Coincidences

I seem to experience a "rash" of coincidences that occur over several days or weeks. Many of them have to do with typical coincidences such as last week when I got into my car and I immediately thought of Kurt Cobain and said to myself - "Ahhhhh Kurt, gone too soon". Then I turned on the radio and there he was! Other coincidences are truly strange when I'm thinking of a specific phrase I read, and two days later, I come across the exact phrase in a much older book! Other times, my husband and I will be having a conversation such as a few weeks ago when we were lamenting the loss of a type of person we miss seeing out in the world that we used to see all the time - those benignly eccentric types who are educated, literate, and curious and seem to be nowhere to be found, especially here in rural North Carolina where we currently live for work. Anyway, we were driving through downtown Raleigh and suddenly I had the idea to go to a brewpub and have a beer . After about 10 minutes, a man sits down next to my husband. He had a book of Ibsen plays with him and turned out to be exactly the type of person we have been missing - intelligent, slightly eccentric, and a joy to talk with -and if you've ever been in North Carolina, where people tend to be extremely conformist in their thinking and behavior, it was a rare thing to happen upon this person! A very disturbing coincidence happened to me last year. A neighbor, who I had not seen in five years, dropped by my house one afternoon. Prior to his visit, we had had a deep connection based on his wartime experiences and the emotional trauma these experiences had caused him. Anyway, we chatted in my driveway for some time about a car I was planning to sell in the hopes that he could buy it for his college aged son. He said he was worried about the reliability of the car his son was driving while attending college. Six hours later, and 100 miles away, his son was robbed and murdered on his way home from his part-time job.