Coincidences

I like coincidences. They make life interesting because they are completely unexpected, serendipitous occurrences in one’s day. I’ve experienced a few that I remember years later, and still shake my head with wonder as I remember them.

Once I was buying dog food at a local tack and feed shop, and noticed a mother and young daughter in the store. I put the forty pound sack of dog food in the car and went on to my next errand—shopping at the Trader Joe’s about four miles away. As I was wheeling my cart through the store, the same mother and daughter came in.

Back in the late 1990s I was trying to find a scarce book. A book dealer I knew suggested that a contact a man in Tuscon, Arizona, who had made an authorized reprint of the book. I made the contact, and have enjoyed a friendship with that individual for over twenty years. Shortly after the book dealer’s recommendation, I was visiting a print museum in Carson City, and spent a little time talking with the owner. He mentioned that he knew a printer who still used the old-fashioned methods and machinery. I was amazed when it dawned on me that he was referring to the same person in Tuscon.

Two or three months ago I was at the post office in town and noted a car in front of me with a personalized license plate. An hour or so later, when I was driving out of the parking lot at the local Walmart, I found myself behind the same car. Well, that’s not too much of a coincidence since this is a small town. But back in 2012 when I was living in Orange County, California, I headed out to visit a friend. In front of me on the freeway was a car with an interesting and clever personalized license plate. I went on to visit my friend twenty miles away, spent an hour with him, then drove back home. As I turned off the freeway to the surface street that led to my home, I saw that I had pulled up behind the same car with its clever license plate. Orange County has a population of several million people and its freeways are almost always crowded with a million cars.

After I moved out of Orange County, there was one teenager I regretted not saying good-bye to; I was just too busy with many things under deadlines to take the time to do everything I wanted. Two years later I came back to visit friends and they suggested that we go to a movie at a local mall. I remembered that it was that teenager’s birthday. We went to the mall, and, in this same county with its millions of inhabitants, I saw the teenager. We had a very welcome meeting and a satisfying closure.

Back in 1980, while I sat in an easy chair I was watching my two-year-old son sitting on the carpet in the living room looking through the sliding glass door that led to the patio outside. It was pouring rain, and I remember being impressed with his rapt attention as he stared outside. Thirty years later, long after he had moved out, he came home for a visit. Once again I was sitting in that same easy chair; again it was pouring rain, and he stood in the very same place where he had sat as a toddler, looking outside with the same rapt attention.

A year or two ago, after a number of years without contact, I emailed a friend of mine who is a fan of the science fiction books I’ve written. We were glad to be back in communication, and after exchanging some pleasantries, we discovered that the small town where I moved after I retired was his home town, the small town where he had grown up in the 1950s. He was now living in New York and I was living more than 2,000 miles from where I was living when I wrote the books. And in another coincidence, the name of the town where he lives now is the same as the town where he grew up. He came to visit me, and the house where he was a child still exists.

Any of these coincidences could have been missed had something been slightly different. Ten seconds either way, or being in a different room, or holding off on an email, and the coincidence would either never have happened, or would have been unrecognized  if it did happen. Sometimes I wonder how many near misses we may have in our lives. Maybe none of these coincidences is of any significance other than to inspire wonder—but then wonder is a terrific part of life.