photograph by cameron fogle
Hannah (left) and Anna.
My phone buzzed as we were standing in blinding late May sunlight outside the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. After nearly four hours of historical exploration, my husband, stepson, and I had decided to take a break, take a breath, and maybe find a bite to eat, before heading back in to complete our tour. (The place is vast.) The buzz was a text from my first cousin, Hannah Traverse. Yes, there’s an Anna Traverse and a Hannah Traverse, and yes, one day we may jointly take over the world. Anyway, Hannah was messaging me to ask, “You at the WWII museum in New Orleans?”
Huh? My first thought was that she had perhaps seen something in my Instagram stories about where we were spending Memorial Day weekend. Maybe she had visited the museum in the recent past and wanted to compare notes. Maybe, just maybe she was in New Orleans at the same time? Hannah and her husband, Jeremy, live in Washington, D.C., so the chances of this seemed low, but not impossibly so. No, better still. When I replied that we were, in fact, where she believed we were, Hannah responded, “Lol look up!”
Hannah and I grew up a thousand miles apart, so we’ve never seen each other without first making extensive travel plans. And yet, here we both were, not 100 yards from each other, on a random Sunday, in a state where neither of us lives.
As chance or fate or … whatever would have it, Hannah and Jeremy were, in fact, standing on the sky bridge directly above our heads. In the crush of people at the museum that day — one of the more crowded public spaces I’ve visited in the past two-plus years — she had happened to spot us while traversing (couldn’t help myself there) an elevated walkway at the precise moment we popped out into the noonday sun below her feet.
None of us had visited New Orleans since before the pandemic. Hannah and I grew up a thousand miles apart, so we’ve never seen each other without first making extensive travel plans. And yet, here we both were, not 100 yards from each other, on a random Sunday, in a state where neither of us lives. We all had lunch together, then continued through the museum, and met up again the following morning for Café du Monde beignets in City Park. Simple and startling at once.
You hear about these sorts of reunions all the time, once you get people talking. My parents once ran into a couple they knew from Charlottesville, Virginia, on the streets of Oxford, England. This couple had attended my parents’ tiny wedding years earlier; the chance encounter took place on … their wedding anniversary. When I posted on social media about running into Hannah, the stories started. One friend bumped into a second cousin at a museum in Paris before the days of social media and cell phones. My colleague Michael Donahue recalled standing in front of a painting at the Met, in New York, and realizing that a friend’s brother was standing before the next painting. And so on, and so on.
I’m not a statistician. Maybe these encounters aren’t so felicitous and surprising as they feel in the moment. Maybe if you crunch the numbers the right way, it turns out that this is something of a predictable quirk.
Whatever the odds, I can tell you that in the moment, hugging my first cousin on that random Sunday in May felt damn near miraculous.
I was an only child, and both my parents died far too young: Mom at 51, when I was 21, and Dad just 18 months ago, at 64, when I was 36. None of my extended family live within a ten-hour drive of Memphis, and there simply aren’t very many of us. I have often felt like a planet without a solar system, or a moon without a planet. I suspect many of us feel that way, sometimes. But every once in a while, the universe hiccups. And your first cousin, whose name sounds virtually identical to yours, is waving down at you from a sky bridge in New Orleans. My friend Sally Elliot Boyle, who grew up in the house across the street from me, described a moment like this as “an amazing reassurance that the world is a kinder, smaller, friendlier place than we usually think.”
The world can certainly be cruel, huge, and pitiless — no disputing that. I don’t mean to rainbow my way across all the terrible occurrences of our time: war abroad, unchecked gun violence at home, financial pain at macro and micro levels, environmental devastation — need I go on?
All of which is very much part of why it’s so delightful to be transported into, or reminded about, a version of the world that also exists, all the time, where love and familiarity are just around the corner.
