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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I relistened to every single Coldplay studio album over the weekend in preparation for their concert in Tulsa this Thursday, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a story about an unusual coincidence.

Today’s Fun Fact: Today we’re going to be talking about a strange coincidence, so here are some other facts that seem too odd to be true, and yet they are:

• In 1895 there were only two cars in the entire state of Ohio…and they crashed into each other.
• If not for the 200-year difference, Jimi Hendrix and George Handel would have been neighbors. They lived at 23 and 25 Brook Street, respectively, in London.
• The first worker to die during the Hoover Dam’s construction was J.G. Tierny on December 20, 1922. The last person to die there was J.G. Tierny’s son, who died on December 20, 1935.
• In 1975, a man was killed when he was struck by a taxi in Bermuda. An unlucky passenger had to witness it. A year later, the same taxi driver was driving the same passenger when the taxi struck and killed the original victim’s brother.
• The British actor Anthony Hopkins [who shot to fame as Hannibal Lecter] was delighted to hear that he had landed a leading role in a film based on the book The Girl From Petrovka by George Feifer. A few days after signing the contract, Hopkins travelled to London to buy a copy of the book. He tried several bookshops, but there wasn’t one to be had. Waiting at Leicester Square underground for his train home, he noticed a book apparently discarded on a bench. Incredibly, it was The Girl From Petrovka. That in itself would have been coincidence enough but in fact it was merely the beginning of an extraordinary chain of events. Two years later, in the middle of filming in Vienna, Hopkins was visited by George Feifer, the author. Feifer mentioned that he did not have a copy of his own book. He had lent the last one – containing his own annotations – to a friend who had lost it somewhere in London. With mounting astonishment, Hopkins handed Feifer the book he had found. ‘Is this the one?’ he asked, ‘with the notes scribbled in the margins?’ It was the same book.”

What I Learned Yesterday
Today I’m going to share the story behind one of the personal facts I shared earlier this season that involved a case of mistaken identity. The year was 1995. I was a 19 year old college student working part-time at the bookstore. By this time I had been at the bookstore for somewhere around a year, maybe longer. At this time I spent a lot of my time working at the back of the store. That’s where the Bible section was located as well as the machines that we used to stamp names on the covers of Bibles.

You probably recall that I was originally hired as a cashier, so I was often called up to front to help relieve the pressure when things got busy up front. There were two main aisles in our 14,000 square foot store that ran from the front doors all the way to the back wall. If I was working at the Bible imprinting station, I could look straight up one of the aisles to the main cash register and keep an eye on how busy they were. If I noticed things getting backed up, I’d go ahead an make my way up there to help out.

One day as I was heading to the front of the store up that main aisle, I caught the eye of a woman standing between the main cash register and the first aisle of merchandise. She had a look on her face unlike any I had ever seen. Her eyes were fixed as if they were piercing right through me. She had a look of startled bewilderment on her face. Her eyebrows were raised and her mouth agape. At first I wasn’t sure if she was looking at me, or something directly behind me. What I was sure of was that she looked like she needed help.

So instead of heading to the register, I approacher her. I said, “Can I help you with something, ma’am?” She said, “I’m sorry, I’m just so surprised. You look just like my son.”

Naturally, I didn’t think much of it at first. I mean, what was the big deal about looking like her son? She went on to explain that her son had just been killed less than a month before. In fact, I think it had been within a week or two since he was killed. I didn’t know what to say. To be honest, I don’t recall at all what I DID say. I only remember what she said. She took a few minutes and told me about her son and how much she loved him. She told me how much he loved God and that he was on his way to church when his car was struck by another driver and he died.

Some of you know the grief that only a parent who has lost a child feels. Here was this woman, a total stranger, bearing her heart to me as she was broken by the weight of her grief.

Our chat that day was short. I did my best to console her, but I really had no idea what to do. I mostly just listened. A short time later she came in again. This time she came in looking for me. We chatted a bit more and then she left. A few weeks after that, she came in again. Once again we chatted for a bit and she told me more about her son and updated me on how she was doing. After that, I never saw her again.

I can’t imagine what must have raced through her mind the first time she saw me. I imagine that if I were in her shoes, I would find myself in crowded or random places and I would see the face of my child everywhere. I think I would catch a glimpse of someone and my brain would tell me it’s my son or daughter only to realize it’s not them upon a second look. But for her on that day, she looked and stared and still thought it was her son. That’s incredible. It seems like a coincidence too strange to be true. I mean we all have doppelgängers, but do we have them that live in the same town and are they so much like us that our own mothers would be fooled for a time?

Here’s What I Learned:
I believe with all that I have that the grieving mother and I crossed paths that day for a reason. I believe that even though I didn’t really know what to say to her and really didn’t say that much, that I helped bring healing to her broken heart. No, I didn’t heal her broken heart, but I think that our conversations helped bring her to a place of peace and closure that she might not have otherwise gotten. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part because I wish I’d been able to do more.

This is the time of year where a lot of change is happening. Kids are going off to school and maybe moving off to college. In our city, a new school opened up and redistricting took place. There are kids at school with my kids who lost all their friends to the redistricting and are having to make all new friends again. Summer time is a season where many families relocate and with that comes a whole brand new world.

I experienced a similar dynamic my first year of marriage. My wife and I moved to Lubbock to help set up a new store and train me to be a store manager. Ten months later, we were just getting settled in to our church, my wife had just been given a promotion at her job, and we were finally feeling at home in west Texas. Then I got the call that I’d been promoted to a store manager position and less than a week later we were living in a town 200 miles away and nothing looked familiar. It was hard. I was just starting to build some great friendships, and they were suddenly gone.

That move took place 16 years ago. Since then, I’ve learned a lot of things. One of those things is that sometimes, maybe lots of times, people aren’t intended to be a part of our life for very long. Sometimes we encounter others only a couple of times. Sometimes we get to spend months or even a few years with people we care about. If we’re really lucky, we get to spend many years with them. I truly believe that sometimes people are only brought into our lives, or we into the lives of others, so that we can have a brief, yet powerful impact. But regardless of the length of time we get with them, if they have impacted our life in a positive way, we have much to be grateful for and they will always be a cherished part of us.

I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.

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