Cambridge Coincidences Collection

I was given this book as a present and settled down with it on Good Friday 2007 (6 April) in what became a compulsive period of nonstop reading. This book relates the 'last testament' of a disgraced Scottish minister, Gideon Mack, whose mind was undone after he fell into a treacherous underground river, was lost for three days and re-emerged claiming to have spent his missing time in the company of the Devil in an underground cave. On page 262, in the Penguin paperback version which I read, as part of Gideon Mack’s claim that he met the Devil, he noted that his wristwatch had stopped at 3:37 on the sixth day of the month. As I read that line, I looked up from my reading at the wall clock and it was exactly 3:37 on the sixth of April 2007! Spooky.....................

My grandmother died in 1971. My mom and dad were at the hospital. As my grandmother was fading in and out of consciousness, my grandfather asked the nurse in a loud voice, "If she dies during the night do we have to come over here?" My mother thought it was a horrible, selfish thing to say and she talked loudly about something else into my grandmother's ear. She mentioned this throughout my life. In 1995, my dad and I were at the hospital as my mom was dying. She was unconscious on a high dose of morphine. My dad turned to the nurse and asked, "If she goes during the night do we have to come back to the hospital?" I ran over to mom to talk to her. I suddenly realized it wasn't a selfish thing to say. My dad was a devastated. He just didn't know what to do. Do we come back and sign papers? Do we come back to the hospital and arrange for the funeral home to come? I told my mom not to be mad at my dad, he wasn't being selfish, he loved her, he didn't know what to do. Then it hit me what an incredible coincidence it was and I started to laugh. I was crying and laughing and defending my father to my mother.

After marriage, I rented and moved to a small house in Toronto, Canada. Shortly after my move, my aunt died; and I was in charge of looking through my grandparents' papers. As I am a writer, I was interested in particular with an envelope containing my grandfather's attempts at getting published. One letter came from a literary agent who seemed to be defending himself against having published my grandfather's work without paying him. This letter was sent 150 km to my grandfather (who lived near Niagara Falls) from the exact address of the house I had recently moved into. My grandfather had been writing to my home over 40 years before I lived in it! And there I was, 10 years after my grandfather's death, reading a letter that had been sent from "my new house" to my grandfather over 40 years ago.

3 friends and I shared an old farmhouse in Mexico, NY in the early 1970s. We were the first people to live there that were not family. The last residents had left in a hurry for a gig in Vermont and left a friend in charge of renting it out. There was a woodburning stove for heat. A two seater outhouse attached to the back of the house. An old fashion pump in the sink for water. The house was full of Victorian furniture, ceramic pitchers and washbasins... a treasure everywhere you looked. The closets were jammed with items that told a story of the many generations that had lived in the house. Everything was in disrepair. My friends and I would return from our jobs, and every long winter night, we would huddle around the dining room table studying photos and reading correspondence - the people in this family were letter writers! They saved everything. We found a shoebox with letters wrapped in linen, written in the late 19th century. The correspondents were lovers, having an affair. He would write on one side of the paper, and she would reply on the other. The letters were delivered in secret by "B". There was one photo ... a glass negative....