Yosemite Bus

In 1984–85, our family hosted a French AFS student named Yvette Perodou in our Los Altos home. From that year on, she became a lifelong friend of ours. After returning to France, she subsequently got married (we went to her wedding in 1992), and over the years had eight children! We were always family to Yvette and her family, so over the years five of her kids came to spend parts of their summers with us in Los Altos. In 2010, we were visited by two of her girls at once: Mathilde and Bertille, by now two teenagers with normal adolescent tendencies. We took them all over Northern California, like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and we took a long weekend to drive them over to Yosemite Park to show them its beauty.

At one point, we had to get on a standing-room-only shuttle bus to return to the parking lot for our car. So the girls sat down in a couple of seats, and I was standing next to a man holding a little boy in his arms. As we stood there, the little boy got interested in my glasses and started trying to grab them. His father said, "Stop that, Patrick! Leave the gentleman alone!" So I started talking to the dad, and found out that he grew up in Los Altos, and he turned out to be John Hayes, the son of Patrick Hayes, a now-deceased former friend of ours. His son Patrick was named after his granddad.

But the plot gets thicker: it turns out that a year or two after Yvette had stayed with us, the Hayes family had played AFS hosts to her cousin Gwinelle Perodou, so John and Gwinelle had been buddies for that year. So here on that Yosemite bus, standing next to me by chance, was probably the only person in America to have a family connection to the girls sitting across the aisle!