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Tuesday, December 28, 2004 |
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Car Story Number 1 It was 1977. I was 24 years old. I was moving with my two children, ages 2 and 5, from Los Angeles to the town of Chico, in north-central California, a distance of 600 miles. I had borrowed a car for 24 hours to pull the trailer that carried out belongings, because my Volkswagen Rabbit wasn't strong enough. I spent the daylight hours loading the trailer. We headed north in the cool of evening, July 30. I drove as the children slept, and I drove slowly: even the borrowed car could barely crest some of those grades, and I was forced to drive between 30 and 45 miles per hour most of the way. It turned out to be a 16-hour drive. I slept briefly at our new house, and then unpacked all our furniture and boxes and drove back south to return the car. I had to be back in Chico the following morning, August 1, to meet with family friends who were passing through and would be there only on that day. After another brief nap, then, I piled the kids and the rest of our things into the VW and headed back north, starting my third 600-mile drive in 24 hours. It was gruesome. I hadn't developed a tolerance for coffee yet, and staying awake was a miserable ordeal. I don't know what I was thinking, but at the time I had boundless faith in my own resources and in the good will of the universe. Fifty miles shy of our destination, around 4 a.m., I woke up. I don't know how long I'd been out or why I awoke. I just know I was driving 90 (yes, 90) miles per hour, my accelerator foot was pressed all the way to the floor, and my car was on the wrong side of the highway. A semi-trailer truck was in the oncoming lane not that far in front of us. No one else was on the road. I pulled the steering wheel hard to the right, we veered into our lane, and the truck passed us by, but the car went out of control. It began swerving sharply back and forth across the road, from side to side, the wheels turning themselves; I couldn't get them to stop. I was barely conscious and terrified at the same time. I couldn't figure out what was happening. And then a calm, clear, insistent voice from the center of my head said, "Take...your...foot...off...the...gas...pedal."
And I did. And the car slowed down and I could control it again. And all was well. I pulled over to the shoulder then and sat there, adrenaline surging through me, and tried to find my wits. We made it to Chico alive that morning. I'll never forget that voice, even if it was some grownup part of my own self and not a guardian angel or intervening oversoul. |
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Thursday, December 23, 2004 |
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This just in: I try to avoid using the word " synchronicity " unless the coincidence is too great to contain itself in that pedestrian word and a larger one is called for, one touched with a little magic.
This so seems like synchronicity to me. In today's mail, which I open after having written the preceding post, I find at random the following: "For me, the prose poem is a pure literary creation, the monster child of two incompatible strategies, the lyric and the narrative. On one hand, there's the lyric's wish to make the time stop around an image, and on the other hand, one wants to tell a little story. ... Impossible to write, illegitimate in the view of so many poets and critics, it must remain an object of ridicule to survive." [Charles Simic, Orphan Factory {"Poets on Poetry" series, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, p. 47}] |
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Friday, May 14, 2004 |
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And here's a very small coincidence: Yesterday I received a box of remainders in the mail. (I sell books online.) I pulled out the book on the New Guinea journey; it looked like a diverting read. Then I opened another package that had arrived in the same batch of mail, and there was the Toltec guru Ruiz's book. Hey they arrived on the same day from different sellers. Minute coincidence. Well, I was amused. But I've been medicated lately.  11:42:01 AM  comment []
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Saturday, May 8, 2004 |
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Keep 'em coming. No coincidence too small (some too big...). Karen from The Hermit's Bid for Attention has this to add: I've got one for you. About a decade ago, I was cleaning houses for money. I had a regular client who engaged me to clean the place where he was house-sitting. I did not know this woman he was house-sitting for, and I hadn't seen her condominium. Driving to the job, I thought for the first time in years and years of a former professor of mine, Valerie Miner. Valerie was (I think still is) a prolific author of feminist-themed fiction. I was thinking of one title of hers from the 70s, called "Blood Sisters." I just happened to remember the book, though I'd never read it, and was clearly visualizing its purple-and-white cover as I drove. You can probably guess the ending of this freaky story. The woman whose place I was to clean, turned out to be a Valerie Miner fan. When I was dusting her shelves, one of the titles that turned up was--you guessed it--"Blood Sisters," by Valerie Miner. Karen Armstead 5/7/04; 1:17:28 PM 10:33:37 AM comment []
