The Comanche Syndrome, or How to Meet Your Life Coming Back the Other Way

It’s remarkable how my life seems to come back and meet itself unexpectedly.  I never know when I’ll next run into myself coming the other direction.

I grew up in a smallish Texas town named Comanche.  It’s never been that large a place, but it still seems to be one of those nexuses of the Universe through which everyone passes, sooner or later.  To some extent, this was because Comanche was where the frontier stopped for about twenty years during and after the Civil War, so it was the jumping-off place for a lot of people going westward in that area during the 1870s and 1880s.

The practical result of that was that no matter where we traveled, in state or out of it, we always seemed to run into someone who used to live in Comanche, or whose granny was from Comanche, or whose boyfriend’s sister’s roommate’s second husband was from Comanche . . . you get the idea.  It happened to us so often that it became a family joke, and we referred to it privately as the “Comanche syndrome:”  the virtual certainty that wherever we went, and whatever we were doing, we’d meet someone with a connection to Comanche.  We accepted that the laws of probability were suspended when it came to Comanche.

The thing is, when I left Comanche and moved to Austin, it Didn’t Quit Happening.  The only difference was that the effect’s focus shifted from local to personal; let me go someplace or to an event in Austin, and I was sure to meet two or three several people, none of whom knew each other, but all of whom knew me.  L was astonished the first couple of times she saw it happen after we started dating.  The first time, we went to the Austin Museum of Art’s Laguna Gloria Fiesta and we ran into six people I knew—and none of them knew any other from Adam.

Some of it I brought on myself.  People tell me I have a memorable face, and I suppose it’s true, and when I combined that with working for a couple of years as a shuttle bus driver at the University, which was a high visibility kind of occupation, a lot of people saw and remembered me.  Spending sixteen years behind a register at the bookstore contributed as well.

In recent years the bus-driver recognitions have fallen off, but it hasn’t affected the number of improbable connections that come up, where some family member runs across someone who knows me in a completely unrelated context.  The best one in that respect I ever pulled off was a few days after T was born, and I was working a weeknight closing shift at the bookstore.  A woman came up to the register and wanted to write a check for her purchase with a Maryland driver’s license as ID.  I decided she didn’t look like she’d run away, so I let her write the check.  As I was writing down the driver’s license number, I remarked in passing on the Baltimore address and mentioned that L had grown up in Baltimore.  Of course, she asked, “Oh, what part of town did she grow up in?” and after I stammered around a bit, because I’m not strong on Baltimore geography, I said she grew up near the York Road.  The woman looked at me oddly, and said she’d grown up in that area too, and where had L lived?  Well, I didn’t know the name of the neighborhood, but I did know the name of the street, so I told her that.  She looked at me even more oddly and asked, “What was your wife’s name?”  I replied that her name back then had been Liz H****.

By now the woman was looking at me with her mouth slightly open, as though I had suddenly sprouted green antennae or appeared in a cloud of smoke and fire or something.  When she got her voice back, she told me that she and L had been in the same kindergarten class and the same Girl Scout troop, more than twenty years before.  I was astonished myself, but only for a minute; I realized this was just another case of the Universe having a Cosmic Giggle at my expense.

I gave her a few details and mentioned that L was in St. David’s hospital, recovering from having a baby.  She said she’d go by the next day to visit, but to tell L when I saw her that Cathy Cowan from Girl Scouts said hello.  L, when I told her all this later that night, had her mouth hanging even farther open than Cathy’s had been, that “of all the bookstores in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”  I just shrugged it off.  After all, this is the way my life works.  I ought to know.  I’ve been living it for a long time now.

Humphrey Bogart painted a orange wooden prairie for the IWW.  Fnord.