Parallel lives?

I've known this girl named Alison for almost my whole life -- I guess we met in the first grade. She lived in the house on the corner of the street I grew up on. She was the first person in our second grade class to learn multiplication tables, and she taught them to me as the second (so there, Alison, there's proof you were smarter than me!). We were in almost every class together from then on. I made fun of her using "Yo, God!" as the opening to her application essay to Harvard (she got into Stanford ... OK, that's more proof). Our younger brothers were best friends, and I think she went to the prom with my eventual college roommate.

Skip forward to now ... we both live in Seattle (although not as close as when we were kids, but darned close). We're friends on "facebook" but despite our physical proximity, we don't have much besides our long-ago past in common.

Until now -- I was just browsing some new photos Alison put up on facebook from her recent birthday, and one of the gifts she got was a very nice fountain pen! As anyone who reads this blog knows, I've recently become quite a pen freak.

Anyway, I thought that was a funny coincidence -- you can take the kids out of Oklahoma, but once they get out, they'll just move to soggy Seattle and spend their money on pens.