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Patia from montana mUsIngs contributes the following coincidence: Yesterday I checked my mailbox and found a card from a distant friend, Karen, whom I hadn't heard from in months and months. Later in the afternoon, I got a phone call from another friend, Kristen, whom I also hadn't heard from in months and months. I met Kristen in a class, and eventually Kristen introduced me to Karen. Both were from Michigan, but had met here in Missoula. Both are now living in Michigan again. So when Kristen called, I said, "Have you and Karen been plotting, or is it a coincidence that I got a card from Karen and a phone call from you in the same day?" Total coincidence. Karen and Kristen haven't been in touch in a while. Patia 5/1/04; 3:52:15 PM 10:29:44 AM comment []
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Friday, May 7, 2004 |
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A goofy message (c.1990) On my day off from my job as newsweekly ad coordinator and proofreader (and occasional contributor), I often drove my old tan Beetle west from Chico to the empty landscape of golden grasses and valley oak trees that undulates between the Sacramento River and the Coast Range in the Central Valley of Northern California. I don't know why those back roads had such appeal for me. I just found the area to be very beautiful, and the emptiness brought me great peace of mind. One drizzly afternoon I packed some cheese and olives and a baguette and a canteen of water, as well as my notebook and pens, and set off in that direction. I drove twenty miles west, to the farming town of Orland, and went on past there for another five or ten miles. I turned left onto a side road, and when the blacktop turned to gravel I continued between and over the dry yellow hills. I followed this road as it circled around the lake that lies behind Black Butte Dam, and then I turned right onto a dirt track that led eventually to the lake itself.  I parked where the road ended, about 100 feet from the lake, and got out. I hadn't seen a human, or even an animal, since I'd turned off the highway west of Orland. The wind was up. Big drops of rain were just starting to splatter around me. I started to walk down toward the lake edge. As I got close I noticed a small rectangle of something bobbing on the distant surface of the otherwise featureless water. It was making its way in a straight line toward shore--and toward me as I approached. As I arrived at the water's edge the rectangle arrived at the shore: it was an opened matchbook cover, black, bearing words in large white letters: "SO YOU WANT TO BE AN AUTHOR!" I kept that matchbook cover for years but I don't know where it is anymore. Perhaps it's lost. 12:33:32 PM comment []
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The mystery of the missing coin This happened sometime in 1982 or '83. One afternoon I was tossing I Ching coins, as I often did back then as an adjunct to meditation. I was alone in my "office" at the back of my little house in Chapmantown. The kids were at school. I sat cross-legged on the rug. I would narrow and unfocus my eyes and shake the coins as I concentrated, and then drop them from a height of maybe a foot or so, and then look to note the combination that had turned up.  After one of these tosses I found that only two of the three coins lay on the rug in front of me. I thought one of them must have landed on edge and rolled somewhere. I didn't move but looked around me from where I sat.( The atmosphere was a little weird.) But I couldn't see the coin anywhere. After 30 seconds or so I heard and felt a >plop< on the rug directly behind me, as if an object had been dropped. I twisted around to look, and there was the third coin. The hair stood up on my head, and I didn't toss the coins for some time after this. 12:17:35 PM comment []
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Thursday, April 29, 2004 |
