These things come in threes, right?
ACT ONE
Last week, I was corresponding with the estimable Chris Dent, who
- lives in the childhood home of my oldest friend, Eric Sinclair
- developed the verry interesting wiki variant warp
- is a good egg.
Eric’s family home is one of the houses I have very strong childhood sense memories of, including detailed smells, rocking out to music I’d flee from today (well, most of it), cold pepperoni pizza breakfasts with flat, watery coke after all-night D&D marathons, and the assorted associations of the initial glimmerings of adolescence. I have a very clear memory of devouring “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” overnight, and a repeated one of listening to all the seventies Firesign Theatre records on vinyl – did you know one of those standard, single-LP releases had three sides? Verry trippy! Flip it over and which side plays? You never knew!
Chris lets me know that he’ll be visiting the glorious Pacific Northwest for about ten days in mid-to-late August. He’ll be traveling in company with his romantic interest, one Sabrina, who, he tells me, once lived here in Seattle.
Well, one thing leads to another, and I’m looking at Sabrina’s blog. While the look
of it is unfamiliar, there’s something about it that makes me think I’ve read it before.
I start scanning backwards, and bingo! I find some posts from early in 2002, when she was getting ready to move to Bloomington for grad school. I recall looking at them at the time she was writing them and being jealous that she’d essentially gotten an invitation to apply for grad school from a prof she had as an undergrad. Come to think of it, I’m still jealous. 😉
So, interestingly, Sabrina moves from author of random blog I once glimpsed for a moment to person who intersects directly with my life and childhood in countless ways, in one easy step.
ACT TWO
This weekend Vivian and I decamped for camping in the San Juans. It was a lovely jaunt, which is detailed in another entry or two.
On the way back, we knew that there’d be a considerable wait for the return ferry. We ended up sitting behind a group of slightly-younger-than-us-folks that looked vaguely familiar, for no readily apparent reason. Right next to us was a friendly lady with a black lab puppy who was talking to everyone around her. The mood of the waiting crowd was festive – it was a gorgeous hot summer day and we were all about to take a free boat ride through some of the most beautiful scenery in the Northwest.
Once we disembarked from the ferry and headed back to Seattle, the only down note was the customary summer Sunday-afternoon return commute traffic on I-5.
Then, on Tuesday, I was idly clicking through the links to the right of this entry, mostly blogs, to catch up. This activity reminds me of flipping through bins of records or comics, in search of the new or interesting.
Then I clicked on the link titled “Statanic Action“. In the entry I clicked into, the author, Stacey Lester, describes attending a wedding in the San Juans, on Orcas Island, where Viv and I had been camping. He spent the night, and then, anticipating a 3-hour wait for the ferry (accurately), hung out with his pals on a hill overlooking the ferry dock.
Which is exactly when and where Viv and I were doing the same thing.
Stacey even promptly (more promptly than me, I tells ya) posted his pictures of the weekend which, you guessed it, includes this shot of the dog lady… with me in the upper right corner.
The last time I was involved in anything comparable to this fascinating chain of coincidence and probability was in the middle of Seattle’s world-famous WTO festival of early winter, 1999. The day after shooting it, someone posted video footage of the Wednesday evening (December 1, 1999?) tear-gas and stinger-grenade clearage of the street near the reservoir in my neighborhood. You (by which I mean I) can make out my blurry figure and hear my voice just as a stinger grenade slams into the cameraman’s hand, busting a finger (and, though not on the video, chapping my ass quite nicely).
The current synchronies are much preferable, and have not involved bleeding.
So the query is, is that three? Or need I look anew to the future, yet unwrit?
That was pretty wild, but I’m surprised stuff like that doesn’t happen more often! I often get stopped on the street by people who remember me from parties or shows I’ve gone to. I read the blog of one of my roommate’s co-workers and though we’ve never met, we ran into each other at Pacific Place! We didn’t speak…we exchanged emails later and she told me she wasn’t completely sure it was me. (I’d thought she’d be taller…)