Contact from years gone past

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
- Sir Arthur Eddington

My pearl of wisdom for today. I received a phone call last night from a friend I have not seen or talked to since we were both in kindergarten. I barely ever called her by her name, which I had difficulty remembering. Instead, my five-year-old self cooked up the wonderful title "the little girl across the street." But this little girl now grown up somehow managed to hear about my father, and then track down my mother, and from there me. She lives in Hawaii now and just finished her masters in geology at an Icelandic university. It was wonderful to talk to her, even though we don't in essence know each other much better than if we were to bump accidentally on the street. But somehow those shared playdates all those years ago grounded us in an easy familiarity and we talked for nearly two hours about anything and everything that came into our minds.

But as lovely and charming as the whole event was, I am still forced to recognize that a world in which that kind of thing is possible is a strange world indeed.