By Bobbi B

While in graduate school, a MFA program in sculpture, we had the great luck of having a very gifted and extraordinary resident art historian who was profoundly connected to the pulse of contemporary theory and art. She dragged us through dense, impossible material and brought us out on the other side. A demanding teacher, her courses were none-the less extremely popular because she got at the core of what was exciting in our culture, happening right before our very eyes.

In one of these classes, the room was big enough to choose wherever I wanted to sit. This was great for me because I am VERY picky about where I sit in a theater or restaurant or classroom. I need to feel comfortable and also have my own space. I am known for changing movie seats several times as I start to feel uncomfortable.

I was instinctively attracted to a mid-view seat on the right side of the lecture area. There was only one other woman I did not know, about my age, who was also attracted to that area. We easily and comfortably sat in adjoining seats every week.

Eventually the woman and I had opportunities to talk. She was an attorney with twins, and I had a daughter; I'd also once had twins but miscarried them. She loved art history, so she had signed up for this class for her pure enjoyment and intellectual stimulation.

Her first art history influence was, it turns out, my current best friend at the time, a woman 10 years older than me, who years before I met her, had taught art history in the high school of the town we moved away from when I was about 10 years old. 

If this was not enough of a coincidence, one day we were comparing notes on the perfect place to grow up. Neither of us had grown up in the local area, and we had not named our childhood towns to each other. We both described the same street and environment, nostalgically, from our childhoods. As it turned out, we had both spent parts of our childhood in the same town, me the first part and she, the second part of childhood.

The year my father graduated from medical school, we had moved away. My mother's best friend, who'd lived next door to that childhood house, also moved away with her family a few years later. The woman sitting next to me, my own age, had moved in with her family next door to my old house, into my mother's best friend's house.

If I had not moved, she and I probably would have grown up best friends. She had become the closest of friends with the same twin boys I had adored and been the closest of friends with.

Not one person in the whole large auditorium sat anywhere near where we sat, instinctively. A small world? Yes.