CHANCE ENCOUNTER

Elder Daughter was in New York this past weekend, visiting Kody, her Significant Other, who is studying for a graduate degree in journalism at Columbia.

They were out taking a walk somewhere just south of 120th Street, engaged in conversation, when Kody noticed a young man on the sidewalk ahead of them, struggling with a pile of music-related equipment. It wasn’t the equipment that got his attention, though - it was the distinctive tattoo on the young man’s neck. “Fun,” it said.

It is a mite unusual, for to sport a Neck Tat, especially one of exotic design that says “Fun.” But it rang a bell of sorts.

A couple of months ago, when the Mistress of Sarcasm and Mickey (her Significant Other) had been visiting Elder Daughter and Kody in New York, Mickey had described one of his brothers as having just such a tattoo. And so Kody asked Elder Daughter whether she thought the young man could be Mickey’s brother. What were the odds?

Elder Daughter ran up to the young man and accosted him thusly:

“Do you have a brother named Mickey?”

Not the kind of question one asks a Random Stranger in New York City...but, yes, the young man did indeed have a brother named Mickey.

“The Mistress of Sarcasm is my sister!” [Not an exact quote, but words to that effect.] And the Light of Recognition dawned in the young man’s eyes, for he indeed had heard of the fabled Mistress from his brother.

And thus was made a Statistically Improbable Random Connection, with one sister (a resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts) encountering by sheer chance the brother of her sister’s boyfriend (both the sister and the boyfriend residents of Savannah, Georgia) while visiting her own boyfriend in New York City.