It�s a small world, after all . . . It�s a small, small world. The 5-year-old's cheery voice chirps from the back seat of the blue '68 Pontiac Lemans as it rolls across the country.

The three adults in the car know that there are nearly 3,000 miles between Reno, Nev., and Fort Edward, N.Y. They also know that the trip will take a week, including a stop to view Niagara Falls. That's a long time to hear "It's a Small World (After All)," warbled over and over and over again. They wisely avoid getting the girl the tambourine she begs for at a rest stop gift shop in Utah.

Somehow, they all make it to their destination safely, and sanely.

This is how I tortured my parents and uncle during our July 1970 move from the West to settle here in the East.

The phrase "it's a small world" came to mind recently, not in song but in a golly-gee-whiz kind of realization that you never know who you're going to run into. I was at a gathering in Gansevoort this weekend, talking to an interesting writer from Brooklyn. In the course of our conversation she mentioned that her husband is a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I told her that my friend's sister also works in the security department there. "She's his boss," was the surprising reply when I said her name.

Wow. What a coincidence.

What a small, small world we live in.

My favorite "what a coincidence" people story happened in January 1992 in Cheshire, Conn., but had its roots in Lake George in the summer of 1979.

Roy worked with my husband at a law firm in New Haven. He and his wife had an adorable young son named Mitchell, with brown eyes and tousled hair, who I would have adopted in a second. A year and a half after Roy joined the firm he was, unfortunately, a casualty of "downsizing." We invited his family over for a farewell dinner before they left to return to the Midwest.

Near the end of the meal the conversation turned to adventures taken during college years. Roy talked about a bike trip he and two friends took one summer. They went from Chicago up into Canada, then down through New York State to his grandmother's home in Connecticut. He didn't get too far into his story before my brain made a hey-wait-a-minute-there connection. Either I'd heard this story before or it was a major deja vu moment.

I waited for a pause. "You didn't happen to go to Lake George, did you?" I asked slowly, with a curious wrinkle on my brow and a disbelieving tone in my voice.

Roy didn't answer at first. He just looked at me for a moment, then said, "Nah. It can't be," and "No. Really?" Then we both laughed. Between the two of us we explained to our spouses that we'd met before --briefly--12 and a half years earlier.

In the summer of 1979 I spent a lot time with my friends in Shepard Park in Lake George. One Saturday in July, five of us met there for an afternoon that we marveled about afterwards for a long time.

It started out like any other day at the beach for a group of teen-age girls: a little bit of food, a little bit of sand, a little bit of water--and a lot of talking. Then Anne, the most adventurous girl in the bunch, pulled out a hand-held mirror to check her hair. She began playing with it, bouncing the sun's reflected rays off a nearby wall. Accidentally--or not? It's hard to remember now--these rays happened to catch the eyes of a guy.

I was both mortified and excited when he came over, chatted with Anne, then went back to his two friends. They then stowed their bikes and came to join us as Anne had suggested. That's how we made the acquaintance of Roy, Mike and Al, three college students on a bicycle trip from Chicago to Connecticut, via Canada and New York.

The odds of ever running into these guys again was slim. While I'd had my camera the week before, I didn't have it this time. So, they got one picture of us, but we didn't take any of them. No one thought to exchange addresses. I didn't even talk much to Roy--it became my duty to keep feeding brownies and other goodies to Al, who was their timekeeper and, thus, in need of distraction so that our afternoon could go on as long as possible.

Eventually, none of them could deny that the sun was getting lower in the sky and they had to be on their way.

That was 1979. Fast-forward to 1992 where Roy and I had just discovered our blast-from-the-past connection--just in time to part company once more. It was both funny and ironic.

While I was disappointed that we didn't keep in touch with Roy and his family after their move west, I wasn't really surprised.

I also wouldn't be surprised to someday cross paths with him again.

It is, after all, a rather small world.

Kay Hafner says she's never seen Disney's famous "Small World" ride for herself, but on videotape it looks, and sounds, just as she imagined at age 5. Kay can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].