My birth father was never actually in my life, until I tracked him down when I was 18 years old. (He and my mother were a one night stand.) He tried very hard to dissuade me from meeting him in person, saying he didn’t even know if I was his child. I insisted anyway. We met for lunch, in the industrial park we both worked in. It turned out we worked a block away from each other (and both frequented the spot we’d chosen for lunch), lived less than 2 miles from each other, and shopped in the same damn grocery store. All of this was not in the town I was conceived and born in, either. Weird, huh? Anyway, he took one look at me and knew I was his. I look a lot like his sister. We ended up having a 4 hour “lunch”, during which we both cried our heads off. That night, he told his wife about me and the next day they invited me for dinner at their house. We had a pretty good relationship (though not father/daughter) for the rest of his life. I also gained a ‘step-mom’ and a brother out of the deal! All in all, I’m really glad I got to know him before he died.
In another case, an ex-boyfriend who then became one of my best friends was lost to me when my ex-husband objected to our friendship (he had decent reasons, so I cut my friend out of my life). Years later, again in a totally different town, I was at my polling place on election day. It was extremely crowded, and I was snaking around the line when I came face to face with him. I was so stunned, I stupidly asked “What are you doing here?!?” Without missing a beat, he replied “I imagine the same thing that you are: voting.” Yeah, I felt like an idiot. Anyway, not only did we live very near each other, we both had children in a magnet school that accepted fewer than 30 students every year out of a very big county. It was pretty surreal. After my divorce, we reconnected again through Facebook and now message each other. It’s nice to have my friend back.