What are the chances?

Last night only by chance we met Jerry Lerman, who had just arrived from the West Coast with his wife. Ever heard of him? Jerry happens to be one of the top-ranked national Scrabble champions.

But the remarkable thing is the number of overlaps between his life and the lives of my family members, almost uncanny connections.

Jerry is the brother-in-law of someone with whom we were having a pre-fireworks dinner. He and his wife were driving in from Dulles as we finished dessert.

Here’s what we proceeded to learn over the course of the next hour or so:

– Jerry lived just blocks from my husband in Detroit until he was 9 years old.
– When he moved back to Detroit at age 15, one of his best friends was our friend Bernie, whose children and ours went to school together.
– He went to the U of Michigan, overlapping with my husband.
– He then moved to San Francisco, where he lived just one block from where our daughter currently lives near Alamo Square.
– His long-time best friend is Joe Edley, the guy who taught the two Scrabble courses my husband took at Chautauqua. At one point Joe was the national Scrabble champion.
– His cousin is Dr. Gary Peck, my melanoma specialist.
– Jerry and his wife will be in Chautauqua this year the same week as we are there. It is likely that he and Joe will be preparing for the 2008 Scrabble championship which takes place at the end of July.

I’m sure if we had talked to Jerry for another couple of hours we would have learned that we are distantly related.

That’s a lot of coincidence for a chance meeting! This sort of encounter makes me wonder how it happened that we chanced to make such a connection, all while we watched the fireworks through the light rain on the roof-top of Hill’s Kitchen.