One of the waitresses at my favorite lunch café did a smiling double take the other day, on seeing me seated before her.
“Weren’t you in earlier?” she asked. I shook my head. “Some guy was here a little while ago. Looked just like you. We all thought it was you.” She started to walk away, glanced back, quizzically. “It wasn’t you?”
“Not me,” I said. “How ‘bout that?”
Apparently, I have what they call, “One of those faces.” Like the heroes of so many old TV shows back in the 60s, I keep running into people who bear the questionable burden of sharing my features, build, and general bearing.
Back in college, I worked one summer at a Baptist conference center in the hills of northern New Mexico. I was assigned to the “Chuck Wagon” snack bar. Meeting the rest of our crew, I was introduced to young lady named Libby who, upon seeing me, gasped out loud. She stared at me for a long moment or two, then rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Of course,” she said.
As it happened, her friends explained, I was a dead ringer for Jason, her boyfriend back in Waco. The resemblance, they said, was uncanny. I found that hard to believe, and did a little eye-rolling myself, off and on over the next few weeks, as she stole glances at me from the far end of the counter, and even pleaded with me to switch shifts, so she wouldn’t have to look at me and feel so lonesome.
It all struck me as more than a little silly … until the day I looked up to see myself walking toward me across the room. The guy stopped on the other side of the counter, and we sized each other up, the way you look at yourself in a department store’s changing room mirror. Only we actually looked more alike than what we usually saw in the mirror.
“You must be Jason,” I said.
“You must be Chris,” he smiled.
A few months later, my sister ran into Jason on campus at Baylor, where they both went to school. Stunned, she thought I must have flown in to surprise her. She couldn’t get over the resemblance.
It’s an unnerving feeling. One gets surprisingly used to the idea of representing a particular countenance to the world, for better or for worse. I rather liked the idea of having this face to myself. (And I’m sure most would agree that one of these is enough to go around.) The thought that countless thousands of people are out there responding to my features, but not to me ... it’s like I’m being cheated out of whatever good impressions the other people wearing my face are making on this beleaguered world.
It’s happened again, from time to time. People occasionally send me photos of strangers they've met or observed who reminded them of me. Sometimes I see the similarities, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes, I shiver a little, knowing “I” am out there, somewhere, living a life so foreign to the one I have chosen.
The flipside of this coin is to google yourself and look at all of the people who share your name – and look nothing like you. That has its own discomforts. It’s weird to see my name on these people and realize I might have been a neurosurgeon … a professor of literature … a successful realtor … a guy arrested for calling in fake 911 calls. That I might be of another race or ethnic background. That I might have lived in Maryland.
Years ago, at the height of the War in Iraq, I happened quite by accident on the obituary of a young man of my precise name and age, killed in action. He left a wife and young children. He died saving others. It was a sobering, even haunting realization, knowing I might not only have lived a very different life – but died a very different death.
What to do with the possibilities? Are there ties that bind us to those who share our faces, and our names? Are they strangers, or just twigs from a far-side branch of the ancient family tree?
In an odd, backward kind of way, my lookalikes and namesakes have actually come to re-enforce my sense of identity … reminding me that whatever the face or title, these people surely haven’t seen what I‘ve seen, been all of the places I have been, known the sweet moments of wonder and love and adventure I’ve known in the company of other rare individuals I call my family, and my friends.
Many may share mon nomme, and even a few my visage, but they cannot know or be what the God who created me reserved for this one-of-a-kind soul, and this unique feat of clay.
“By the grace of God I am what I am,” Paul told the Corinthians, “and His grace toward me was not in vain.” Praying it hasn’t been wasted on me, either.
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