“A Journey Through Time: A One and a Million Chance Reunion After 20 Years”

A true story of a rare encounter on a cold and snowy night.

Sometimes in life, the stars align just right, and a chance encounter or event happens that you instantly know is very unique.

For me, this encounter was so rare and coincidental that I felt the odds of it happening to anyone else were at least a million to one. Maybe more. Like hitting the lotto odds maybe.

The year was 1994, and it was Christmas time. I was living just outside of Washington DC in a small town in Maryland. So far, it had been a busy and very cold winter, and I was looking forward to flying home to Arkansas for Christmas and seeing some family and friends.

However, the procrastinator in me waited til the last minute to purchase an airline ticket. This was still pre-internet and booking online days when you still had to call and talk to a travel agent.

I found out that no matter what price I could afford to pay, there were no flights available, and if I were going to spend Christmas with my family, I wouldn’t be arriving there via airplane.

So reluctantly,

I headed to the bus station.

Now, if you’ve never been to the bus station in downtown Washington DC at 3:00 in the morning when it’s 18 degrees outside, well, you just haven’t truly seen all the craziness in this world.

I boarded the bus and sat back for my long journey. We traveled the rest of the night and all day through rural Virginia, stopping at every little town in between it seemed. A cold front had drifted across the eastern United States and although frigid outside, the bus cranked out its heater at full max it seemed, as we ventured down the highway inching closer and closer to my destination.

We reached Knoxville around 5 p.m. and I had just enough time to grab a quick bite from the McDonald’s and get back onboard. I got extremely lucky in that a beautiful young woman in her 20s asked if she could sit in the open seat next to me.

I replied “Sure” and for the next 8 hours, we talked the whole way about everything. Made the time fly by. We chatted like old friends as the bus rumbled along through the cold night. I can only remember that she was traveling to Oklahoma to visit family for the holidays.

Upon reaching Memphis at roughly 2 a.m. we departed ways, and looking back on it now, I wished I’d gotten her phone number. But then I remember this was 30 years ago. There were no cell phones and calling “long distance” was always a shot in the dark, you never knew when someone was home or not.

I hurried quickly inside the bus station, and proceeded to the counter to find out the number of my next bus and when it would depart for Little Rock, my final destination.

The agent at the counter (who looked to be about 96 years old) banged away at some keys on his keyboard and then informed me that my bus would not be leaving for 4 hours, around 6 a.m. But then he pointed to a bus outside that was just getting ready to depart and told me that there should be one seat left on it and that if I hurried and caught it, I could be in Little Rock before I was even scheduled to depart Memphis.

Well, you didn’t have to tell me twice. I shot out the door with my camera bag in one hand and my old Navy duffle “sea bag” over the other shoulder and ran to the bus. The bus driver was pulling out of the lot but stopped when he saw me and opened the doors.

I asked him if he had a seat left, and he looked up in the mirror over his head and said “Yeah, I believe there’s one open back there” and so onboard I climbed.

As I walked down the aisle of the very crowded bus, I saw the open seat. In it was one passenger next to the window and I quickly identified why no one, up to this point, was interested in sitting next to this man.

He was a black man with a clean-shaven bald head and he was wearing some dark wrap-around sunglasses “at night” as he sat fully upright in his seat. He was an intimidating figure for sure, but I was a military veteran, and race had no bearing on me, so I asked him if I could sit in the seat beside him.

Little did I know, but I was about to experience a chance encounter that defied all odds of statistical probability…

He turned to me, smiled, and replied absolutely, and I noticed immediately that when he smiled at me, one of his teeth was capped in silver.

Now flash back close to 20 years and I remembered a close childhood friend that I went to school with up to 5th grade who had a tooth capped in silver the same way. I remember how he would laugh and tell us that his momma and daddy weren’t about to spend big money on a “gold” tooth, and so silver is what he got. But he moved away after 5th grade to somewhere out of state I remember, and that was that.

But back to the present, as I sat down in the seat, I couldn’t help but think of this memory. We rode along quietly for just a few minutes, weaving our way through the streets of downtown Memphis on a freezing night, making our way towards the interstate when he turned to me and said, “So where are you headed?”

I replied that I was getting off in Little Rock, but that my family lived near a small town called England about 30 miles south of there.

He replied “Really? I went to school when I was a kid in England.”

Well, that was all the confirmation I needed, so I turned to him and said “I know you did because you’re Adrian Harper.”

He lurched back as if he had been punched. He then proceeded to lift his sunglasses and looked at me for just a few seconds with an astounding look on his face and said, “Well I’ll be damned, Scott Wood…”

We quickly shook hands and hugged, much to the astonishment of some other passengers, and quickly started to try and grasp just what this rare encounter meant.

To think that someone I hadn’t seen since I was a pup in school, and now nearly 20 years later, had just happened to “run into each other” was too much for both of us. Had it not been for the old agent at the counter telling me about the sole remaining seat on a different bus, or had someone else been sitting in that seat, all of the different tangibles that could’ve derailed this encounter, then this meet would’ve never happened.

What if I had flown instead of taking the bus?

I found out that he had moved to Atlanta when he moved during the summer after 5th grade and had graduated high school there, and then joined the U.S Marine Corps right after. I told him how I had practically done the same, having joined the Navy and left for boot camp not even a month after graduating.

We spent the next 2 hours riding to Little Rock chatting away about our lives. Knowing that we had played in the school band together, I asked him if he still played the trumpet.

He smiled real big and said, “Yeah, I play in a jazz band at a big club in Atlanta.”

I told him about being a photographer in Washington and all the photo ops the city had to offer.

We promised to write or call each other as we departed ways upon arriving in Little Rock.

We haven’t spoken since. It’s just the way things were back then. You could try calling long distance, but most people didn’t even have answering machines back then, so if all you were to get was ringing on one end, you just tried again in another week or two. Maybe. You said, “Man I need to call that guy someday” and then quickly the weeks turn into months, and then years, numbers get lost or changed, etc.

But times have changed! We now have ways of locating old family and friends, but for some reason, neither of us ever got big on social media and didn’t utilize the benefits that it offered.

But today is a new day, so Adrian Harper, if you are still alive and out there, my old friend, please get in touch!

If you enjoyed this story, please respond accordingly to keep the algorithm happy. Critiques, Tips, and Suggestions are highly sought after.

And if you happen to come across a big bald black man wearing shades at night and playing a trumpet in some jazz club, don’t be afraid to go up and say hi!

Until next time,

Scott