The upstairs apartment
Last winter, I got sick of living in suburbia and I decided to relocate to downtown Birmingham, MI. I discovered Birmingham when I joined a local Toastmasters’ club that met there. Anyways, I found an apartment that was the first floor of a two-story building. When I signed my lease, Pat, the apartment manager told me that I’d love meeting the couple upstairs, Adam and Nicole.
I snickered momentarily, because one of the people I’d known from Toastmaster’s was named Nicole and she had just starting dating a guy named Adam when she quit the club. But I knew she lived in Royal Oak, and the chances of it being the same people were minute. Since I’m writing about it, you can guess how that story ended.
Adam and Nicole got married last summer and bought a house together in October and for the whole winter, I had the entire house to myself. Two weeks ago, I was sitting at my computer when I heard a ton of rumbling upstairs. “Man, they must be really desperate to rent,” I said to myself. “They’re showing the apartment on a Sunday!”
I went outside to see some guy I didn’t know moving boxes into the upstairs apartment. I talked to him for a while and he told me his girlfriend was moving in. Over the course of the last two weeks, I’ve talked to the boyfriend a number of times and even met her parents, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to go upstairs and say hi to my new neighbor.
Anyways, today, I came home from Tae Kwon Do just as she was leaving and we finally introduced ourselves. In the course of our conversation, she mentioned that she does marketing for downtown Farmington, another suburb just west of Birmingham. “Oh that’s funny,” I commented. “One of my good friends does event planning in downtown Rochester.” (another suburb).
“Oh my God!” she added. “You’re friends with Stacey?”
Small world.
