My brother & his ex

My brother's marriage broke up: devastated, he literally fled to the airport after a final fight with his spouse and left the country without contacting anybody. As it turned out, he was abroad for 6 years (he got a divorce within the first 7 months & never contacted his ex again). Finally returning home to Canada after six years, he flew into a distant city in a part of our large country he had never been to before. At the airport, he scoured the newspaper want-ads for a "drive-away" — our term for an individual or company advertising for a person to drive their vehicle to a select destination & bear the cost of gas (a cheap way to cover long distances). My brother found a suitable private drive-away in the ads, phoned the number, made a preliminary agreement with the man on the other end, and went to arrange his ride for the 3500 miles to our family. When he rang the bell at the address, the door opened, and his ex-wife was standing there — apart from strangers, the very last person he had spoken to in Canada before leaving from the other end of the continent 6 years previously, and certainly the last person he had ever expected to speak to again. He met her new daughter, but didn't take the drive-away car. In our country, a place with a small, highly mobile population (30 mil) & a clutch of big cities spread across long distances, coincidences like this are more common than one might think. For instance, my same brother's current next-door neighbours in Vancouver happen to be the son of my wife's boss in Montreal & a former tenant of mine in Toronto. More internationally, my 83-year old father has just begun dating a woman in California whose 3 middle-aged sons were delivered 50-odd years ago in Lancashire by my own doctor father-in-law. Working in South Sudan in 1985, the Scottish pilot of the bush plane flying me out of my isolated location (the only non-African person I had seen in 5 months) turned out to be the first cousin of my best friend in Canada. The year before I had travelled in East Africa with an Australian: we never kept in touch, but when I holidayed in West Africa in 1990, I ran into him at an airport & we travelled together once more. I also once worked at a remote camp in the Yukon with a female colleague. When our relief flew in, it was her ex-husband who had been searching for her and their daughter for 11 years (quite the scene). Ten years later, I ran into the grown daughter at a house party in Crouch End. The world is a small place, at least for Canadians.