Soulmates

First, I must apologize to my wife who is my one and only soulmate. She understands the adolescent side to me that comes out when things happen like the two of us pulling up to the local grocery store parking lot and seeing a practically identical Cabriolet to the one in our garage. 

Imagine my surprise ...

This happened yesterday afternoon, and I promptly instructed my wife to go into the store ahead of me with our son. I was going to wait for the owner and make a new friend. To my wife's great credit, there were no complaints, no rolling of the eyes, no long sighs.

So there I was waiting outside the local A&P next to a beautiful 1995 black E320 Cabriolet as I sat in my wife's Mini Cooper. As people approached, I was at the ready, prepared to introduce myself. The portly older gentleman in the wrinkled, preppy clothes ... surely this is the owner. Turns out he was a Mercedes driver alright, but not the right model. Perhaps it was the Vietnam-era veteran who looked like he might have retired from a long career as an engineer. I imagined him tinkering with old German cars like this on the weekend. No such luck. I discovered he likes older cars, but favors Detroit iron.

Turns out it wasn't either of these men. In fact, it wasn't a man at all. It was my charming new friend Naomee, who was only too happy to show me her gorgeous Cabriolet. (She tells me people ask about it all the time.) Imagine my surprise to learn the other car in her garage is also a green Mini.

Manufactured a couple of months before mine in 1995,
but otherwise very similar to this blogger's Cabriolet. 

At the risk of embarrassing her mechanic, I should also add that when I asked to see her engine bay, we were horrified by what we saw under the hood. It was immediately obvious a mechanic had left it significantly disassembled and closed it up while in the middle of working on it. Naomee had been driving around with papers under the hood, a magnetic tray still attached to the valve cover to hold loose screws, gaskets undone, and even the covers for the air conditioning system completely disassembled. Someone had shut the hood with work still in progress. Never mind that the car had actually left the shop; the hood should never have even been shut to begin with. It was a disaster to look at, but any real disaster had been averted by my curiosity to look under that hood. Sheer luck.

Naomee and her husband live just around the corner from us. "Small world," was what my soul mate and I thought as we drove away with our 9-year old son in the backseat (probably rolling his eyes). Naomee had her own take on our chance meeting that day. She called it a "god wink."