As I entered a bar with friends a few years ago, a man threw his arms around me and shouted with delight, “Mary Ellen! It's YOU!” Assuring him that I wasn't Mary Ellen, I wrenched free and followed my friends. But it wasn't a total surprise.

        I'd been mistaken for Mary Ellen before — and any number of other women.

        Once, a man ran right onto an airplane to follow me (receiving special dispensation from the gate agent, I presume). He just had to say hello, he panted, because I'd been his student some years ago. Unfortunately, it was at a college I never attended, in a class I never took.

        People have interrupted dinner conversations, seized my arm at church festivals, accosted me in waiting lines. I used to feel that I'd disappointed them somehow, that maybe I should pretend to be someone else for a minute.

        In a doctor's office some years ago with my son, the receptionist told my son she knew me.

        “I'm sorry,” I said, “I don't remember you.” I'd been there the previous week, she explained.

        “No, you're mixing me up with someone else,” I said, laughing. “We've never been here before.” Exasperated, she persisted. (So maybe I was having a serious amnesiac episode, and didn't really know my own name?)

        I've been a stand-in for women 10 years older and 20 years younger, a head taller, with glasses and without. A few years ago, a young African-American woman told me a bus driver mistook her for me.

        If I didn't know better, I might conclude that mine is a universal face. But I do know better.

        Actually, I know my most perpetual “twin,” Mary Ellen. She's a very nice woman who grew up in the neighborhood I joined at age 35, and she doesn't live here any more. We look about as much alike as, say, Britney Spears and Denzel Washington, but we both happen to be blind.

        If I had any doubt that this was the cause for these confused identities, all doubt was removed about a month ago. I was taking my daughter to the downtown library for a school project. An elderly woman boarded our bus, and began chatting. Suddenly, she said, “Oh, you don't recognize me. I'm your neighbor.”

        She explained where she lived (not my neighborhood), so I smiled and said, “I think you're confusing me with someone else.”

        “Oh, I'm sure it's you,” she said. “You've got the same DOG!”

        My daughter and I giggled when we got off that bus. We both understood what had happened — again — and we both recognized how silly it was.

        But it's troubling, too. Troubling in a personal way because it is not lost on me that others, in such instances, are not seeing me at all, but only seeing one characteristic. And troubling in a much larger sense because I know there was a time when all black people looked the same to some whites, and all Caucasians to some Asians. Since Sept. 11, we're experiencing the same phenomenon in some instances with Muslims.

        When we were children, we learned that no two snowflakes are alike. Human beings are like that, too — and when we look beyond the disability, the race, the culture, to see whose face we're looking into, another similarity will be detected: Each of us is splendid in some particular and identifiable way.
       Contact Deborah Kendrick by phone: 673-4474; fax: 321-6430; e-mail: dkkendrick@earthlink.net.

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