Meeting Rhode Islanders… In Minneapolis

I was on the light rail from St. Paul to Minneapolis last Friday night, on my way to meet some friends, minding my own business, thinking about what non-alcoholic drink I would order from the bar, as a bunch of us Millenials danced that night.
The train ride is around 45 minutes which, funny enough, is the amount of time it takes to get across my entire home state of Rhode Island.
As it would turn out, it would take only half that time for me to run into people from my hometown.
When the train or bus stops and picks up passengers, I like to have situational awareness, so I look up to see who is getting on.
At one of the University of Minnesota stops, a couple and a young adult got on the train, and I noticed one of them had a Rhode Island shirt on.
The Special Olympics was last week, in Minneapolis, so I figured they were up in the cities for it.
I yelled out from a few seats away “what part of Rhode Island are you from?”
The young adult looks up, and says he is from East Greenwich/ Warwick.
I then told them I was from Rhode island myself, Warwick in fact, just like them.
We chatted for a couple of minutes, then they told me they were in fact there for the Special Olympics, and asked if I was doing the same.
I told them I was here permanently.
I’ve written a couple of times about how small the world truly is. Especially when you’re from the smallest state in the country.
There are roughly 800,000 or so people who are permanent residents of the Twin Cities, just shy of the population of the entire state of Rhode Island.
There are tens of thousands of people who use the Metro Transit on any given day, and there were thousands of people who were in town for the Special Olympics who were using public transportation.
Yet, despite the many different reasons why it would be improbable, I found myself sitting next to a couple of people from my hometown.
The next day, we took my in-laws who happened to be in town to the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre to see Guys and Dolls (great show by the way).
On the way back, my mother-in-law wanted to see the largest rubber duck in the world, so we took a drive past the Twin Cities Pride festival.
As we were driving by, I spotted one of my friends, who I was just with the night before.
There are tens of thousands of people who attend Pride, and the odds of running into someone on the sidewalk you know has to be real small (I chose journalism not math) but yet it happened. The world is a big place, but increasingly, if we take the opportunity to see it that way, also a small one.