Cambridge Coincidences Collection

When I was a rebellious teen living in northern Virginia during the early '70s, I ran away from home one summer. My dad, a veteran of three wars, went looking for me at a nearby hippie commune; emerging from the woods behind the commune dressed in full camo gear, armed with a military rifle, but I wasn't there. Many years later, while living in Florida, I went to lunch with a business associate, who told me a funny story she had heard from a old friend the week before. When the friend was young in the early '70s, she lived for a time in a hippie commune in northern Virginia, and one summer day, while the residents were outside relaxing, a "crazy" man came out of the woods, dressed in camo gear and carrying a rifle, and scared them all half to death. I had to tell the business associate that man had to be my dad, and we both marveled at the coincidence.

I'm a Californian. Arkansas, a place so foreign to most of us Californians, had never entered my mind until a free e-book about a young woman in Southern Arkansas landed in my iBooks library a few years back. I read lots of books so I decided what the heck, it's free, I'll read this one too. Although I didn't love the book, somehow I felt compelled to buy the other books in the series and read on. After several books, I became enraptured like no other book series in my life. I couldn't figure out why. I kept joking to my family that I was obsessed with the series because our grandma had lived in Arkansas even though we all knew she was a New Yorker, and they doubted she'd even visited there, let alone lived there. Fast forward a year, I delved into my family's genealogy on ancestry.com, and upon researching my grandmother (who had passed away in 1980), I found that in 1945 she had filed an application for a social security number (SSN) under an alias maiden name. The image of the actual application wasn't online, but the SSN and family members (whose names were correct) were in indexed.

Now Finale' to The Shore Now Life and Love, Finale' and Farewell Now, Voyager, Depart After listening to a moving choral setting of these new-to-me Whitman lines, by Thomas Ades, I went to the Peabody Institute Library in Danvers to return some books. The first book I saw, on a New Books rack, was a biography of Bette Davis, which had material on her 1942 film Now Voyager, although it turned out that the phrase was from another Whitman line: Now voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find. This was already a same-day coincidence, but the book mentioned that the novel was written by Olive Higgins Prouty, a name unknown to me, and mentioned that she had also written Stella Dallas. Donna and I had watched the 1937 film of that a few nights before. I took out Prouty's autobiography right then and there. Wikipedia has a biographical note.

I met my future husband through local politics in London - he was a Councillor and I was a wannabe MP but for different parties. We kept meeting at hustings events and eventually went out for a drink. Anyway, various life things kept getting in the way and we didn't meet again. My day job was working for a corporate firm and we had a few suppliers to help with different things. A few weeks after I had met politucs bloke for a drink I got told by my boss that we were getting a new contract with a different supplier for something and told me the name of the account manager. I thought it was a strange coincidence that he had the same name of the bloke I went on a date with. Turns out it was the same bloke. Cue a few awkward work meetings and he asked me back out for a drink. We got on and started dating. Once it got a bit serious and we met each others families It transpired that his dad and my dad knew each other and had worked together - first meeting 43 years ago and before either of us had been born. Hubby's dad had also been a work associate of my Godfathers and the two were reunited after 25 years at our wedding.