“It was a really small world moment.”

So I graduated from college on April 30th, and, as I was walking out of the arena to find my dad after the ceremony, um, I kind of was meeting up with him, and this guy with white hair and sunglasses recognized the two of us, and it took me a second and then I recognized this guy, too. He’d lived about seven houses down the road from us when we were living in Ohio. Um, and he was, his house was on my walk to the neighborhood park, and my dad and I went to the neighborhood park pretty much every evening that the weather permitted, so we were always walking by this guy’s house. He had five boys eventually. I didn’t really wanna play with boys that much, but they had a lot of cool yard toys, so I would play by myself with their Hoppity Hops or in their sandbox or something. And my dad became good friends with this guy that appeared outside of my graduation ceremony, and I thinking they contacted each other like sometimes, maybe talked on the phone like once a year a little bit. When my dad went to visit his relative that were still living in that part of Ohio, occasionally he’d go see this guy, but we had no idea he was gonna be at my graduation ceremony at this sort of small — smaller, not really small — um Christian college, but it turns out um one of his nephews, who is actually like from down South, not even from the Midwest, was at my college as a soccer player, and he’d been there like the whole time I had been there. I didn’t know him, ‘cause I didn’t interact really with the soccer players, and we were very different majors, but so this guy I knew when I was really young was at this ceremony, unbeknownst to me, there to watch his nephew graduate from the same school of like thirty-seven hundred that I was graduating from. And it was a really small world moment because this neighbor remembered me when I was, before I could talk, when I was just in a stroller being taken to the neighborhood park, and he knew me like when I was a toddler, in elementary school, and it was kind of one of those small world, things come around moments. And it especially surprised me because, like I said, I’ve had a lot of change in my life. After we left Ohio, when I was nine, not a lot was constant, or the same at all until I came to college and kind of established some routines there. And so, for that to happen to me is really unusual, but really cool at the same time. And my dad actually found out where the guy was staying, and they got together the next day after the graduation.

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