I live in a small town

Once in a while some coincidence happens in life that just has you reaching for the Big Book of Coincidences to see if anything in there can top what's happened to you. This one at least deserves a page devoted to it. Yesterday morning, start of the week, everyone at work is doing the how-was-your-weekend thing and a girl I work with came up to me with a piece of paper. She'd been busy at the printer and wanted to show me a particular photo. "Isn't this a lovely picture of me and my friend Carol?". I look at the picture and, sure enough, it's a picture of her and Carol. And yes, she looks nice, and Carol looks nice. It was one of those moments where the brain has to do a little bit of catching up because I know her and I know Carol but... how is it that she knows Carol. I knew Carol nine years ago when I lived here for six months. I was doing a course between summers of managing swimming pools and a friend introduced me to her and her housemates. Most of the people in my course were older than me so I didn't really connect with any of them, so I kind of made a pest of myself and visited Carol & Anne & Dave(?) every so often. They didn't seem to mind at the time and I think of them fondly now for taking pity on a poor lonely boy with no friends. I loved going to their place and they were generally a happy lot. Carol had a good voice and I used to think I could play guitar so we jammed and harmonized and just had a lot of fun. At one point they had a huge electricity bill, so Carol and I went in a talent quest at Flinders Uni Tav and won $100 doing a couple of Frente songs. It was a close contest too as FUCS (Flinders University Choral Society) came equal first with us and we had to have a play-off, which meant doing another number, which we hadn't really rehearsed (we really hadn't rehearsed anything much: during the second Frente song I was prompting Carol because she kept getting the verses in the wrong order). We ended up doing a very bad version of The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy). I say a very bad version because I didn't really know the chords and Carol changed the words to something like "Hey lamppost, please vote for us because we need the money to pay our ETSA bill" which I don't think is what Paul Simon originally had in mind. Anyway, the plea to the audience worked and the crowd picked us, the underdogs, over the very polished and slightly smug FUCS. We were the true Aussie battlers. So, big coincidence. I knew Carol, my colleague knows Carol and told me all about what she's up to these days. I told her to say hi next time they saw each other. Keep in mind that it's nine years since I last saw this person (not counting an unconfirmed sighting at the railway station a few years ago; it looked like her but I wasn't sure and didn't want to embarass myself saying hi in case it wasn't). Tonight, we needed a few things from the supermarket for dinner so I polished the credit card, strapped on the man bag and went out in the rain for provisions. Who do you think I saw as soon as I stepped into the supermarket? You guessed it. There's that theory that says we're all no more than six degrees of separation from any other person in the world. In Adelaide it's no more than two. Too freaky, and after I explained the work connection we had a bit of a laugh about it. "Small world," she said. "No," I said. And I told her what I tell everyone when things like this happen "Small Adelaide".