“Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions.” ~ Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall “It’s hard to believe in coincidence, but it’s even harder to believe in anything else.” ~ John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

I met someone who said, “I know your twin, and she lives in Paris.”  And then she shared a picture of  said twin, and I  could see a vague resemblance to me, but my supposed doppelganger was old and fat.  Go figure. But I do believe everyone has a doppleganger somewhere, because the universe is just weird like that. How’s this for random weirdness? I attended the University of Evansville for my freshman and part of my sophomore years, before transferring to Miami University so I could get married.  At 19.  Yeah, that’s weird. Anyway, U. of E. is tiny.  About 2,000 students on a 75-acre campus.  I learned just recently that a current friend was also a student at the same time, but I didn’t meet her until a decade later. Another strange University of Evansville connection:  In 1988 when the original Roseanne show had just launched, I read an article about Matt Williams, creator and producer, and it said that he was an alum of li’l old University of Evansville, also in the 70s.  (Incidentally, the Hoosier was fired by Roseanne after the 13^th episode.)

And it continues:  A few years ago, my daughters and I spent a weekend in an Airbnb apartment in New York City.  As I am wont to do, I perused the bookcase and there, front and center, was a University of Evansville yearbook from 1970 when I also attended. Another collegial connection occurred in New York City the weekend my younger daughter graduated from Fordham Law School.  She was walking to the rehearsal with her gown draped over her arm when she quite literally ran into (as in collided with) a man who was her sister’s best friend at Northwestern University.  After college he had worked in Hollywood and had just gotten a job at 30 Rock.  He joined our family, including his college friend, my daughter, at lunch.  Think of the moving parts:  Chicago to LA to NYC.  Strange. How about the time I was at a teachers’ workshop, and afterwards a woman came up to me and said, “Is Mrs. Seilkop your mother?” “Uh, yeah.  Why?” “She was my first grade teacher.” “We don’t have the same last name,” I said. “How did you make the connection?” “I heard you speak and you sound exactly like she did.”

One of my mother’s favorite stories, which usually took about three hours to tell, was that she and my father were standing on a corner in Mexico City and my mother was sure she heard someone calling her name, “Phyllis Seilkop,” from a passing taxi.  My father told her she was crazy, as he did every time she came up with an original thought, and I imagine they debated the plausibility of the story until my mother cried and went to bed with a sick headache. Three months later, when the Finneytown School District staff met the day before school started, the high school Spanish teacher sought my mom out at the primary teachers’ table.  “Phyllis, I saw you in Mexico City.  I called your name.  Did you hear me?”  Two teachers from a small suburban school district traveled 2,000 miles, independently, to a city of 8 million people and crossed paths. Olé! Another one:  We had planned to name our first daughter after one of my favorite students, Heather Schmidt.  Heather had long tawny curls in which her mother tied pink satin ribbons.  When my daughter Stacey was born, however, she had olive skin and black hair—not just on her head, but a scrim of it over much of her body.  This was no Heather.

It was 1979, when mothers were allowed to stay in the hospital long after the perspiration on their labored brows evaporated, so my husband and I had three days to come up with a more fitting name.  The night before I was to be released, I told a neighbor who was visiting that I was considering the name, “Stacey,” but I had to see what my husband thought of it.  My neighbor said, “That’s funny, last night your husband told me that he was thinking “Stacey” would be a good name, but he had to ask you!”  “Stacey” it was. Synchronicity?

This story is a bit irreverent, but I tell it knowing my mother-in-law would be proud of her foresight.  At 97, she was prepared for the Zombie Apocalypse.  With her Depression era mentality, she never wanted to spend too much, but she also never wanted to run out. I once took her to the Dollar Store, and she bought ten tubes of toothpaste, which I thought was very optimistic and also hypervigilant, given that most of her teeth were store-bought.   She stocked up on everything:  salt (which she never used); canned goods (which she used long after the expiration date); spray starch (which she didn’t need for her polyester Allison Daley pant suits), and many, many rolls of toilet paper. Four hours before she died, she ran out of toilet paper.  When the toilet paper is gone, it’s time . . .

