was born, and I spent most of my life in the Anaheim area, so it’s sort of obligatory for my mother and I that we at least pass by the house where I spent a fairly good portion of my youth.

This time however… something occurred to me, that for whatever reason hadn’t before. At barely eleven my mother and her family moved across the country from Florida to California, my mother had been born in New York but the family had moved from there to Florida when my mother was eight or nine. Shortly thereafter tragedy struck and my grandmother passed. It would be two years before the family moved over to California. Around that time, my grandfather joined a over fifty’s singles group where he met a woman whom he later would marry.

Here’s where it gets a little stranger than fiction, this particular woman in question, lived in Anaheim, on the same street several miles down from my father’s side of the family. She had lived there for quite a few decades by that time, and my father’s side of the family had lived on his street since before he was even born.

It was like something out of a movie… two families had lived only a few miles away for years, and it was only because of my grandfather happening to get a job in California, and happening to meet this woman that mother would move in to that particular house and shortly thereafter meet my father.

The fairytale, as it often does, … ends there. Their marriage was not exactly what I would call a happy one. I struggled with my parents divorce for years, but the more I learned about the tumultuous marriage, the more I realized it was more than necessary, it was long overdue, but the point is… if all of these things hadn’t fallen into place in just such a way, my parents might never have met.

Sometimes life is so much more bizarre than anything a writer could even imagine… and I think if I had seen it in a movie or read it in a book, I probably wouldn’t even have believed it.

I love hearing about family history and really all kinds of history… maybe it’s a writer thing.