I was waiting for my wife to check out at Walgreens when an older gent came through the door, strode our way, nodded a polite greeting, and slipped into line behind us. I gave him a glance, then a double-take, then stole a third look under the ruse of searching for something imaginary I hadn’t dropped on the floor behind me.
It was incredible. He looked enough like an old friend of mine to be his double. I nudged my wife, who never thinks anyone looks like who I think they look like. She glanced over my shoulder, raised her eyebrows, and actually agreed that, yes, this fellow looked just like our friend.
Figuring our combined furtivity would by now have drawn the man's attention, I turned and apologized, explaining our interest in his countenance. “You look just like one of my best friends,” I said. He shrugged and grinned.
“Is he a good guy?” he asked.
“He is,” I assured him.
“Well, then … it’s all right,” he said, smiling. And we left him to his shopping.
It’s just such an uncanny phenomenon. It’s amazing enough that so many people come out of their mother’s womb looking exactly like each other. (About 3.5 out of every thousand births, the statisticians tell us.) We’ve all marveled at twins we’ve known, guessed at telling them apart, read the stories of how eerily similar their personalities and preferences are, or of how oddly different they turn out to be.
Most of us have fantasized of what it would be like to go through life with that kind of visual connection, smiling at how fun it would be to switch places, now and then, and keep our friends on their toes.
It’s a fascination – but we accept it as a fluke of nature and go on. Confident in knowing that, for better or worse, we have our own unique physical appearance to embrace or rue, and with it a distinctive identity to flaunt, bear up under, try and change, or accept and settle into.
But these are genetic twins. What do we make of those people of absolutely no relation who look not vaguely similar but virtually identical? How to explain that?
Look at the people in this photograph. These pairs a-posing are all complete strangers, genetically unrelated, who happen to look at least as much like each other as they do themselves.
How to explain this, scientifically? You figure that your physique is the distilled essence of countless generations of DNA, interwoven with and enhanced or disfigured by the various contributions our sundry ancestors have pitched into the family genetic pool. How could two unrelated people possibly come up with that same combination of physical features?
It reminds me of an old mathe-matical theory that, by the law of probabilities, if you put enough chimpanzees in a room and set them to typing, they will eventually, inevitably, reproduce – verbatim – all the greatest works of world literature (and not a few of the worst). After all, there are only so many possible combinations of letters and punctuation. But surely human DNA is more complicated than that, and certainly our Creator never runs out of new ideas and possibilities.
One study suggests the odds of two people sharing duplicate facial features is something less than one in a trillion. On a planet of over seven billion people, that comes out to about a one-in-135 chance that someone out there looks almost exactly like you.
There’s some old saw about everyone having a twin somewhere in the world, but most of us give small credence to that … mostly because we’ve never really run into anyone who looks all that much like us. Think about that: if the odds are that high against our having a double somewhere – how much higher are the odds of our actually running into them? Or even being alive at the same time in history?
For years, it was a stipend of network television that somewhere in the run of a series, the main character had to encounter an evil twin whose malevolent plans endangered the hero’s life and reputation. Going by TV and the movies, you’d figure we’re all bound not only to bump into our doppelganger, sooner or later, but to find in them our mortal foe.
Happily, that wasn’t my experience.
One summer, halfway through college, I worked at a Southern Baptist conference center in the hills of northern New Mexico. I was assigned with a dozen others to the “Chuck Wagon” snack bar, as was a pretty young woman named Libby who spent most of her days stealing glances at me and then grinding her teeth or making half-muffled sounds of pain and frustration.
She’s not the only one in whom I’ve inspired those reactions, but she seemed to suffer them more severely than most. The problem, she said, was that I looked “just like Jason.”
Jason, I learned, was her boyfriend and intended fiancé. He had worked at the same conference center the year before, in that same Chuck Wagon, and the two of them had planned on his being on hand again, this summer, with her there to work beside him. A last-minute upheaval in his course work, though, had necessitated his staying back at Baylor, his place to be taken by … me.
To hear Libby tell it, Jason and I were virtually identical. She wasn’t the only one who thought so. A number of other people on staff had worked with him the year before, and not a few remarked on the close similarity. Several actually came up and started talking to me as if I were Jason, until I explained their mistake.
After a while, it all got to be a bit much. No one, I thought, looks that much like a stranger.
Then one lazy afternoon, I looked up from the snack bar counter to see myself walking toward me.
It really was the weirdest feeling … like watching yourself coming toward yourself in a mirror. The wide-eyed look on his face told me he was processing the same odd emotions. He stepped up to the counter, and the two of us just kind of stared at each other for a minute.
“You must be Chris,” he said.
“And you’ve got to be Jason,” I replied. The rest of the crew came running to gape at us, laughing and shaking their heads at the rare resemblance. He stayed a week; both of us spent most of that time explaining to friends and stranger that we weren’t the other.
To top it all off, that fall, my sister started at Baylor, and happened to run into Jason on campus. It took several minutes and close study to convince herself that I hadn’t just traveled 1,000 miles to surprise her.
There’s certainly an element of delight to finding you have a twin out there, but other feelings bubble in the background. Curiosity, certainly: what kinds of scenes, relationships, adventures is this person wading into with my face? Is he or she making better use of it than I am?
Covetousness, too, comes in – what experiences is my countenance having without me? What wonderful things will this other “me” enjoy that I may never know or experience? Is that me having more fun than I am? Is he living a more fulfilling life?
That last part feeds on a certain insecurity. Whatever our woes and misgivings about the looks we’ve been given to go through life with, those looks at least give us a certain identity to cling to. I may not like everything I have to present to the world, but at least I know me when I see me.
It’s like the Korean civilian in an old M*A*S*H episode, caught on the military base without a pass. “Can you identify yourself?” an officer asks him. To which the man replies (beating his chest enthusiastically):
“This is ME!”
There’s the rub, of course. The blunt reminder – looking at someone with my nose and eyes and chin – that I’m more than what other people see. More, even, than what I see … in the mirror, and in my mind’s eye.
That, as the Apostle Paul says: “the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” The appearance I spend so much time refining is bound for worms and dust, one day … while something deeper is being primed for a place where my identity won’t hinge on an odd voice, or some blemishes, or a bad hair day.
Yes, it's a hard thing to get our hard heads around. But it's something we all have to … face.
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