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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This is the best coincidence that's happened to me:
When I worked in the costume shop at Shakespeare & Co in Lenox, MA, I used to go occasionally to an international folk dancing group that met in Great Barrington. One night there, I talked with a woman who was up from New York for the weekend to see her son. Her son, it turned out, was an actor at Shake&Co. In fact, I had been tailoring a jacket for him that week. As we talked some more, it turned out that the actor's mother had grown up in Providence, where I grew up, and had gone to the same middle and high schools I went to, and her aunt and uncle lived across the street from me when I was growing up. Oh, and when I told my dad this story later, he said, "And she didn't mention that we were at the National Havurah Committee Summer Institute at the same time, years ago?"
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Crazy small world.
Oh - Item the 2nd...
During my India trip. I was at a cafe in Udaipur for Diwali, and met an American couple from Colorado. The woman and I take one look at each other and we're both, "I know you!" We couldn't for the life of us figure out how, though. I finally got out of her that she's originally from Rhode Island. And is a burner. And yeah, we had met at several local burner parties here in Boston.
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9 months later I was in the car with Jess's Dad and he mentioned her friend Alvin and used Alvin's last name....and it was the same Alvin.
I particularly liked the dollar bill coincidence story and thought of you when I heard it this weekend. :)
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Happened to me: I was using the women's bathroom in one of the food courts in the Eaton Centre (giant four-storey, full city-block, two-subway-stops Toronto mall). I was just about to sit down when I heard a voice saying, "Rowan, it's okay! It's okay, Rowan!". I was so startled that I stopped, despite everything being, indeed, okay. I went to sit again, and the voice started up again: "Hang on, Rowan! Mummy will be done in a minute!". So I finished up, then met the woman coming out of the stall next to me with her little baby, Rowan, to share the bizarre experience I'd just had.
On a side note, I think we generally remember things that happen to us better than stories we hear about things that happen to other people; I'm not sure that's special to coincidences. I won't argue the "view more significantly" part, though.
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If you listen to that episode, near the beginning you hear a girl talking about how her grandmother is always going on about amazing coincidences the girl doesn't think are that special. Then she tells her grandmother about a coincidence of hers that she thinks is better than the ones her grandmother keeps going on about, but granny is unimpressed.
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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 was kind of embarrassed, but it turned out OK, because I married her.
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Once there was a party in my living room at which three guests were talking about how strange it was that they all shared a birthday, what are the odds of that, blah blah blah. In walks a fourth person, who asks, "Oh? What day?" Turns out that's his birthday too.
Another time some friends were hanging out in my living room talking about coincidences. One of them, a fairly new postdoc in town, says, "There was this girl in my grad program who seemed to know everybody! Everywhere I went, people would be talking about M-- H--!" At which point I got to say, "Oh! I know her too!"
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My friend J was on a city bus and on a whim struck up a conversation with the woman next to him. After a pleasant conversation he thought, there is someone I would really like her to meet. Turns out she already had: they were friends in preschool.
And on the preschool theme, my childhood best friend is marrying a guy she thought she first met on JDate.com, but it turns out from photographic evidence that they were also in the same preschool class.
Maybe I remember other people's coincidences more than normal people do; I think I suffer from that flaw of attaching significance to the insignificant. Makes life more fun, though. I'll have to listen to that episode of TAL.
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"Maybe I remember other people's coincidences more than normal people do; I think I suffer from that flaw of attaching significance to the insignificant. Makes life more fun, though. I'll have to listen to that episode of TAL."
You'd appreciate the closing comment from that episode.
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I went to a club with friend, to which I hadn't been a year or so. Some years ago I was there every other week, but not anymore. It was a very spontaneous desicion to go there and nearly didn't happen, as my boyfriend who was with us, doesn't like the club. Anyway, we were there and there was a couple exploring the (tiny) club and I thought to myself ... oh, they totally look as if they are new here, but they look like people i could totally get along with. A while passed, while I was talking and dancing and such. Then I saw the girl from the couple again, standing a few meters away from me ... our eyes met ... and I thought ... boy does she look familiar! And then she said: "Ellen?" And I was like ... "Claudia?!" - and there I met my first-to-fourth-grade best friend again.
Special about this: She still lives in the area I grew up at, a few hundred kilometers away, was just on a two day city-trip to the town I live at now and was only in the club because the location they picked out before was actually boring and they decided to go some place else. We hadn't seen each other quite some years and actually only twice or so since we went to separate schools when we were ten.
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They were introduced by first names, and one recognized the other because he looked exactly like his father had when they were children.
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Many many years ago I was freshly divorced with two small children, and thought I'd give writing a try as a way to bring in income and still be able to take care of my daughters.
A friend of mine told me Marion Zimmer Bradley edited and published anthologies of short stories in addition to her novels, and perhaps I should start there. So, I picked up a couple of the anthologies, took them home and read them. One of the stories, about a barefoot princess who did not WANT to be rescued from her dragon, thankyouverymuch! stuck in my head. Knowing what I knew about MZB, I was more than a little surprised to find out the author was male. "Huh," I thought to myself, "I bet he'd be interesting. I wish I could meet him sometime."
(As a note, I did submit a few stories to MZB, and although none of them were accepted, 2 did make it all the way to the final cut. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to bring any money in, so I quit trying and went back to school.)
Fast forward a whole bunch of years, to when my daughters are about 17 and 19. I had gone to Faerieworlds, as was my habit, and was camping with (several dozen) friends. One particular very popular friend arrived and was instantly swarmed by other people. Once the crowds cleared, and there were only a few of us left standing there, she looked around, did a doubletake, and promptly introduced me to a guy who had also been part of the crowd and who was now standing next to me, someone I'd never seen before, telling us we *really* needed to know each other. She spent the rest of the weekend doing her best to throw us together, quite unnecessarily, as it happened.
Probably a year later, when he and I were exchanging yet more stories of our histories, it came out that *he* was the author of that story, and publishing that story was effectively the start of his career as a writer. (Which went on to include being the line developer for the RPG my daughters had played with now-former housemates.)
We've been together almost 6 years now.
Oh, and? We have a publishing company now, that was accidentally formed when we put together an anthology to raise money for the friend who had introduced us.
As for other peoples' coincidences... my dad had a reputation in our family, because it didn't matter where we went, or how remote it was: there would always be at least one person there who knew him, either from playing with him in an orchestra, or from working with him in the NEA, or through one of the humanitarian projects he sometimes took on... I think it even happened when he and my stepmother went to Germany several years ago.
In his case, at least, it wasn't that we weren't impressed with the coincidences. It was just that it was CONSTANTLY happening!
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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 :)
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I'm at the wedding of friends of mine from college, in upstate NY. At the reception, I'm mainly hanging out with other college friends (this was not too long after graduation), when an older woman comes up to me and says, "You must be $FirstName $LastName 's son." Well, yes, I am $FirstName $LastName's son, and admitted it. Turns out that she had dated my father back before he and my mother had met... some 30 or so years previously, and I guess I looked like my dad did then.
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Back in... 2006? 2007? Forget the exact year...
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