I love coincidences

 Several months ago, pre-election, when I was on a book making binge, I made this.

It's a flip book in the style of the Exquisite Corpse game.

The pages are divided into thirds. Each whole page depicts a person, and when you flip a section of the page,  part of the person can be changed into someone else. Fun and games, and my mind saw a message just in the format. Walk in someone else's shoes. Get inside someone else's head. Feel what's going on in the heart of someone that isn't you. I thought the book needed a few words though so I excerpted several lines of a poem called, "In This Place." Turns out it's a poem by Amanda Gorman. I had no idea, back then, how appropriate that would be.

In other news, I am in this place--my new house in my new study where everything finally has a place and I no longer have to excavate a bin from beneath a bed to find a certain piece of paper.

Here are the other books I made during the book making binge.

And the sturdy deep shelves with room for books and my never ending collection of stuff.

The tiny closet is a wonder. There's room for my handmade paper, my hand-marbled paper, and all the stuff I use for collaging, plus the usual crap one keeps in a filing cabinet. Things like a final decree of divorce, mediation agreements, new divorce advice, tax forms, etc. 

A long while ago, there was this coincidence. Life is so mysterious and interesting. 

Saturday Evening Beach Report

I don't usually walk on the beach in the evenings. But I did tonight. I walked far and picked up a bag of trash.

This is one of the things I found.

I've walked that particular stretch of beach many times with Dan.  But I'm not in the mood to be all woo-woo about finding his name on a discarded cup. Still there it is, just the same.

How to Predict your Future: Write a Story?

I love serendipity and co-incidence. Who doesn't? People fall in love serendipitously. Adoptees and birth parents reunite. Long lost siblings find one another. Old photos and prized possessions of the long dead get returned to loved ones. I'm brought to tears by stories that are powered by coincidence or serendipity when I come across them in newspapers and magazines.

I've written about some lesser serendipitous events of mine on this blog--like THIS. Recently, a   STORY of mine that was published has caused me to consider co-incidence in a more internal context. The story was first drafted in the spring of 2011 while at a writer's residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. It was more than a year later that I brought my mother to California to live with me, so I did not write the story with any daily close observation of my mother or any woman in her 80s. The medical-alert button that Addie (the woman in the story) wears/refuses to wear  was not an item I had any first-hand knowledge of while writing the story--or when the story was first send out to literary magazines a few months ago (I am a very slow worker)--or even by the time it was accepted for publication. But when the story appeared in Fiction Fix, my mom was wearing a Phillips Lifeline button, and having a particularly rough week that required some quick study on my part on the differences between hospice and in-home nursing care.

My mom, this evening, seems to be rallying. A martini was involved.

I find it rather un-nerving, though, that the week I had a story published wherein the 80-something protagonist dies is also the week that my mother was at her most frail. Coincidence.

I write things down that move me. A visual impression. A quote. A scene. Anything and everything. I have hundreds of not-very-well organized notecards. How they get combined to make a story is its own weird kind of serendipity. 

Wishes and Coincidences

Like a lot of writers, I have a stash of journals. I've been combing through them lately. Revising stories, tearing out the stuff that stinks and the stuff I'm done with, trying to find some way of organizing all these notes that I jotted down before I hit upon those little notebooks of index cards that work so much better for me. In this effort, I stumbled upon my "divorce notebook." I have no idea what the central purpose of this book was. Some sense out of the chaos, I guess. I kept notes from interviewing attorneys, general questions. Financial stuff, therapy notes. There was this:

Okay. A short list. I might have been able to keep that in my head. But maybe not. I was fucking insane then.

And there was this:

Perhaps I was planning to send the Someone a bill for my moving boxes. I dunno.

And in my effort to visualize what I wanted my new place to look like, I clipped and pasted pictures from magazine and catalogues. 

Pretty, huh?

Okay. I moved. I got some new stuff. That was 2007. Flash forward. Forget that divorce notebook ever existed. Decide aged mother is moving in with me. Move again (it's 2012 now). And flash forward again to 2013. Get more new stuff to furnish extra bedrooms. Months later, find notebook. Walk down hall to guest room. See this.

I love a good coincidence. Who doesn't? But just to add a little weird frosting to the coincidence cake, I didn't choose the guest room bedding in the photo above. Daughter C did. 

