Coincidences

Sometimes, there are impressive instances of events happening together or near each other.  They can be arresting in their way or merely surprising.

When we were in Hawaii last fall, we visited a restaurant called "The House Without A Key".  That odd name led me to the 1925 book of the same name, which turned out to be the first volume of the Charlie Chan stories by Earl Derr Biggers.  Fast forward to the next fall.  We are in a Road Scholar (formerly Elderhostel) program in Rocky Mountain National Park and one of the events is a trip to the interesting and romantic "Baldpate Inn", a mountain lodge/restaurant that serves famously delicious meals, and has to celebrities and such, since 1917.  One of the features of the inn is the tradition that as a guest, it is customary to leave a key to your house with them.  Sounds weird, I know, but many people have participated and left them a key.  It is such a big deal there that they have a room dedicated to the collection of keys that have accumulated over close to a century.  The name of the inn and the tradition of collecting keys related to the book "Seven Keys to Baldpate" by guess who?  Yep, coincidence #1: Earl Derr Biggers.  I couldn't get over it: thousands of miles apart and we run into the same novelist from my parents' childhood in both places.

Ok: next: I made a new friend in the neighborhood.  The man seemed erudite and sophisticated.  I stopped walking or jogging a few times and we struck up conversations.  After a while, I invited him to have lunch somewhere sometime.  We did and it was very fun.  In turn, he invited me and a third friend to lunch.  Again, a fine lunch.  At the end, he said he hoped the two of us wouldn't mind if we stopped by a local bakery to pick up a certain type of cookie he liked.  He had just discovered it and thought it was really good.  It happens that Lynn and I have virtually stopped eating any other cookie than a particular type ("Nuts2Chew") from the same bakery.  Nah, it isn't going to be very same cookie.  There are hundreds in there.  What are the chances?  Yep, coincidence #2: same cookie.  They are really good. 

Some happenings of events close in time are more poignant.  Our younger daughter died two years ago.  We held a memorial service for her.  On the following day, our second great-granddaughter was born.  Lose a life, gain a life?

The other day, on the eve of the anniversary of our daughter's death from brain cancer, Lynn got to feeling irritated and bored with her project of the hour.  She cast about for something else to do, something a little different.  How about the stack of journals that our daughter left behind?  Mostly recordings of hallucinations and delusions, there are some touching pages of clarity and grace.  Paging through them, she found two letters, one to me and one to her, that thanked us for our parenting and love.  Wonderful, uplifting finds!  We suspect that some force generated the irritation and boredom to move Lynn into those journals on the anniversary of the death.