Chance Encounters
[image error]Sixth Form Poet (@sixthformpoet on Twitter) told a terrific story this week in the form of a tweet thread on Twitter, and it’s a damned enjoyable short read that got me thinking.
My dad died. Classic start to a funny story. He was buried in a small village in Sussex.
I was really close to my dad so I visited his grave a lot. I still do. [DON’T WORRY, IT GETS FUNNIER.] I always took flowers and my mum visited a lot and she always took flowers and my grandparents were still alive then and they always took flowers. My dad’s grave frequently resembled a solid third place at the Chelsea Flower Show.
Nice, but I felt bad for the guy buried next to my dad. He NEVER had flowers. Died on Christmas Day aged 37, no one left him flowers and now there’s a pop-up florist in the grave next door. So I started buying him flowers. I STARTED BUYING FLOWERS FOR A DECEASED MAN I’D NEVER MET. I did this for quite some time, but I never mentioned it to anyone. It was a little private joke with myself, I was making the world a better place one bunch of flowers at a time.
I know it sounds weird but I came to think of him as a friend. I wondered if there was a hidden connection between us, something secretly drawing me to him. Maybe we went to the same school, played for the same football club or whatever. So I googled his name, and ten seconds later I found him. His wife didn’t leave him flowers BECAUSE HE’D MURDERED HER. ON CHRISTMAS DAY. After he murdered his wife, he murdered her parents too. And after that he jumped in front of the only train going through Balcombe tunnel that Christmas night. THAT was why no one ever left him flowers.
No one except me, of course. I left him flowers. I left him flowers every couple of weeks. Every couple of weeks FOR TWO AND A HALF YEARS.
I felt terrible for his wife and her parents. Now, I wasn’t going to leave them flowers every couple of weeks for two and a half years but I did feel like I owed them some sort of apology.
I found out where they were buried, bought flowers and drove to the cemetery. As I was standing at their graves mumbling apologies, a woman appeared behind me. She wanted to know who I was and why I was leaving flowers for her aunt and grandparents. AWKWARD.
I explained and she said, “OK that’s weird but quite sweet.” I said thanks, yes it is a bit weird and oh god I ASKED HER OUT FOR A DRINK. Incredibly, she said yes. Two years later she said yes again when I asked her to marry me because that is how I met my wife. –Sixth Form Poet
It’s an extraordinary story, but I think if we look at our own lives and how we tend to collect the people in them, we’ll find some rather unexpected coincidences, synchronicities and all out oddities. I’ve met pivotal friends and loves in all sorts of unlikely places. Like a 400 year-old building with no electricity, a gruesome photography exhibit that documented sexual depravity, and in the poetry section of a tiny bookstore – when I don’t even read much poetry. I’ve had destiny-altering encounters in exotic foreign locales, and quite literally, in my own backyard.
Case in point, here are two of my nearest and dearest friends. I met Michele (center) only weeks after I’d moved to Prague, when she utterly dismissed the idea of my ever working at the English language newspaper where she was an editor (I didn’t have a journalism degree and she disapproved of the way I’d dressed for my job interview, among other things). And I met Dale (the artsy lady in black) in San Francisco. At that time I was a new arrival to California, having relocated there for my husband’s job. I didn’t know a single soul.
It was a bit intimidating meeting Dale, as I was in an in between place, professionally, and she was a big-time magazine editor. Dale agreed to have coffee with me thanks to an introduction by Michele, who had by this point reformed her first impression of me :). We met around the corner from Dale’s apartment, in a quirky little coffee shop that also served wine, like they do everywhere in northern California. For some reason that establishment had the Czech words for Men and Women (Muži and Ženy) marking their corresponding bathrooms – even if the owners had no connection to Prague or anyone or thing in the Czech Republic. In retrospect, being a superstitious Czech girl and all, I should have seen that as a sign.
To make a long story short (or at least, shorter), Dale and I hit it off instantly. We gabbed for hours about books and storytelling and art. Finally, after graduating from coffee to a fine Napa Valley chardonnay, we revealed to one another our quasi-secret desires to write fiction. I’m not even sure how it came about, given that we had literally just met, but from that day onward, Dale and I became writing buddies.
It was one of those things that just sort of evolved. Every time we got together, there was so much to say that we felt compelled to make another date. It became pretty clear early on that we might as well make it official between us, so we set up a fixed time and place – Thursdays at Momi Tobi Cafe. We had these weekly fiction dates for years, reading each other’s stuff, and talking in depth about what most moves us in a story and why. Dale gave me excellent criticism that always challenged me to do better, think through my thoughts with more precision and empathy, be an advocate for my reader.
And we shared deeply personal parts of ourselves as well. About the frustration and heartbreak of a faithless lover, the helplessness of watching a family member struggle with mental illness, the perpetual feeling of “otherness” that had characterized our lives. In one of those incredible, lucky strokes, I gained a lifelong friend, and got one-on-one tutelage from a first rate editor with a sharp, inquisitive mind and a profound love of fiction. If you check the first pages of The Bone Church, my debut novel, you’ll see it’s even dedicated to Dale. She is literally the reason I ever got up the gumption to write that book in the first place. And it’s all because I blew a job interview.
(Here I am at a book signing for The Bone Church at the Virginia Festival of the Book)
There is a beauty and cosmic elegance to our chance encounters. Not all of them, certainly. We meet people nearly every day, coming and going from the store, the post office, the veterinarian. Introduced to us by mutual friends, acquaintances or colleagues. Lightening doesn’t always strike. But when we look at our lives from afar, we can see how everything interconnects…we can chart the way inevitabilities have woven themselves into some of our most banal appointments. The ones that end up changing our lives, reworking our fates, even fulfilling our wildest dreams.
I often wonder in what ways my own encounters with readers will weave their individual destinies? How things I may have written, and stories you may have told me about your lives have changed us both in some seemingly invisible way that will make itself known somewhere down the line.
It’s an awesome and exciting prospect and I thank you all for taking this journey with me. Were it not for you, it would be a lonely a joyless trek.
(That’s me, Michele, and Dale down there on our girl’s weekend in Sea Ranch, CA this past weekend.)
