Perhaps you know the joy of running unexpectedly into a friend while in a far-away place. I’ll never forget the gasps of surprise from such an encounter in a little café in Prague. Two of my Smithsonian guests looked up from their coffee to see former neighbors. That family had moved across the country ten years ago and contact had been lost. Suddenly, they were finding one another again in the middle of Prague!
That occasion was my favorite “chance encounter” until last week when I ran unexpectedly into a treasured colleague named Thomas Abbott in the courtyard of Sanssouci, Frederick the Great’s pleasure palace in Potsdam. Here’s the story.
During his university years, Tom had come to study in Berlin. Caught up by the dynamism of Berlin after reunification, he basically never left. (To the surprise of families back home, it’s not unknown for students to do that.) Tom established a career in Germany as both an archival researcher and a guide for historical sites.
I met Tom in 2002, one year after founding a Germany study program for my university. The program was based in Weimar, a small city known for its cultural riches, but we interspersed visits to bigger cities like Dresden and Leipzig.
We saved our trek to Berlin for the final weekend, presuming that the students’ intense study of German history would come together in a coherent whole. We needed a certified guide for our visit, so we engaged one. He was a nice man, but he bored us to tears.
How, you ask, can a tour through Berlin turn into a mind-numbing burden? Hard to fathom, I agree. But after an hour, everyone was dragging. After two hours, our students had nearly collapsed. We soldiered on for another hour until our guide noticed no one was paying attention and released us. The next year, we said to the agency: please give us someone who at least could keep our students awake.
Enter Tom, who seems to have every fact pertinent to Germany history and culture at his fingertips. Within seconds, this exuberant, beautifully spoken man, with his infectious laugh and a tendency to say provocative things, had us in the palm of his hand!
He sat us under a tree south of the Brandenburg Gates—a spot that once marked the middle of the Death Strip. He said, “Listen up, because I’m going to give you German history in ten minutes.” And he launched forth.
Within ten minutes we’d traveled from Germany’s ancient roots to the latest stage of post-Communist politics. At the end he said, “Any questions?” No one could speak.
“Fine, let’s go.”
For the next four hours, our students followed Tom as if he were the Pied Piper. Rather than leading us into the Spree River, though, Tom continued tossing us through time with the most fabulous combination of knowledge and hilarity I’d ever heard. He lifted every student into a state of inspired connection with history, something rarely experienced by young people that age.
Year after year, Tom worked his magic on our study-abroad students. Sometimes I helped friends traveling to Berlin get in touch with him to enjoy his expertise as their private guide. He helped us with our courses, too (our students will recall Tom discussing Romanticism in Unit 9 of Discovering Music, as he and I walked on a wintry day through the park in Weimar).
I had not seen Tom for a few years. So imagine my disappointment when, despite working largely in Germany this summer, I wasn’t going to be able to visit with him. He stays busy in the same way, leading groups as far afield as London or the Mississippi Delta. Our schedules would not line up.
Last Friday, walking across the courtyard of Sanssouci, while describing the magic of Thomas Abbott to a colleague who also knows him, I lamented, “How I wish I could see Tom this summer—even for a few minutes.”
Suddenly, to the left, there sat Tom. Perched on a bench under the royal colonnade, he was heatedly engaged on his phone, confirming arrangements for his group’s lunch. I was too busy talking about Tom to have noticed him. It was my husband Hank who spotted him.
I literally danced, it was such a wonderful coincidence. I confess that we made a bit of a scene, starting with me singing For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow. Three hours of visiting were compressed into twenty minutes.
Okay, maybe it was not a completely astonishing encounter. Both of our groups (as it turned out) had a visit to Sanssouci on their morning’s agenda. In fact, Tom’s group would later board the same riverboat we had departed earlier that morning. His group would make the same journey as ours along the Elbe River in reverse order.
But it was such a happy circumstance. And I nearly missed it by not seeing Tom.
While not wishing to pack too much meaning into the encounter, I do wonder how often in life we miss things, both big and small, that would bring us joy. How many times do we yearn for something while, simultaneously, walking right past it? Do we lament a lack of beauty in our lives while walking past beauty? Do we wring our hands about a lack of accomplishment while failing to take the bountiful opportunities right before our eyes?
That is too much meaning to pack into a chance encounter at Sanssouci. But I continue to think about it, much as I continue to smile.
