Chance Meetings

   More often than not it would appear to be a small world when you bump into a friend or acquaintance (or even a stranger) in the oddest of places.  It can be while entering a store or walking along a path or even in being in another country and your surprise and joy at the chance meeting soon turns to a period of catching up, a quick "so what have you been doing" series of questions that causes both of you to walk away some five minutes later with the realization that years of your lives --or sometimes much longer than that-- have been summed up rather quickly.  It's a good time to reflect back at that moment, to think of what were the important points of your life that you felt needed to be brought out, as if on a television game show and being asked "so tell us about yourself"...in 30 seconds.  Sorted, filtered, prioritized, of course, just as the other person you've just met is doing.  And often you're left with a puzzle in your head of how these chess pieces of life could have been arranged to bring you to this chance encounter, that out of all the possible places and times to appear that you would bump into one another; a single minute later an you would never know that your paths had crossed.

    Some years ago this happened to my wife and I while on vacation at the last minute (an invite from a friend with a free hotel stay in Kauai) and us walking along the beach early in the morning, venturing well off the hotel's property and onto the steps of a distant restaurant that appeared closed (we were after a quick cup of coffee).  As we climbed the steps, there was another couple there with their backs to us, and it turned out that they were the only couple there...and sitting outside.  I peered at that head of hair, the body structure, the vaguely familiar glimpse of the faces, and ever so slowly my brain began overriding the impossibility of them being a couple I knew from a decade ago (and had not seen in an equally long time)...how could it be, that at that hour, that island, that chance walk in the wee hours of the morning, that we would bump into them?   So I was equally puzzled when I ran into a person whom I had only recently met, a marketer for a hospice company that happened to be checking on the facility where my mother was staying.  We chatted a bit, shared a few commonalities (her father is in a similar situation as my mother) and poof, she was gone.  She was in sales and a stranger after all, and what are the odds you would see a perfect stranger again?  A month later I moved my mother to a new facility, my mother's is there a week and I walk in to visit her and there is this same person, now with a new company and who just happened to be visiting this new facility.  She stepped out the door just as I was entering.  What is that? 

    Sometimes such meetings are spotted and avoided, as if you catch a glimpse of someone but don't really want to spend time chatting so you turn your head or duck around the corner.  And yet sometimes the chance meetings with friends and even strangers make you wonder if there is indeed some order to this randomness.  And your meetings, are they there to stimulate you or renew you or make you wonder "why that person?"  Is there a reason to it all or is it purely by chance, an odd occurrence that is as unexpected as hitting a jackpot.  And so it was I found myself at a Costco buying some tires.  My car was sliding all over the road during snow and ice storms, the California tires that were only a year old now virtually useless in colder temperatures (actually it's my mother's car but it's the one that she used to drive and to her mind --or so I feel-- the one thing that is important to her in that it is something of hers still physically there from her past, something she owned and was hers, since so much of what she knew has been taken away as her house and items inside have given way to her new, and perhaps unwanted, life in an assisted living facility).  And for those of you wondering what the heck this has to do with tires since tires are basically tires, the chance meeting begins.

    Snow tires, all-season tires, performance tires.  The R60 and 205/16 stuff that tells you the type and width and rim of the tire, all of it becomes gobbly goop to most of us.  Walking into a tire shop usually means that you're unwillingly there as much as making an unscheduled stop at the dentist.  Your tire is low or flat or something has happened that is now out of your hands...changing a tire on a bicycle is difficult enough and few of us have the machinery or strength or desire to change an auto tire.  But that's the physical stuff.  Tires themselves have undergone some major changes, one being their diminished use of rubber (remember rubber, as in that milky liquid from rubber trees?).  Said a piece in Road and Track: Don't ever think of a tire as a homogeneous glob of molded rubber, because nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, a tire is more properly recognized as a high-performance composite of some 60 different materials.  It is quite possibly the single most complex component of your car.  Radial tires (patented in 1946) introduced polyester and steel bands as well as synthetic rubber, but the article also notes that "...natural rubber offers a toughness thus far unmatched.  A race tire's rubber might be 65 percent synthetic; a passenger tire's, perhaps 55/45 synthetic/natural, respectively; an off-highway tire's, as much as 80 percent natural rubber."  Hmmm...maybe a graphic from a tire companies such as Michelin will help to better explain this new composition of today's tires (there are actually over 90 manufacturers of auto, truck and aircraft tires, the largest such manufacturer by number of tires ironically being Lego although their tires are produced for their toys).  Add to all of this that nitrogen is now generally used to fill your tires instead of just plain old air (nitrogen molecules are larger so the theory is that filling your tires with such a gas will decrease the likelihood of your tire getting a leak).  And as the Costco salesperson went on and on with me nodding my head as if I understood it all, I realized that chance meetings don't always happen with just people.

    We can stumble around a bend and be dazzled by the scenery before us, or ride along in a fire truck (I did so when accompanying the paramedics as they transported my mother to the hospital some months ago) and be equally fascinated.  A person you don't expect to run into can be as surprising and exciting as a walk on a beach or your car sliding into an embankment; not all such events are welcomed but the newness of the experience is.  It's a part of life, and perhaps as much as we try to figure it out there are times when we should just let it go and welcome the surprise.  Gobbly goop on the tires?  Absolutely.  But it was a piece of the unexpected that I probably wouldn't have sought out elsewhere.  Now, about that visit to the dentist...