Do I know you?

I wouldn't call myself an optimist, per se, but I do go through life expecting to be pleasantly surprised at any moment. I am, of course, often disappointed and am not pleasantly surprised, or sometimes I am even unpleasantly surprised, but I still believe deep down that these few moments of unpleasant-surprise-ness are the exception of my life instead of the rule. At any moment, something totally awesome could happen. I can just feel it.

One of the more extreme ways that this belief comes out is that I am constantly thinking that I see someone I know. Not someone I know from work or from church or from my neighborhood, however, but someone who lives across the US or even in another country, someone who has utterly no business being in my city. Yet, I could swear that I just saw them pulling away from the gas pump next to mine, or turning down an aisle in the grocery store, or on the jumbotron cheering at a hockey game. When this happens, the "expecting surprises" part of me is convinced that friends or relations who do not in fact live anywhere near me have made a special trip to Nashville and are driving around in cars past the intersection where I am sitting at a red light or walking down the road in front of my office to subtly surprise me with their presence . . . if I would just so happen to look up and notice that they're there.

Now, I do know that the chances of this actually happening are very unlikely. What friend would travel all the way across the country and spend the day following you around in a rented car, hoping that you'll look up and go, "Oh my goodness! Is that Stacy? Wow! It is!" Most people don't have time for this kind of tomfoolery and would instead call ahead to make sure you'll be in town when they visit, have you pick them up at the airport, make plans to stay at your house, and then go home when the weekend is over. Yet for some reason I hang on to the notion that one day I will walking into the post office to get my mail and I'll pass one of my friends coming out of the building, seemingly engaged in conversation on their cell phone, wondering if I've figured out yet that it's them.

Oddly, when I just coincidentally run into someone I know at the airport or at Disney World or at the Grand Ole Opry, I never think they've spent the whole day walking around just on the edge of my vision, waiting for me to turn my head and catch them in the act. It seems like a true coincidence that I'm there and they're there and we ran into each other.

Hmmm... Maybe I'm not giving people enough credit for their cleverness. Maybe they're so clever that their "I'm surprised to see you, too!" act has had me totally fooled. I may have more pleasant surprises in my life than I originally thought. What a pleasant surprise!