Coincidences, Mysteries, Prefigurements, and Foreshadowing

This is a photo of my daughter C.--taken approximately twenty years ago on a family trip to Catalina Island. I think the hat might have actually belonged to the captain of the boat. I don't remember exactly, but I imagine that with three cute little girls in tow, we somehow managed to catch his attention and ended up with a photo op.

Today, after almost six years of sailing historic tall ships, C. herself passed the test that makes her a captain. The  picture was tucked in a photo album hidden away for years on a shelf in our garage, and last week as C. prepared for her captain's test, an image of her in a captain's hat surfaced in my memory.

I'm fascinated by coincidences, and have written about them here and here. And this one is one of my favorites.

Sometimes when I look into the eyes of the man who loves me, I think that he looks familiar, that I know him from somewhere a long time ago. Which seems highly unlikely. Our worlds do not appear to have ever intersected.

Over the years I've had recurring dreams about a house on hill with a grassy slope and a view. In the distance there's the shimmer of water.

photo credit: C's father

Stranger in the City/Stranger than Fiction

Coincidences astound me. I live in Los Angeles where the population of the metropolitan area is something like 12 million. Yesterday at LAX I took the Flyaway bus and was on the same bus with a TSA officer who was also taking the bus to Union Station, I presume as part of his after work commute. I had a personal encounter with this officer some months earlier when he had to escort me back to the baggage counter after my bag failed the security check (expensive corkscew/knife combo.) Tonight I'm at the Central Library for a performance. He's here. I ask myself, am I imagining this? I study his rather distinctive earring from across the narrow lobby, and then hear him say to the woman he's with, "When I have five more years with the TSA...."


The day before yesterday I was able to chat with a friend at the Baltimore airport because we both happened to be there flying out to our respective cities on the same airline at approximately the same time.


photo credit: murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com

Life is weird. I know this because I'm a writer and I like to write the weird things down so I remember them. These notes might spark an idea for a story. And the weird things--coincidences, juxtapositions, etc. happen more often than one might think.

I'm living in France for a month and today I began work on a short story called La Voleuse. It's written in English, but set in France and has a French title and a French word employed here and there. I wanted to check the spelling of the word, 'voleuse.' I meant to pick up my French/English dictionary, but I mistakenly picked up my thesaurus instead. An old Valentine's Day card from my husband fell out. Not so weird, but the message on the front of the card was in French. Je t'aime, it said which means, "I love you."

Connections

Every morning in the woods, the paths are strung afresh with spider webs.  They brush my nose and cheeks, and in the sunlight you can see the shiny floss connecting trunk to branch, leaf to stem.  A visible example of connections unseen.

Like the woman in the airport.  As I was wheeling my book laden bags to the check-in counter the man behind me asked if I was carrying gold bricks.  

"Kind of," I said.  "They're the books I'll need for this trip."

"Are you an author going on a book tour?" he asked. (I should have asked him to keep holding on to that thought.)

"No," I said.  "I'm a writer though and I'm going to a writer's residency and this is the reading that will inspire my own writing."

His wife took over then.  She'd been taking writing classes herself. She'd been to the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference. What did I write? she wanted to know.

"Memoir," I said.

"That's what I've been learning to write," she said.

I gave her the one-line summary of the book I'd be working on--the story of giving up my son for adoption when I was 17 and reconnecting with him when he was 21.  She nodded and as we went to our separate kiosks, she and her husband wished me good luck.  

Several minutes later as I was dragging my bags to the scanner, she rushed up to me.  "I just wanted to tell you that I gave up a baby, too," she said.

Intersections

Tonight at dinner I found out that one of the poets in residence here was  an art model at the University of Knoxville during the couple of months that I was modeling  there in 1974.  She also sold blood plasma at a storefront collection center, as I did, and had a similar experience that left her on a gurney most of the day while they tried to get the "leftover" blood back into her veins. Friendships often start on these pieces of common ground and this small wedge of the past seems like a bridge to something more. We plan to do a reading together sometime later this week and I'm very excited to hear what she's working on. She's been a regular breakfast and dinner companion these past few days and we've done quite a bit of laughing together.  I'm mystified by coincidences like this, and I always find myself asking,"What are the odds..."  But maybe the odds of the past intersecting with the present are pretty good.  Unless you enter the witness protection program, the past seems to have a pretty good chance of meeting you in the present. After this latest coincidence, I spent a little time googling things like "nude+zebra rug" wondering if I'd find a picture of myself on the internet. Thankfully, that piece of the past seems to have disappeared.