Just a coincidence? You learn a new word and within 24 hours, you read that word in a novel, hear it on the radio, and use it on a crossword puzzle. You are on the Interstate, hundreds of miles from home, and you see the person in the car that passes you is someone you know. Serendipitous. You find out that two of your friends on FB, people from different states, even, are friends of each other. You dream about your aged Great-Aunt Agnes, whom you haven’t seen since you can’t remember, and the next day you read in the paper that she won the lottery and that she is going to split it with her beloved niece.  Well, no, that never happens, but just keep dreaming. You can explain away some of these coincidences.  For instance, you’re amazed when your cart full of groceries comes out to exactly $94.00, and you say, “Couldn’t do that again if I tried,” but it is equally likely to have the total be exactly $94.00 or $94.25, right?  One in one hundred. You can see it as amazing that a friend, a Hollywood producer, and a New Yorker all attended the same tiny Indiana college at the same time, but everybody has to be from somewhere, right? I admit, though, the way fragments of our lives bump up and rub against each other can seem astonishing.

I would love to hear about the strangest coincidence you’ve experienced.  I will publish your story at the end of this blog post.

From my readers:

This is from my daughter:   “Three months before meeting my future husband in a dance club in Mexico, I was discussing baby names with a pregnant friend, and I told her that my favorite boy name was Gunnar. Then, after meeting my future husband and traveling to Norway to meet his family, I found out that the name Gunnar was a family name given to the first boy of every other generation – which would be our child if we had a boy!”

Teri:  “My husband and I went to the same high school. We were friends but never dated. 11 years later we married each other. While combining all our memorabilia from high school, he found the senior picture I gave him. When we turned the put over, we saw what I had written when we were both seniors 11 years previously. “I’ll kill the lucky girl who gets to marry you.”

Suzanne: “”My husband and I didn’t meet until middle age. When he first came to my then apartment, he said, ‘I used to live on this street years ago. In fact, my son and his buddy planted that tree in your front lawn when they were kids.’ True story.”

Mary Beth:  “When Larry died on December 7, I ordered the sweetest welcome mats for all of the kids in our family for their homes. They had snow people families and each parent, child, and family pet’s name was under that cute snow stick person. At the top was the message, ‘This family sticks together.’ Christmas Eve came, but the mats had not been delivered. “I was sad, but then I got a call from the UPS man. He said, ‘Mrs. Borcherding, I have a package in your name with the wrong address. If you think it’s yours, I’ll be right over.’ “When he came, I said, ‘How in the world did you know my address?’ “He said, ‘I delivered all of your husband’s meds from hospice. I figured this Christmas package was probably important.'”

Christy:  “We moved to Florida 10 years ago to take care of grandchildren. Before I left Cincinnati, a co-worker told me that her sister-in-law lived in the same small town where we would be moving, but I did not get the person’s name or address. After we had lived here for a few months, we were taking a walk on the beach. As we started down the path to the beach, another lady was coming off the beach. She commented to us about the approaching storm clouds. As we talked, she told us she had a sister-in-law who lived in Finneytown! It was the person my co-worker had been talking about!?!”

Claudia:  “Sitting at lunch in Disney World, a wonan at the next table noticed my son’s T-shirt which displayed the name of his high school. She struck up a conversation, telling us she was from Dayton and could we possibly know her niece who attended the same school. Of course, we did. So what are the odds that at Disney World, which is crammed daily with seemingly a million visitors, that someone with a connection to my son’s school sits down at the next table?”

Cathy:  “We had just moved to England in a small town in Northumbria when a relative suddenly moved there with their family. Recently while at a swimming pool in Fort Collins, Colorado I struck up a conversation with a woman who was from the Cincinnati area. I knew exactly where she had lived. Though not too unusual, both were pleasant surprises.”

Brigid:  “One of the many coincidences I have experienced while traveling just happened in Madrid. We had just bought tickets to see a bullfight and had time to spare before it started. Using Yelp to find a lunch spot, we walked to a small cafe away from the main streets. We were seated in a crowded restaurant next to a couple that said, ”Hi. We’re from Cincinnati – Mason to be exact!”

