Mar12

familiar.

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for some reason in the last few days

I’ve had a series of people coming up to me

asking if I was the person they saw somewhere

or mistaking me for someone else who they knew.

are people following me,

am I wearing powerful magnets,

does my face look extremely generically familiar?

—

here are my series of events:

1. a man who I’d met once was in a large group meeting with me and stopped me to ask if I had been with a small group, maybe family, at dinner a few nights ago at a restaurant in town. it turns out I had been but he hadn’t said hi because we barely knew each other and he couldn’t remember my name. I was only there because the guest of honor requested that restaurant but it wasn’t a place where I usually go. the man who asked me the question had first met me when he came to a smaller meeting I was in, sat down and realized that he had come to the wrong meeting by accident but ended up staying for the whole meeting anyway. we now are working together in the big group.

2. later that same day, I met up with a different small group of people in a tiny cafe to begin organizing a community project. a woman who I had never met was at the cafe and asked me if I had been to a grocery store prior to the meeting, because she thought she had seen me there. I said, yes I had met my daughter there earlier before coming to the cafe meeting. We introduced ourselves and will now be working on this project together.

3. the next day, I walked downtown to a small market and was browsing in the cheese section, where a woman was also looking at the cheeses nearby. She began to talk to me and I thought she was just being friendly or asking me a question, so I turned to her and she apologized, saying she thought I was her friend who looks very much like me and lives nearby and she just assumed that I was her until I looked puzzled. we are not going to be working on a project together, at least as far as I am aware of at this point.

4. the next day after that, yesterday, I was walking in the mall due to bad weather, with my friend, when a woman came up to me to say something and when she got close she said that I looked exactly like her friend but realized at the last minute that I wasn’t her. so we all laughed and she went on her way. I explained to my friend that for some reason……

—

‘people always think they know me from somewhere.

that shall be my epitaph:

‘he hath a face familiar to many, known to few and now hidden forever.’ 

-stewart stafford

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75 responses »

  3. that sounds SO familiar! I do recognised so very often that i sometimes feel really bad for not knowing who’s so ‘intimately’ chatting to me, but i think it’s mainly because i am really easily recognisable. i have wild white, curly hair, wear very red lipstick, am small and really round (HH says Rubenesque) and i laugh a lot. but i’m not on so many committees as you are, so i might not get ‘known’ as often as you do ;)

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    • right, and I’d love to meet her, as for the other situation, I’ve been busy lately so it makes sense that I might cross paths with lots of people but it just all happened in quick succession

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  12. Reminds me of the time I looked across the room in a large department store and connected with someone who looked exactly like me. She looked back, just as startled, but we didn’t speak. I have always wished I had engaged her and found out who she was.

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  31. I might have to noodle on this one for a while? But my first thought, it’s your smile, it’s inviting and people are inspired to connect or come up with a connection. I get it. If I stumbled on you poking around the cheeses at the grocery store I would so start up a conversation and I would absolutely figure out a way to be part of that mysterious project! Hugs, C

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  33. Those are some good stories. I have one that I like to tell (ignore me if you’ve heard this before). I’m very good at knowing people’s faces, though I don’t always remember their names. I walked out of the hardware store one day, when a woman stopped me, “Pete,” she said enthusiastically. I turned toward her and thought, I have no idea who you are. I asked her a question, hoping that something she said would trigger a memory. At one point, she said, “Are you still painting houses?” (I used to paint houses for 25 years in the summer when I taught, so I assumed she was an old client.) She did the majority of the talking for a minute, then looked at me curiously and finally said, “You’re not Pete Bradley, are you?” It was the weirdest thing to talk to fake a conversation that long before she realized I was someone else.

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    • oh, that is hilarious! and unusual that it kind of fit with your story, but I do think we try to make it fit to be polite naturally, and I know that your brain was probably working overtime trying to remember, when she had her moment of realization- so funny!

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