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More Pointless Phenomena: My Famous Blender Story  This jpeg is a reduced scan of a page torn from an old magazine. I've been dragging it around with me for ten years and keep it taped to the wall wherever I live and work to remind me of caprice and synchrony. Late one evening in 1993 I was sitting alone in my little rented house in Chapmantown, an unkempt unincorporated somewhat slummy village enveloped by the slicker finer Chico urban area. The house was dark except for the space around the living-room reading lamp next to the sofa, where I sat leafing through a magazine that featured an article on the impact on human health of proximity to electromagnetic fields. The subject had fascinated me since I'd read the New Yorker series on the subject ("Annals of Radiation: The Hazards of Electromagnetic Fields," June 12, 19, 26, 1989). In the quiet and semidarkness, I turned the page to reveal this illustration (which I suppose was meant to convey a sense of EMFs surrounding common household appliances). As I glanced at the illustration, at that very moment, popping and buzzing noises suddenly came from the kitchen. I looked up quickly toward the darkened kitchen doorway in time to see flashes of white light strobing the room. I tossed down the magazine and ran to the kitchen. All was dark and quiet again--whatever had happened, it was over --but the smell of ozone was intense. I flipped on the light and began sniffing my way to the source of the "electric" smell. It took me a minute to trace it to a wall outlet above the kitchen counter where my blender--an old chrome-based Waring identical to the one in the illustration, was plugged in. The outlet cover and the wall area around the outlet had been blackened; the outlet was dead. The event--a short? a surge?--had occurred coincidentally at the instant of my first glimpse of the electrical illustration. (Illustration from American Health, May 1993, page 53.) 11:24:42 AM comment []
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Tuesday, April 27, 2004 |
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Coincidence of April 24 As I drove toward the valley to attend my son's wedding, I chose a different route from my usual straight shots west and south. I wanted winding, and forests, so I turned south to follow the more circuitous path. Near Susanville, I turned off onto a little byway, a shortcut I know about, that cuts over to town on a little lane and avoids the big traffic. Signs warned that I was approaching High Desert State Prison. I succumbed to a sudden impulse and turned at the main entrance and wended my way past mystery buildings and guard towers and unattended checkpoints to a filled parking lot. I got out and began wandering around, curious, a little scared. I learned recently that my cousin is serving time here, for what I don't know. He and I grew up together. As children, mostly all we had was each other, and we were as close as any two siblings. But I ran off to start a family and go to school and make a life as unlike that of my childhood as I could, and he ran off to make his own very different stories. He would be 48 or 49 now, and prison, I think, is not an unfamiliar place for him to be. I want to know how to find him, how to visit, because everyone else in my family lives hundreds of miles from there. I spotted a crowd gathered before a small building and walked over. It was 12:28 p.m., and these were the Saturday visitors awaiting admittance. All heads turned to gape at me in horror: I'd parked in a forbidden area; I'd left someone (my brother) sitting in the car (forbidden); I wore denim clothing (forbidden); I carried a purse (forbidden); worst of all, I'd arrived uninvited by any inmate (absolutely forbidden). As I approached, several people asked whether this was my first time, and then they recited, rapidly and with fearful expressions, all my transgressions. And the doors to the facility opened, and everyone surged forward. I didn't know it, but I'd walked up at a critical moment. Two minutes later and the doors would have been locked again for the day. (That is the "magic" portion of this story.) I approached the officers standing behind the desk. "I know I'm not dressed appropriately," I said--a female guard nodded sternly--"but I only wanted to get information about how to set up visits with an inmate." I was handed a bright pink sheet of paper covered front and back with rules and restrictions and ushered rapidly out the door. CoIncidence of April 23 I've been informed by everyone that rooms around Chico are impossible to get for the weekend of the wedding. Midspring weekend events have brought thousands of people to the area and every motel is full. The day before I plan to depart for Chico, I call the motel where I usually stay. The gentleman who answers says, "Oh yes, we have one room, 39." I reserve it. When I arrive there the next evening, a woman at the desk tells me I'd done the impossible: there were three people ahead of me on a waiting list. There'd been a cancellation. She'd stepped into the bathroom for a minute and her husband had answered the phone when I called and in his ignorance had given me the room. Tiny magics. 11:20:33 AM comment []
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