Isn't It A Small World?

I was on the Q train last week with my 3 year old. My 3 year old who is exceptionally outgoing. She gets it from her parents. I'm outgoing to a point and that point is striking up conversations with fellow passengers on the subway. I won’t do that. The 3 year old has no such boundaries however and introduced herself to a woman who had sat down beside us. The woman shared with her her own name and then the 3 year old insisted that I tell the woman my name.

The woman was quite taken with my kid and as we chatted, she asked me where my “brogue” was from. She proceeded to tell me about her son who got married last year in Tipperary, to a Tipperary woman. She couldn't remember the name of the venue but I took one guess and got it right, which she seemed pretty impressed with. Well, if she was impressed with that, she was about to have her impressionable little socks blown off because when she started to tell me what her daughter-in-law did for a living, it rang a bell and all the details she’d given me so far suddenly clicked into place and I said “Is your daughter-in-law called Valerie?” Yes she was. “I've met her”, I said. I’d met her at one of the monthly breakfast meetings in the Irish Consulate and because I was definitely a country Garda in a former life, I never forget someone’s address or profession or marital status.

A few heads were looking up in surprise at the connection being made on the Q train. But I knew this was small fry in the ‘Isn't It A Small World’ contest. I have three really good contenders for the same contest:

1. Tell Your Mother I Was Asking For Her

My aunt lived in New York in the 1980s, in an apartment on 19th street between 8th and 9th Avenue. One day, the phone rang and she answered it, chatted for about half an hour and hung up.

“Who was that?” her German flatmate asked.

“Oh, just a woman from AT&T checking that the line works.”

“EXCUSE ME?”, the German said. “You spoke to her for 30 minutes.”

What had happened was after both ends of the line had established that the line was indeed working, the AT&T woman asked my aunt if she was from Ireland as she herself was from Bailieboro (population: 3,000). My aunt told her how her mother (my Granny) was from Bailieboro too and the woman on the phone knew my Granny and all of her siblings and enquired as to what they were all doing now.

I like to think that someone, whose job was so monotonous, it was simply calling numbers to see if they would ring, got to end one of her calls that shift with “Tell your mother I was asking for her!”

2. I Never Knew Aisling Marron Spoke Polish

I spent my third year of college at a university in Bordeaux. There were about 100 Erasmus students in the college and it had a really good Erasmus community. I didn’t keep in touch with anyone from the course once the year was over though and Facebook wasn’t around to give us the illusion that we were keeping in touch with each other when we weren’t.

A few years after college, I was back living with my parents and getting the bus one day to Dublin. Now, Trim (population: 9,000) is a commuter town. A lot of people live in Trim and go to work in Dublin. In the mornings, there are buses to Dublin every 15 minutes between 6 and 9 and every one of those buses is packed. But this was an 11am bus and there were about 8 people on it, total.

My stop is the first stop after the town so there were already a handful of people on the bus when I got on. As I picked a seat, I noticed a guy that looked quite like Pawel, one of the Polish lads on Erasmus.

“He looks like Pawel”, I thought. And that was all I thought. Not even the tiniest bit of me was thinking “I wonder is that Pawel, a Polish law student I studied with in France four years ago, now getting a midweek, mid-morning bus from Trim to Dublin”. Not even the tiniest bit. But I was sitting a few seats back and across the aisle from the Pawel lookalike and he kept turning around to look at me. “Fuck, IS it Pawel?” I now wondered. “It couldn't be”.

He broke the stand-off first and, looking as incredulous as I was feeling, he said: “Aisling?”

Me: “Pawel??”

As I write this, I realise it would be a wonderful meet-cute but no, Pawel and I did not drive off into the M3 sunset, on our way to make half-Polish, half-Irish babies. What did happen was that he came back to sit beside me and told me why he was in Trim (for a work conference being held in The Hotel) and we chatted away in our lingua franca. He, in his heavily accented (Polish accent) French and I, in my heavily accented (Irish accent) French. And I like to think that my neighbours in the seat behind me were thinking: “I never knew Aisling Marron spoke Polish”

3. What Are The Chances?

Summer 1989, we were on a family holiday in France and were on the train one evening, out of Paris, back to our campsite. As people exited at every stop, only one other party remained on the train: a young family from Glasgow. Holiday-makers, like ourselves. My parents struck up conversation and the mother in the family told us that her grandmother was from Ireland, from Co. Fermanagh specifically and a small village called Derrygonnelly (population: 680)

“My grandmother was from Derrygonnelly too”, my mother said. “What was your grandmother’s name?”.

“Julia Timoney”, she replied.

“That was my grandmother’s sister”, my mother told her. “We are second cousins”.

Imagine telling those two sisters, Julia and Agnes Timoney, born in Derrygonnelly in the 1890s, that they would grow up, marry and have daughters in different cities (Dublin and Glasgow). And that their daughters would grow up, marry and have daughters. And that two of those daughters (then, grown up married and with sons and daughters) would one day meet, by chance, on a train in France.

Of all the places that Scottish family could have gone on holidays. Of every week in the year they could have gone. Of every day in their stay they chose to do a day trip to Paris. Of every train they could have taken back. Of every carriage of the train they could have gotten into. What are the chances? Isn’t it a small world?