Get Outta My Airport

Have you ever come across someone you knew in an airport?  I mean when you're both flying, and neither of you expects to see the other?
   Isn't it totally weird?
   I was talking to my younger niece yesterday, and she saw one of her old teachers in an airport just that day.  Aside from the freakiness of realizing your teachers are just like everyone else - they even poop - there was the added surprise of seeing someone you know in a completely unexpected setting.  It pushes you off-center, make you uncertain.
  I've had this happen to me twice.  I used to travel quite a lot for a job I had working as a government contractor, and one trip took me through the Brussels airport.*  Yes, that Brussels, in Belgium.  I was walking down a concourse and I saw a guy I'd gone to high school with coming the other way.  This was over a decade after graduation.  We both slowed down, then stopped, and we both had the same expression on our faces:
   "What the hell are you doing in my airport?"
   Very odd.  We exchanged pleasantries for a very, very brief time, less than a minute, then we were both on our way and glad of it.  Afterward I tried to figure out why we were both so eager to get away, and I think it comes down to cognitive dissonance.  The setting was just so incongruous - an airport thousands of miles away - and the meeting so unexpected that his presence clashed with my belief of what should happen in an airport in Belgium when I was flying on business.  This was a person from my childhood, who I never expected to meet again, let alone meet by chance in a foreign country.  I couldn't even imagine the odds of us meeting in a particular concourse in Brussels twelve years after parting ways in San Antonio.
   The second time was more recent, and I was flying back to Burbank after the holidays here in Texas.  I was in DFW, and I saw a woman who was in my improv class.  Though the break was jarring, it was not nearly so odd as the time in Belgium.  I called her name and eventually had to go touch her on the shoulder because she wasn't responding.  She didn't expect to meet anyone in the airport and so thought the 'Heidi' was for someone else.
   Turns out we were on the same flight back to Burbank.  Which is not odd at all, considering how few flights go in and out of Burbank.  But here's the kicker - we were assigned seats next to each other.
   Freaky.

Now, whenever I'm in an airport I have an eye out for a familiar face.  I actually say to myself 'I wonder if I'll meet someone I know?'  I do this to prepare myself for the not-so-remote possibility that I will.  I don't like feeling off-balance, it makes me feel like I'm not in control.  And however true that might be, sometimes I prefer my illusions to reality.
 

*  I was flying Sabena, and they had the hottest flight attendants.  Too bad they're out of business now.