Ever strike up a conversation with a perfect stranger and find out you have a connection that seems impossible to be just a coincidence? Happened to me this morning.

You know that annoyingly repetitive Disney tune, “it’s a small world after all”? First heard it at the World’s Fair in 1964. I never really appreciated how small it was until this morning, 60 some-odd years later.

I was at my usual spot, City Lights Eastside Coffee Shop here in Charleston, minding my own business… not! Of course I started a conversation with a young couple from Charlotte, North Carolina, here to see our beach for a few days. I talk to everyone there who’s willing to talk, and Kent and Jordyn were willing.

It came out early that I’d been an Air Force guy for a while.

Kent mentioned his grandfather was a POW.

Wait, what?

“What was his name?” I asked.

(You see, I’ve got some history with POW/MIAs. So my head started doing math fast, grandfather, POW, Air Force. Maybe, just maybe, I’d seen his name before.)

“Perry Jefferson,” he said.

Jefferson. Hmm.

“Was his wife’s name Sylvia?” I asked, hesitating.

“Yes.”

“Was Perry related to the Coors family in Colorado?”

“Yes.”

Oh my gosh. Can this be true? I almost spilled my coffee. At eighty-seven, with a head full of mush most mornings, I’m lucky if I remember where I parked. But this name came back fast.

I told Kent and Jordyn I knew Sylvia. Knew her well, in fact. From 1970 to 1973, I managed the pay accounts for every Air Force MIA and POW in Vietnam. 325 of them. Sylvia was one of the most memorable, partly because of the Coors connection, and partly because she lived in Denver, where I was based. She was a gracious, kind lady, and I was happy to help her through a trying time. As I’ve said before, that assignment was the most rewarding (and entangling) job I had in my entire 30-year Air Force career.

I told them the Air Force made a presumptive finding of Major Jefferson’s death back in the seventies, but no remains were found at that time.

Kent, Major Perry and Sylvia Jefferson’s grandson, told me something I didn’t know. The DOD finally found forensic proof of his grandfather’s death in late 2007, almost 40 years after he was lost. The family finally had closure.

Sylvia had passed away in 1992.

Of all the coffee shops, in all the towns, a couple from Charlotte walks into mine. And ends up next to an old man who once managed the military pay account of the grandfather, and got to know his grandmother during one of the hardest stretches of her life. Over fifty years ago.

Guess that song was right after all.

It’s a small world, after all. 

Enuf.