Seeing Double

In December I was honored at an awards ceremony for my performance in German. At reception afterwards, Kris & I were speaking with Kris’s former German prof and my current German prof. In the course of conversation, my prof admitted that, after having me in his class for a week, he went to the master roster to see just how many people with my last name were enrolled at the school. He had subbed one day for Kris’s prof during the previous semester, and when I showed up in his class he was pretty sure that I was Kris and in the wrong class. After seeing that there were two of us, he realized that I was in the right class after all. He never said a word about it to me until that night. Kris & I were amused.

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Several days a week, Kris & I would walk to our first class at the same time. Kris would often cut through my building and continue on to hers and in the process meet people coming to class from the dorms. One day a girl came into the room and inquired if I happened to have a sister on campus. I confirmed that I did. She had met Kris on her way into the building. At first she couldn’t understand why I would be going away from the math building when I obviously had class in it. When she arrived in the classroom, I was sitting there so she came to the conclusion that it couldn’t have been me that she just met.

During the course of the semester, several more people asked me similar questions and still others became reporters of “I saw your sister.” One morning, Elizabeth proceeded to tell me that the previous day she and Brittany, another girl in our class, were sitting at the library looking out over the plaza in front of the library. “Look,” Brittany said, “There goes Sharon.” Elizabeth looked and told her that it was not me. “Yes, it IS Sharon,” she insisted. “No, it’s NOT her,” Elizabeth said. “Sharon was wearing tan socks with maroon flowers this morning. That girl is wearing white socks, so it can’t be her.”

I laughed. “Elizabeth,” I said, “My socks? You remember my SOCKS??”

“Well, I thought your socks were cute and that I need to start wearing cute socks,” she said.

The things that people notice…