In case you don’t have time for the longer version, here’s the summary: I ran into a college friend of mine yesterday on the streets of Cambridge. I hadn’t seen her in probably over a decade (although on occasion we’d been in touch on email). But allow me to give more detail to emphasize the low chances of this meeting.

Having just gotten back from Europe, I was pretty jet lagged on Monday and had been up since 2:30am. I had planned on taking a nap in the afternoon. I had just finished a late lunch with a colleague and was extremely tempted to walk home for a nap instead of going to the office. I stopped on a street for almost a minute figuring out how to proceed. I rarely do that. I usually do contemplation of that sort while walking. But going home vs going to the office required very different routes so I needed to stop and make a decision. I finally decided to go to the office.

There I was, walking in Cambridge (crossing the Common to Massachusetts Avenue) on my way to Harvard Law School. I was about to cross a street when I saw someone I knew so I called out her name and stopped to chat with her. As I was talking to her, in the corner of my eye I noticed that someone stopped nearby. She was looking at me a bit puzzled. It took me about two seconds to realize who she was. Marjorie Victor. Marjorie is a friend from college, the year when we studied in Geneva, Switzerland together. I probably hadn’t seen her in about a decade (if not more).

Although Marjorie used to live in Cambridge, she now lives in Toronto and her work often takes her to Ethiopia. She barely comes to Cambridge anymore so what are the chances that this encounter would happen?! Wow. I was and am still overwhelmed by this wonderful coincidence.

This all reminded me of the last time I saw my very dear paternal grandmother. The day before she died, I was on my way home from school (eighth grade) and was deciding whether I would go stop by her place to show her my midyear report card. I was on a tram and was undecided. The tram pulled up to the stop where I would have had to get off if I was interested in going home rather than visiting my grandma. I was still undecided when the tram doors suddenly closed in front of me. That was it, the decision had been made for me, I was going to my grandmother’s. To this day I remember standing there thinking: well, that was easy. What I didn’t know at that moment was that this allowed me to see my grandmother one last time before she passed away.*

Although yesterday’s encounter doesn’t carry the same weight, it reminded me of that story. Of course, when we decide to take the route that doesn’t lead to such significant encounters, the moment is forever lost having little significance. But those few moments of this sort that lead to something special can stay with us for a long time.

* I posted three tweets on the 100th anniversary of her birthday this past summer that I’ll replicate here since Twitter messages disappear after a while:
1/3 Thinking about my amazing Grandma born 100 yrs ago today. Her husband was killed in a labor camp in WWII.
2/3 She herself was in a concentration camp with her sons & other relatives in Vienna. Then came other hardships back in Hungary.
3/3 But she remained a most amazingly kind & thoughtful person &although she died 20 yrs ago, to this day she continues to teach me so much.

Just this morning I was contemplating how horrible it must be for the people who suddenly lost their homes in the fire around Lake Tahoe. By the afternoon I was watching firefighters from my office window battle flames on Stanford’s hills.

I was sitting at my desk already unable to work having just received word about the death of Peter Marris, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at UCLA, dear husband of Dolores Hayden who was a fellow Fellow at CASBS this year. The two of them had to end their year at the Center early, because Peter was sick, but I don’t think any of us expected things to escalate so quickly.

Unable to concentrate on work, I turned around to look at the beautiful view from my office. I spotted some big red flames. Soon I realized that a large area around it was completely black with smoke and flames on the periphery. Eventually sirens and helicopter appeared, as did firefighters. Some of the smoke was now white not just black, apparently a good sign. But not all the black smoke disappeared and an hour later there was still much activity. I went to an event and by the time I got back to my office, another hillside was completely black (see the difference in the left area of the two photos above).

How quickly things can change.

Fortunately, just as I was about to post on this, I came across Dopplr, which is a site that addresses this precise issue. Once you sign up, you can let the system know about upcoming trips. You also link up with other people to share your itineraries and the system tells you when you’ll overlap. It’s in closed beta, but if you can think of a friend who has an account, you can ask him/her for an invitation.

Obviously, the value of such a service increases by the number of relevant contacts that join and keep their accounts up-to-date. I wonder if they will be adding the option of distinguishing among contacts. You may want certain people to know about a trip, but not others. And of course, if you prefer that people not know about a certain trip at all, you can exclude it from your list altogether.

I’m excited about this service, but the usual challenge remains: getting enough of my non-geeky friends to join and update their travel info.

First, my friend Olivia was graduating (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude and prize for her thesis in history) and celebrations (e.g. Phi Beta Kappa ceremony) started already early last week. See photos.

Second, my dance club, Chicago Dance, was hosting the annual Chicago’s Crystal Ball ballroom and Latin dance competition. Given everything else, I only made it to part of it, but even those few hours were super fun! See photos plus a video. No, there are no pictures of me dancing since I don’t compete. Granted, I did dance one cha-cha.. in front of hundreds of people.. wearing sandals. Hah.

So here’s a little trip down memory lane.. a few images of my brother and me from a few decades ago.

In honor of the occasion, I have posted a few photos from ten years ago.

   

I have started a Flickr set dedicated to pictures I have taken of Flickr contacts (I’ll restrict it to post-Flickring meet-ups). Of course, a good chunk of my Flickr contacts are people I knew pre-Flickr so this is not meant to suggest a grand expansion in my social circles. I just thought it would be fun to dedicate a set to it. Plus I really did need to join the group of people who have pictures of Jeremy even though with just one image in his photostream he’s still a Flickr toddler himself.

Ben playing at Third Coast Festival concert,
originally uploaded by eszter.

I saw a great concert last night as part of the Third Coast International Audio Festival‘s events. The special guest for the evening was One Ring Zero playing music different from most of what’s usually on my playlist. As one of the members described it at some point: weird circus klezmer music. As silly or weird as that may sound, I think it was a reasonable description of at least some of their music. (If you don’t know what klezmer music is, you can check out the bit of discussion we had about the topic here on CT a while back or see what Wikipedia has to say about it.)

The group was performing pieces from their most recent album As Smart As We Are that has songs with lyrics from an impressive set of writers. See the Web site for some sample mp3s and the list of contributors to this album.

The concert also came with the special treat of watching Bob Ewards play the theremin. I had never seen a theremin played so this was interesting in general. In case you don’t know what a theremin looks like (or what someone looks like playing it), Theremin.info has a helpful animated image on its front page to give you an idea. (Needless to say blogs exist on the topic of theremins if you want a daily dose.:)

Thanks to my friend Ben – the trumpet player in last night’s performance – for alerting me to this event, it was definitely a treat. I’ve posted a couple of images on Flickr.