It's a Small World After All

It’s a small world. This is a saying that is repeated by so many, and so often. What makes the world small? Having one of those synchronicity events in your life? And some are more smaller than others. If the distance or the time, or even the time and distance, are substantial, then the small world event is more than just a small world event. How many times have you said, or heard someone else say, “Oh, that gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.”?

In my last post, the one about my reunion in Seattle, I received a comment that told of an amazing small world story, (hereto referred to as a SWS), about a soldier from WWII who, many years later, was in a hospital and some soldiers that served with him long ago found him by the purest chance of hearing someone else say his name in their presence.

I’ve had many of these experiences. I’m never surprised anymore that they happen, but I am surprised at what happens. Like the time the eagle sat in the tree in front of the Cabinette at the same time I was being treated by a spiritual healer with the wing of an eagle. Or the recent picture I saw of a Facebook friend with her new boyfriend, a guy I knew from years ago, but didn’t know she knew him, let alone start going out with him. Small world! I mean SWS!

The other words used to describe these phenomena are coincidence or synchronicity. I’m sure you’ve also heard the response to, “Isn’t that a coincidence?” as “There are no coincidences.” Or someone starts speaking the melody of the Twilight Zone theme song. I’m not sure that coincidence isn’t the right word when things happen, after all, it can happen, coincidence that is. I’m not sure of the exact Webster’s definition, but I’d say that when someone slams into your bumper when you come to a sudden stop, that it is a coincidence that it happens in some kind of respect. I think so.

Back in 1972, I worked at a sheet metal products manufacturing plant as a truck driver. I remember waiting around while the truck was being loaded. I’d wander around the plant and make my way to the section where the machinists were making parts to keep the machines running. One guy, a lanky chain smoking guy named Ike, would always have a few words for me. We talked all the time. That section of the facility was a great hideout. It was ten years later, long after my friend Hal moved to California and was back for a visit that I met him at his friend’s house. His friend was named Ike. I remember mentioning that I used to work with a guy named Ike and the conversation came around to the fact that I worked with my friend’s best friend’s dad. SWS. A lot of years passed by, but the distance wasn’t so far as we all lived in the same suburban region of Chicago.

I found out about a wonderfully coincidental synchronistic Twilight Zone SWS experience over this past weekend, though, and the miles and time are astronomical. I want to tell you about it. I went to the Chicago area to visit my Mom and sister. We sat and talked at the dining room table in the morning over coffee as we do often. My sister told me that she had been to her 50th high school reunion. I’m sure the conversation started as I was telling her about attending the reunion I went to in Seattle.

Well, it seems that some of the people my sister went to school with have little brothers and sisters, just like my big sister has. And some of these kids went to school with me. Surely not a surprise or even a real tight SWS to hear about my sister talking with the sister of a friend I just got in contact with after 40 years. But there was another name mentioned, and this is the really seriously unbelievable connection story here.

Seems there is a gal my sister went to school with named Mary Lupo. We lived in a stronghold of ethnic Italian folks. So many had Italian surnames. Never gave the name Lupo a second thought. Except for this morsel of trivial pursuit.

When my Grand parents on my Mother’s side of the family came to America from a town in Sicily, about 25 miles East of Palermo, called Termini Imerese, my Grand mother was very young, which was common in those days around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century. By very young I’m talkin’ like 17-18 years old. She got homesick, and wanted to go back to Italy to visit her mother. My Grand father, Giuseppe Caruso, accommodated her and sent her back home for a visit.

When she returned to the USA, she traveled with another family. When entering through Ellis Island, a common port of immigration to the United States in 1916 thereabouts, she was with this other family and considered a member of said family. Since she was young, the authorities assumed she was one of the offspring of this family. Are you guessing what their surname is? Well, you are right if you said Lupo.

Now my sister asks Mary Lupo where in Italy her Grand parents are from and of course, it is Termini Imerese. She asks her when they immigrated to the new world, and the year was the same as the Ellis Island information available. And even though Lupo is sort of a common name in the old country, it was enough of a connection to assume that her friend from high school, which graduated in 1959, was the Grand child of the family that escorted Mary Bova, her Grand mother, back to the USA after a visit with her Mother in Italy sometime before 1920. And to find out 50 years after high school is amazing!

Now that’s a small world. I know, you may say I didn’t prove it. That’s okay. No proof needed. It’s the possibility and probability of it that stands alone in my mind. The name is the same, the town is the same, the era is the same, mode of travel, ages, area where they came from and where they moved to. Enough to think, “How about that!”

Tell me your stories. I know there are some that are even more weird than this one, even less of a chance and can be considered Twilight Zonish or even supernatural and driven by the hand of the almighty. It used to surprise me when this happened, but I think we really are all related at some level. I’m always finding out we have things in common.

Peace to all