Deborah:  “I  have many “coincidence” stories. One of my earliest was when I was a college student studying in Europe. On a visit to Florence, I got into the elevator in a “student hotel” and ran into a girl from my neighborhood at home in Ohio. “My favorite story is about the birth of my daughter’s first child. Long before his February 15th due date, they had chosen the name Blaise for their baby boy. Blaise came early, as babies often do. He was born on February 3rd – St. Blaise’s Day.”

Barbara:  “When we moved into a new house, many years ago, we needed furniture. My husband saw a small antique store in St. Bernard (a small suburb in Cincinnati, Ohio). He found a mirror and two small chairs that he liked. He inquired about the price and was surprised that they were more expensive than what he anticipated. He tried negotiating but the owner, an older gentleman, wasn’t in the mood to hear it. My husband said he wan’t interested in the items at those prices and walked to his car. Minutes later the owner came running outside and said that his wife had been listening and told her husband to sell the blankety blank items. The old man made the sale but didn’t hesitate to tell my husband what he thought of him (with more than a few expletives). “Twenty years later our daughter got married. Turns out the older antique dealer was the groom’s grandfather!!”

Lisa:  “We recently decided to do some estate planning. The attorney, recommended by a friend came to our home to discuss the details. When I welcomed him in, he said he had been in our house many times! He grew up in the house across the street and was friends with the previous owner’s children. He spent his childhood running back and forth between his house and what is now our house. It was a sweet memory for him and serendipitous for us.”

Fran:  “I have many such coincidences, mainly featuring my husband, Joe. “Many years ago on one of out first of many trips to Hilton Head Island SC, we were talking to some people while relaxing in the ocean. It turned out they were also from Cincinnati and we had mutual friends. “Another time we were in Cleveland for a Faberge exhibit at the art museum. The tickets were timed to avoid crowds. As we were entering, our next door neighbor was coming out! Neither of us knew the other one would be there. On that same trip we were approaching the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when we heard someone calling Joe. It was a coworker of his. “Another time we were in the airport in Las Vegas waiting to board our flight when I saw my husband talking to an older gentleman, something he does quite often. It turned out to be the neighbor of his best friend whom we had met a few times.

Diane:  My husband & I live in the Cincinnati area. We were visiting St. Augustine, FL one year.  At the St. Augustine lighthouse, I did a double take and told my husband that woman looked like my cousin Sue, who lives in the Buffalo, NY area. I had only seen Sue maybe once in decades. I called out her name & sure enough, it was my cousin! We had never been to St Augustine before and had not told any family members we were going. What a wonderful surprise!

Ellen:  “A few years into my job as a nurse at Shriners Burns Institute in Boston, I met our new chief resident. He was the son of my father’s best friends from medical school in Upstate, NY, a couple who were one sister’s god-parents. Our families were so close, we once went to Miami Beach together. I was in maybe 6th grade at the time of this vacation, and had a mad crush on the young doctor who stood before me on the burn unit. Turns out, he was nothing like his father, a kind, humble man — his son had a classic “Napoleon complex.” The whole connection benefited me, though, because he treated me with respect, where he was a complete bastard to all of the other nurses.

Jan: ” I was in a small grocery store just up the street. The woman checking out the apples looked familiar, but I just couldn’t figure out where I knew her from. A little bit later, as I was checking out the apples, I realized, she was me. She was my twin. I had been looking at myself. No wonder she seemed familiar! I searched for her, but she had already left the store. That was probably 25 years ago, and I’ve never seen her again.”

Dianne:  “My husband & I live in the Cincinnati area. We were visiting St. Augustine, FL one year. At the St. Augustine lighthouse, I did a double take and told my husband that woman looked like my cousin Sue, who lives in the Buffalo, NY area. I had only seen Sue maybe once in decades. I called out her name & sure enough, it was my cousin! We had never been to St Augustine before and had not told any family members we were going. What a wonderful surprise!