Separated at birth?
One of my favorite places to go is Blue Bottle Coffee Co. As you probably know, I don’t really like coffee, but that hasn’t stopped me from heading over there several times a month. They have free wi-fi, which actually got me in the door the first time over a year ago. Whenever I have a lot of church-related stuff I need to do online, it’s just easier to grab my laptop and head up to Blue Bottle than worry about transferring things from one computer to another at home. There’s a possibility that we might be given a wireless router for our home soon. This, of course, would help alleviate the situation. But it probably won’t stop me from going to Blue Bottle every once in a while.
I love the atmosphere and the customer service is fantastic.
As I was about to leave last week, a guy turned to me and said, “Did you know you have a twin in Michigan?”
Not really sure how to respond to that, I told him that I was sorry for him. After all, I wouldn’t want anyone to have to live with the curse of looking like me! All I could say was, “Well, I’m sorry for him.”
“No, it’s a good thing. The guy’s a millionaire.”
Apparenlty, he owns a microbrewry in Kalamazoo and has been quite successful. The guy who told me about him is a regular at Blue Bottle (along with his wife). The first time they saw me in there, they were a little put off because they were expecting me to come over to them and say hi to them…and tell them why I was in Muncie instead of Michigan. When I didn’t even acknowledge them, they wondered what was going on and why I was acting that way. I had a similar experience down in Tennessee a few years back. I thought I had seen my old college roommate in the Target parking lot one night. It’s not a pleasant experience when you realize the person you thought was someone really isn’t that someone. So I felt their pain.
The guy pulled out his iphone (or something similar) and showed me a picture of my apparent twin in Michigan. And he was right. Scary right. The guy looked a lot like me! Boy, do I feel sorry for him!
It’s been a while since I’ve had a complete stranger ask to take my picture. It happened several times in the backcountry of Philmont, but that was over a dozen years ago. I gladly posed for a picture with him and he sent a copy of it to my Michigan twin.
It was a surreal experience, to say the least. But I got to know a pretty neat couple. And they’re regulars at the Blue Bottle. They’re such regulars, in fact, that they have their own keys to the shop!
Crazy, huh?
