BLOG 11
Before getting into today’s topic -
I’m going to take a moment to summarize all my previous blogs.
DON’T CLICK THAT RETURN ARROW YET…
TAKE A SECOND TO SCROLL DOWN – AND YOU MAY BE GLAD YOU DID.
I promise – I will not bore you with all the details.
Recently, I ran across the Wordle Website which has a wonderfully simple word based Graphic Generator. You can make your own “Wordle” graphics by going to http://www.wordle.net/. The graphic I made includes the top 50 words most frequently used in all of my previous blogs. The size of each word shown in the pictorial output, relates directly to how often I used each word.
So here you have it – a beautiful summary of all my blogging to date. Painless – yet to the point! As you can see thanks to “Wordle” – my blog concentrates mostly on … RARE, CHANCE, MEETINGS, over the YEARS, with OLD FRIENDS, at TIMES when I am away from HOME.
Now -
Today’s Rare Event Story
It was a “Once in a Lifetime Trip” – Edie and I flew to Hawaii for a full week’s vacation. Our cottage was so close to the water you could throw a stone in it from the front porch. The cottage we rented was a mile from the “End of the Road” on the island of Kauai. The setting was beautiful — for all I know — the old movie “South Pacific” could have been filmed there. Today that Hawaiian vacation is one of our fondest memories – and as luck would have it – we had one of our longest distance Rare Chance Meetings on our way through the Oahu airport.
Unless you have one of those private jets and can fly wherever you want – you’ll probably fly to either the island of Hawaii or Oahu whenever you go there. When we went – we passed through Oahu. The day before we had arrived from our home in upstate New York. We didn’t go directly to Kauai, but we took time to do a day-tour of the island of Oahu, since we wouldn’t be back there any-time soon.
Laying over for a day in Oahu meant we passed through the Oahu airport 3 times during our trip. On our 2nd visit to the Oahu airport we were heading to the rental cottage in Kauai. As with all airports – you can spend several hours – just hanging out – waiting for your flight. This occasion was typical. While we were sitting on one of those hallway benches we noticed a couple of “Familiar Faces” approaching us. It was none other than Mr. & Mrs. Goodrich. The Goodrich’s were parents of an old high school friend. They were waiting on a flight home to Michigan, and decided to stroll around the airport. They had spent the week on Oahu. As usual, neither of us had any idea – we were going to run into the other that day!
Again – I say – How does this happen? Here we are 5000 miles from home … the couple we run into is 4300 miles from home … that’s a total of 9300 miles of travel and here we are standing a few feet apart. It’s amazing when you think about it! What are the chances: one in a million, one in a billion or possibly less?
What’s the chance of this happening? It can’t be infinite. If the real chance of this type of meeting is infinitely small – it would never happen – but it does – and this particular event is proof that it really happens.
It’s times like this — I like to reflect on what one of our children’s famous toy heroes used to say. It was in the movie Toy Story – the robot hero Buzz Light Year would say, “To Infinity – And Beyond” whenever he faced a “nearly impossible event”.
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