<Begin Segment 6>

[Interruption]

FS: ...touched me on the shoulder and said, "Do you know that you have a rip in the seat of your pants?" And she said, "I'm secretary to the pastor of the Friend's Church there, and if you stop in, I'll repair it for you." And then she said, "You wouldn't remember me, but I was your first school teacher."

EG: For heaven's sakes.

FS: Fifty, sixty years earlier. I remember I went to school on the day I was five years old. I wasn't supposed to go so soon, but I had an older brother who wouldn't go alone, so my mother had to send me along with him. And I remember that the teacher took me on her lap and read stories to me. And this was her, fifty, sixty years later.

EG: This happens to you all the time, that people from way back turn up again. That's amazing.

FS: It truly is. It's been said that if you sit long enough in Times Square, or O'Hare Airport, or any one place, someone you know will come by. I was walking down the corridors crowded with people at O'Hare in Chicago. Suddenly met a man that I had worked with in France twenty years earlier. On another time I boarded a BOAC plane in Calcutta, sat down beside a young man, he told me he was a member of a soccer, I think, team from Oxford, which was going out to Hong Kong to play some matches. I told him I'd just come from Oxford. We had a Quaker conference there during a vacation period for the students, and we were housed in student quarters, "digs" they call them. I told him I had just spent a week at Oxford, and he wanted to know where I lived. I told him the college. The rooms were not numbered, but the stairways were. I've forgotten which is the name of the college, but it had originally been a monastery. And the first floor was half underground, second floor up a flight of steps, and the third floor above. I told him the college, and he said, "What stair?" I told him, "Nine." "Which floor?" "Three." "By God," he said, "my digs!" I had spent a week in this man's room with his scout. The Oxford students, at least at this college, didn't have hot water, running water. And the students, for every two students usually there'd be an old man, a war veteran, whom they called a "scout," who would bring them a kettle of hot water every morning to shave. So I'd had his scout. It's also truly said that if any five people, total strangers to each other, get together, got together, there's about a 95 percent they'd find that they had a common ancestor or a related relative. And it's amazing how many people who are not Quakers say, "Oh, my grandmother was a Quaker," or "My aunt was a Quaker."

EG: I think one of the reasons so many people from long ago turn up back in your life is because you're living so long that you give them a chance to find you. Think that helps?

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.