Botvinnik

I decided to take a walk, and six blocks from my house I ran into a guy I knew by sight from the grocery store where he works.  A black man around fifty, congenial and helpful when at the store.  We stopped and chatted.  "Do you play chess?" he asked. "Haven't played for a while, why?" I answered.  "You look like Botvinnik," he said.  The long dead Russian chess Grandmaster.  I remembered seeing this man play chess on the third floor of Central Library.  He told me a few things about Mikhail Botvinnik, dead since only 1995, as it turns out.

And then, he asked: "Do you ever see people on the street who remind you of your old friends from years back?"

"Sometimes," I said.

"I do all the time.  I see people, women, men I used to know in high school, close friends, girlfriends, way back when I lived in the Caribbean.  There is no way they could be here, and yet, I think I keep running into them, and they don't look like they ought to, thirty years older,  but about ten years older, as if they were thirty, thirty five at the most now.  Naturally, these people are not my old friends, but lookalikes, or near lookalikes."

"They say that everyone of us has a double somewhere in the world," I said.

He laughed. "Yes, and that double appears to be fifteen years younger than the original."

"Which would mean that we don't acquire a double until we're fifteen years old, right?"

"That makes perfect sense!" he said.