Getting to know you

Last week I had two interesting conversations with familiar strangers. These were those people that we have become comfortable around because of propinquity yet don’t really know. You know them, people at work we see every day but only say “Hi” and “See your tomorrow.” Or, those people at church we greet every week because they sit near our pew to whom we’ve passed the peace but could not tell the names of their children or what they do for a living if asked.

As often happens, those familiar strangers can turn out to be very interesting people with life stories that verge on the adventuresome. Such was the case with my two conversations. Both left me saying to myself, “Wow. You never know.”

Allen Shawn, in “Family Meal” (June 22, 2008, New York Times Magazine) wrote “It is amazing how much people contain that we never have a chance to know about, how vast and mysterious we all are.”

Read his short piece about a family story.