Sunday, April 20. 2008
Synchronicities, coincidences, and such
« Ufo's, socks, and coffee beans | Hauptseite | How to make a patchwork ball »My dad (87 years old) calls them synchronicities and says that they will be the end of him. What he is referring to is something that all of us experience at some time or another. One of his favorite examples is: He is driving along a lonely county road. No other cars in sight. The road narrows to a small bridge...and here is where he and the only car to be driving in the opposite direction end up meeting – where it causes the most trouble for both of them! My dad claims that it happens more often than can be just explained by the law of averages. I suggest that it‘s these incidents that he remembers the most – but so far I haven‘t been able to convince him.
Here‘s another of my dad‘s examples: He likes to have a pencil always at hand, so he has one or more in the breast pocket of his shirt. He often goes to a hardware store and when he‘s there, he‘ll check what new equipment they have in stock. On one such hardware store visit, he was looking more closely at a wood chipper or some such gardening machine. He bent over to look at something on the inside of the chipper, the pencil fell out of his shirt pocket and into the chipper. But not just into the chipper – into the narrow space between the inner and outer walls of the chipper so that it was impossible to just reach in and retrieve his pencil. I can hear him now. “If I had tried to drop a pencil into that narrow space, it would have been impossible!“ I don‘t remember how he got the pencil out...possibly the chipper had to be partially disassembled.
And now I have a good story to add to my dad‘s collection. I have a porcelain nail file. The file itself has a plastic handle and since the file is porcelain, it‘s breakable, so it has a tightly fitting plastic cap to protect the file. When I say “tightly fitting”, I mean, you can hold the plastic cap and the nail file will not slip out. When you put the cap on the nail file, it clicks in place. The nail file “lives” in an open basket on a shallow shelf in my bathroom – the shelf is directly across from the toilet and about 2 feet from the toilet (it‘s a small bathroom). The other day, I wanted to file my nails. I reached for the nail file, but inadvertently knocked it out of the basket. It landed on the (tile) floor, handle-end down. When the file landed, the force of the impact made the protective cap fly off. The cap flew up and in an arc, over the toilet, and hit the wall behind the toilet. It bounced off the wall and slid from behind into the small crack at the back of the toilet lid (the lid was closed), and – into the toilet! And then that fraction of a second before I really grasped what had just happened. Give me a break! How many things had to be just right (or just wrong) for that to happen? I could hardly wait to tell my father!
Another synchronicity incident in my life: We had some friends over for dinner, and the boys of mine and friend's families had been told not to go down into the creek bed beside our house. Needless to say, they went, and were sitting in a place where a huge rock and the bank of the narrow valley meet. A bee buzzed around the boy with the glasses, and he swatted at it. Instead of hitting the insect, he hit his glasses, which then fell into a hole between the rock and hillside that was about 6 feet deep, and with no way in or out! We did end up getting them out, but boy what a kafuffle!