Sadly, this story has lost a bit of its immediacy
I am the type of person who runs into people. (Interestingly, I’m also the type of person that always gets asked for directions wherever I am – a la, stopped in Paris by two rapidly speaking Frenchmen for what I presume were Parisian directions, singled out amongst a crowd in Brooklyn not three hours after my arrival and asked subway directions, etc. Luckily, I usually know where I am.) I mean, nearly without fail, I will run into someone on the train platform, the bar I’m at – it happens more often than you would think.
For instance: Two weekends ago, I went to NYC for my grandmother’s memorial service/would-be 102 birthday party. Poor directions for the mailbox in the airport led to me running into my friend Lauren, who had just randomly flown in from Boston that morning. More fun awaited me at the gate, where my friend Laura happened to be on my flight, off for a comedy gig in the city.
The next morning, I decide to go into the city from Brooklyn to see about some theatre tickets. There used to be a TKTS booth in Bowling Green, but, poor luck, it was no longer there when I turned up. So, despite a total lack of desire to do so, I head up to Times Square to go to the TKTS booth there. And it’s not open until three. So I hop back on the subway (by this time wondering why I did not purchase an unlimited daily pass) and am about to get on the 2 to go back out to Brooklyn, when I decide at the last moment to go down to Ellis Island. So I wander across to the 1 instead. Being the voyeur I am, I start to look around and the first guy I glance at on my left looks familiar. He should, given that it was my cousin Tim. And his girlfriend with family in tow. And my other cousin, also with the fam. I don’t know how to begin to calculate the odds of my running into them since a) it’s probably the busiest subway platform in the world, b) it wasn’t my original intention to get on that train, c) if the booth had just been where it was supposed to be, I wouldn’t have even been up there. We had a very nice time and I ate some good pizza.
Get back to Chicago (Laura’s on the same flight back, of course, one of nine that day) and have a vague date for the Cubs game the next night. The rub is that this date had been set up a while ago, but, in the meantime, I’d sort of started seeing someone else. Not a big deal, except I talk to the guy I’ve been seeing that night and guess what he’s doing the next day? Going to the Cubs game, of course. So now I’ve got to say something to the date guy because we’ll definitely run into the other one if I don’t.
It was a very awkward three hours. But date guy was rather patronizing, so I felt less bad. Actual quote: “Now… the Marlins play in Florida.” Thanks. I’m not a moron. No, really… I’m not.
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