Serendipity in Dublin

In the early 1990s, my graduate school classmate Sandy and I navigated our university days together in Florida. After graduation, he relocated to San Francisco, and when I eventually moved to the Bay Area myself, we caught up and hung out off and on. 

Back then, Sandy was in his mid-thirties, happily single, and completely convinced he was a lifelong, confirmed bachelor with absolutely no intentions of ever getting married.

As the years rolled on, we both got swallowed up by work and the demands of life, and we eventually lost touch entirely.

Fast forward to October 2005. I had signed up to run the Dublin Marathon and flew over to Ireland for the race. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a faint memory told me that Sandy had relocated to Ireland at some point, but I had no idea where. We shared no mutual friends who knew his whereabouts, and in the pre-widespread social media era, I had no way of tracking him down.

The afternoon before the marathon, I wandered into an Indian restaurant in the heart of Dublin to carb-load for the grueling 26.2 miles run ahead.

As I sat waiting for my food, the ambient noise of the restaurant shifted. I overheard a group of diners at a nearby table chatting animatedly in Marathi—the regional language of Maharashtra, the Indian state where Sandy was raised.

On a sudden, irrepressible whim, I stood up and walked over to their table. "Excuse me," I said, interrupting politely. "I know this is a long shot, but I lost touch with a friend about ten years ago. All I know is that he vaguely lives somewhere in Ireland. By any chance, does the name Sandy ring a bell?"

One of the men at the table looked up, smiled, and said, "Oh yeah, absolutely. I know him and his wife."

I shook my head. "No, that can't be him. My friend is a fiercely committed bachelor."

Undeterred, the Dublin resident pulled out his mobile phone and dialed a number. A moment later, he handed the phone to me. When the voice on the other end spoke, I was floored. Against every imaginable statistical odd, it was the exact same Sandy. Not only had he built a life in Ireland, but the "confirmed bachelor" had indeed happily married.

Now, in the era of WhatsApp, keeping in touch is effortless. Since that miraculous restaurant encounter in Dublin, I've returned to Ireland to visit him three more times, a friendship resurrected by a single conversation overheard across a restaurant floor.