It was bizarre walking into the gerontologist’s office with my mother a week or so ago and coming face to face with a man (the doctor) who looked just like a former colleague. Same eyes, narrow and slanted. Same mouth, with fleshy pieces at the lips’ edges. Even the voice was the same — a cultured New York City kind of sound.
And then the next week, taking my mom to an orthopedic surgeon and confronting a doctor who was the spitting image of the actor, Tom Amandes. It was like meeting Dr. Abbott of Everwood in person.
Many years ago, a woman accosted me in JC Penney’s, insisting that I was “Helen Kaminski.” I kept telling her I wasn’t, until she finally walked away muttering, “Well, you look just like her.”
It makes me wonder if someday science will enable us to trace our genetic heritage far enough back in time so that we can discover the ancient tribe where those genes began to be shared. Surely that’s why some people have practically the same physical features. They must be products of the same original dominant gene pool.
They say we each have a twin. A “doppelganger.”
I wonder what the odds are of any of us running into ours on the street.