My brain attaches keywords and tags to all the stories and anecdotes floating around in my brain. Some stories have multiple tags while others only have one and are pretty specific and only come up once in a great while.

I only have one story about the band No Doubt, and this is it.

In the late fall/early winter of 1995, I went on a work trip to Minneapolis, Minnesota. The hotel my co-workers and I stayed at was across the street from the Mall of America, the largest mall in the United States. Travelling for work was still a new experience for me, back when things like getting paid a daily per diem and being allowed to drive a rental car seemed very exciting.

The roads were already icy in Minnesota that time of year and one night while returning from the Mall I found myself doing donuts in the hotel parking lot (unintentionally, at first). Just as I was getting ready to park the car, a new song from a new band came on the radio. The band was No Doubt; the song, “Just a Girl.”

The minute I heard the song I knew it was going to be a hit. I wanted to record the song, but this was at least three years before I owned my first cell phone. I had, however, taken my camcorder to the mall to shoot some video (this was also before I owned a digital camera), so I quickly pulled my camcorder out of my backpack, pointed it at the speaker in the car’s front door, and recorded “Just a Girl” as it streamed across the radio waves.

When I got back to Oklahoma the following week I played the song for all my friends. For each one of them I had to hook my camcorder up to the television in our living room and play the video of me recording the speaker in my rental car as the song played. Within six months or so, No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” became a huge radio success. I had been right.

Nobody I know ever mentions No Doubt or the Mall of America in conversation any more, the only two possible keywords that would trigger that story and allow me to work it into a conversation.

Friday afternoon, 20 years after that story took place, I found myself once again rolling into Minneapolis — this time with my family. After stopping by our hotel and dropping off our bags, we piled back into the rental and set out for the Mall of America, four short stops away from the hotel.

Hey, the Mall of America… that reminds me of a story…

And just as I turned toward Susan to relay my one single No Doubt/Mall of America story, the twenty-year-old song “Just a Girl” started playing on the radio. Not on my phone or anything like that, but on the real honest-to-goodness radio. For the next five minutes all I could say was, “What are the odds of that? What are the odds of that?”

Seriously, what are the odds of that?

I guess now I have two No Doubt/Mall of America stories.