I went out to dinner a few Friday�s ago, to celebrate Sean�s father�s (who was visiting from England) birthday. There were four of us, and we began to talk about William�s ten days here in Nova Scotia. How exciting it has been for him, the interesting people he has met, the unusual things he has done and seen. How it comes full circle, the circle of events. Underlining the coincidence of meeting: having dinner together with people he hadn�t known two weeks before, celebrating his birthday in a city he had never been in previously, knowing that the circles will expand. Like throwing a pebble into a pond.
At dinner I was telling my friends about reading Erik Fosnes Hansen�s Tales of Protection, a novel that seems to be about connections, about the threads that lead one to do one thing over another. If you didn�t take one path, you would obviously be on another, have met different people, done different things.
It reminds me of the people I have heard about who overslept their alarms or were stuck on a stalled subway and thereby missed being in the towers that fell in NYC on September 11. Or the story a friend told me of a friend of hers who was standing in the checkout line at the grocery store, backed up, bumped into someone, apologized, they started talking and then . . . now they are happily married. Really. And I heard another very funny story about the power of coincidence this morning. My friend had a flat tire. She called CAA. They sent someone out to fix it. He was very kind and had beautiful bedroom eyes. So she prayed (and prayed and prayed) that her car would break down again, and soon. And it did. And now they are living together and deeply connected, more than just his eyes and her tires. So there ya go!
Hansen�s book is in the form of four tales that seem to be separate stories. In the end, it is not quite clear how they merged into one book. Except that the main character is present in the first and last stories. Just like you don�t really know what makes us do or be where we are when it happens. Those coincidences that are auspicious in our lives.
Posted by leya at October 10, 2005 05:47 PM