My husband recently convinced me to start playing Pokemon Go, and shortly after that, another friend of ours started playing it too. One afternoon, we decide to meet at a park and play for a while. It’s my husband and I, another male friend who is also in his 20s, and a female friend who is slightly older than we are, with her two sons and daughter (aged 5, 12, and 6 respectively). We meet up, and her kids are having a blast on the playground, while we walk circuits around the playground area catching Pokemon.

After a little while, we are talking about trying to find something specific nearby, when a stranger walking past overhears, and tells us that it’s a bit further up, by the parking lot. The kids decide that they want to walk with us, and we all make our way to find the Pokemon. We all catch it, and decide to hang out in that spot for a couple of minutes, and as we do, a new stranger comes up, and asks if we’ve seen something that we passed on our way up to where we are now. We tell him where it is, and he starts off in that direction, before getting distracted catching something else. (Important side note: My husband is black, while the rest of us are white, and the stranger we just talked to is also black, though slightly taller, and with a different hairstyle.)

Moments later, we decide to had back toward the playground, and the stranger tells us that there’s something three of us haven’t caught yet just a few feet away. We stop to catch it, and then look up to see that our friend’s daughter has taken the hand of the stranger, and is walking with him in the general direction of the playground. Our other male friend has taken her other hand, and the two boys are walking on his other side. We realize that from the daughter’s perspective, this strange man looks just like my husband: both are wearing jeans and have dark skin. We start chuckling over the fact that she didn’t realize her mistake, and in that time, the kids and our friend have left the stranger, and started back toward us. At this point, my husband was walking a bit further behind us, so it takes a moment for the daughter to see him. When she does, complete surprise instantly lights up her face, and she exclaims loudly, “[Husband]! How did you get back here so fast???”