Surely it's just coincidence -- no?

My grandmother, who was a sensible, intelligent, realistic and remarkably sane woman believed in ghosts. She especially believed in portents (of either doom or good fortune), as well as synchronistic circumstance. To her there were also guardian angels, and maybe even fairies at the bottom of the garden. Nothing in the universe, she maintained, happened by accident.

I am more sceptical than she, or at least more of a believer in randomness because I tend to hold (sometimes) that we are the products of our choices and if something seemingly mystical transpires, then it is pure chance, and pure coincidence. We are the living (temporarily) entities that we are and if there is an afterlife, let alone a netherworld, we are not about to find out in this sphere.

Actually, I’d like to believe more fully in ‘magic’ because I think that those that do have more fun. Weirdness is much more fascinating than day-to-day routine. I also harbor the sneaking suspicion that I might be wrong and it just could be that we are not quite as alone in this universe as our logic tells us we are.

So, I am prepared to admit that I do read my horoscope and, if it’s a good one, I am comforted for the day. If it’s a bad one, I say it’s all BS and move along regardless. Furthermore, I do know that I show far too many Piscean traits for even my own serenity, but I still believe much of it is wishful thinking. Hey, I even watch Medium once in a while, and not just because Patricia Arquette is stacked like gangbusters, but because the yarns are fun, if unbelievable.

All that said, however, we did have an incident transpire on our European sojourn that not only gave me pause-for-thought but also made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up just a tiny bit.

I think I mentioned in an earlier blog that I had gone to visit the house in which I resided in Great Yarmouth, England in 1981. In so doing, I also looked up my old landlord who still lived next door.

When we arrived at the door, I rang the bell. Footsteps told me that somebody was in. In case he had forgotten me in 25-years, I reintroduced myself. He looked at me almost perplexedly. He then held up his hands and told Wendy and me to wait on the doorstep and to not go anywhere, and that he would be back in 2 minutes. Odd, we thought, but we obeyed his request. We then heard him pad upstairs, and shortly thereafter, back down again.

He looked at me when he arrived again at the doorstep. He was holding a couple of pieces of paper in his hand.

“Look at these,” he said.

I did so. They were cartoons I had drawn a quarter of a century ago as birthday cards to his late wife, Daphne. I was something of a working cartoonist among other things back in those days, so I often drew people personalized, hand-etched cards. It was kind of neat to see something I had drawn so long ago.

He then said: “I have not seen those cards in all the time since you left here. I had no idea where they were, and I wasn’t looking for them. I was just going through some old papers of Daphne’s this morning to decided what I was going to keep and what I was going to discard. The cartoons fell out of the papers. I looked at them. I was amused, and I thought nothing more about it. That was two hours ago. And now, two hours later, without having contacted me to let me know that you were in England, there you are on the doorstep. I find this very strange.”

So did I. I’ve mentioned it to a couple of people who are more mystical than I, and they suggested that my energy had transmitted to him because I was going to pay a call. Therefore, to prepare him for the visitation, he happened upon the cartoons. It was all part of the same metaphysical package, as it were.

Probably it’s all just coincidence, but in this case I am not quite as dogmatic about it as I might have been at one time.