Mar. 5th, 2013 10:53
Coincidences
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cosOn the drive to Connecticut this weekend I listened to an episode of This American Life about coincidences. Several stories of coincidences were told, some rally excellent, others nothing special. One idea they explored was that when a coincidence happens to you, you view it more significantly or remember it more than when you hear about a similar coincidence happening to someone else.
It got me thinking of a coincidence that happened to my parents last year.
When I was very little we lived in Jinja, Uganda, where my parents had been living for several years before I was born. My parents divorced here in the US, and my father remarried here.
My stepmother had never been to Africa. Last year, my dad planned a long vacation for the two of them to Uganda and Tanzania, to show her all the places and things from his past. They were going to see wildlife, and nature, and the cities, and visit Jinja and see if our former house was still there.
In the spring my stepmother's mother was diagnosed with cancer, and it was clearly going to be fatal within a year, so my parents cancelled the trip. While she was still here, they weren't going anywhere. As it turned out, the cancer progressed very quickly, and she died three months later, in the summer, during the time that they would've been in Africa.
Her final few days were right on the dates when, if they'd gone to Africa, my parents would've been in Jinja. Spending those days at the hospital with her, they met her nighttime caretaker, who'd become good friends with my stepgrandmother in a short time. A young woman from Jinja, Uganda. She and my dad traded stories, and when he described where we'd lived, she knew the street and recognized the description and told him the house was still there.
[ My parents did go to Africa this winter and did most of what they'd planned for the summer trip. ]
...
Tell a story of a coincidence you know of? One that happened to someone else, who told you about it, and you remembered it.
It got me thinking of a coincidence that happened to my parents last year.
When I was very little we lived in Jinja, Uganda, where my parents had been living for several years before I was born. My parents divorced here in the US, and my father remarried here.
My stepmother had never been to Africa. Last year, my dad planned a long vacation for the two of them to Uganda and Tanzania, to show her all the places and things from his past. They were going to see wildlife, and nature, and the cities, and visit Jinja and see if our former house was still there.
In the spring my stepmother's mother was diagnosed with cancer, and it was clearly going to be fatal within a year, so my parents cancelled the trip. While she was still here, they weren't going anywhere. As it turned out, the cancer progressed very quickly, and she died three months later, in the summer, during the time that they would've been in Africa.
Her final few days were right on the dates when, if they'd gone to Africa, my parents would've been in Jinja. Spending those days at the hospital with her, they met her nighttime caretaker, who'd become good friends with my stepgrandmother in a short time. A young woman from Jinja, Uganda. She and my dad traded stories, and when he described where we'd lived, she knew the street and recognized the description and told him the house was still there.
[ My parents did go to Africa this winter and did most of what they'd planned for the summer trip. ]
...
Tell a story of a coincidence you know of? One that happened to someone else, who told you about it, and you remembered it.
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A good friend of mine recently had this happen to her. She works for a startup in publishing. While she was working out the details of a new acquisition, it came up that the author used to live -- not just in her city -- not just in her neighborhood -- not just on her street -- but in her house.
My own existence is sort of the opposite of a coincidence, maybe. My parents met on a blind date. When I got old enough to be curious about it, I asked each of them individually about how they got set up. It turns out they actually weren't: each of them was supposed to be set up with someone else, but got the wrong person and just shrugged and went with it, figuring they had misremembered their date's name. They didn't figure out what had happened until I told them.
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I went to DC for the March for Women in 2004, and stayed with my friends Christy & Michael in NW DC near Takoma metro. We went in to the city separately. At the march I was hoping to find the DC area Howard Dean group, who had posted that they were marching together, but I didn't find them - though I did find a MassForDean group and stayed with them for a big part of it. However, after the event was over and people were leaving, I ran into one of the DC Dean people, who told me they were having an afterparty at the group's coordinator's house, and she had directions.
Reading the directions to this party... take the metro to Takoma station, turn that way, walk this many blocks, take this fork, ... I felt like I was reading the directions to Christy & Michael's house, which I knew how to get to. Turns out I was actually reading directions to their next door neighbor's house.
They'd never met their neighbor, so when I got back to their place I invited the next door with me to the party :)