Coincidences Come in Two's
My friend Doreen and I had a habit of wearing the same colors on the same days. She would come to pick me up for charity luncheon in a sky blue dress, and I’d be wearing sky blue. Or she would be wearing a brilliant deep green, and so would I. It got embarrassing after a while; friends thought we did it on purpose, but that wasn’t the case. So, one day I wore a white dress to drive Doreen to an afternoon tea. She was dumbfounded when she opened her door. She was wearing white, too. “I only wore a white dress,” she said, “because I knew you didn’t own one.” I guess I should have taken her with me when I went shopping.
When my daughter was away at college, and I lived in El Paso, back in the days before everyone had cell phones. Amber would call me, and my partner Richard would tell her that that I had just gone out. I called her back, of course, but that wasn’t the point. This pattern continued to happen, over and over. She finally explained to Richard that she would think about calling me for a while before she did it. Maybe she had to finish was she was doing or maybe one doesn’t call Mom just on the spur of the moment, not when you are trying to establish your independence. Richard finally told her to call as soon as the idea came into her head. If she waited, I would be gone.
Richard and I had a bad habit of giving each other the same presents. One Christmas morning we opened our gifts and discovered we had suddenly gone from no sailboats to two huge model sailboats, the kind that you buy at Michaels. We often went sailing on his actual sailboat, so maybe this wasn’t so strange. However, we didn’t know what to do with two of them, so I took one to my office. My birthday was July 13 and his July 14, so we celebrated them together. One year we bought each other identical birthday cards. Sometimes, I would make tortilla soup for dinner only to find he had had tortilla soup for lunch at Jaxons. Richard found this kind of thing disconcerting. It was too intimate, perhaps to maybe share brain waves. I thought it was funny. Maybe it had something to do with the relationship not lasting.
Then back before anyone talked about global warming, there was the time my Honda had an electrical short and the air conditioning wouldn’t work. It took a while to get it fixed, so a friend loaded me his Bronco. I happily drove it for two or three days and then its air conditioning went out, too. A colleague of mine learned of my difficulty. She had her daughter’s Scout in storage while the daughter was out of the country. I borrowed it, and, you know what? The car had had never had air conditioning. Was the universe trying to tell me something? If so, I didn’t get it.
Scholars actually study coincidences like these, though there doesn’t seem to be a consensus among them about the cause. It could be random chance, telepathy, or some sort of mass sharing of ideas. It could be divine intervention.
Some people take comfort in coincidences. I don’t know. I think sometimes giant model sailboat are just giant sailboat models and broken air conditioners are just broken air conditioners.