Stranger than Fiction

Poststructural Pub
1

I imagine it’s happened to almost everyone: something occurs in real life that is so odd or implausible that even a novelist wouldn’t put it in a plot.

I’ve had a string of these lately:

I only know three people who’ve broken their jaw, and as it happens all three of them work closely together in the same office in my company. One of them broke his jaw a few years ago during a mugging, the other broke his jaw a year later in a car accident, and the third broke his jaw this past winter when he slipped on an icy sidewalk.

A few weeks ago I stopped on a whim in a restaurant in my city, a Mexican restaurant that I’d never tried before in a neighborhood I rarely visit. I sat down at the table and halfway through my meal I heard someone say “Brad?” I looked up and it was a couple I know who live in this same city, and it happened to be one of their favorite restaurants in town. It was the first time they’d been there in a couple of years. Two days later I was driving to New Hampshire and stopped in Montpelier, Vermont to grab some lunch at the food co-op. I came around a corner and there was a woman who ran a shop in the apartment below mine when I lived in Montpelier 8 years ago. She doesn’t normally shop at the co-op. Two days after that I was walking up Mount Royal (the “mountain” here in Montreal) and bumped into a friend of mine walking his dog. In a city of 1.6 million people, the odds that you and someone you know will be in the same place at the same time are pretty low.

Many years ago a few members of The Chieftains gave a concert in Nelson, New Hampshire, and I went to see them there and we had a small session afterwards. Two days later I flew to Seattle. My flight stopped in Minneapolis and I had to change planes there. While walking through the airport, I bumped into The Chieftains, who were on their way somewhere else. We all stopped and looked at each other, pondering the odds that something like this would happen.

I once went to a wedding in a tiny little town in the Catskills called Stamford, New York. I’d never been there before; it was the hometown of my college roommate who was getting married. I pulled into a roadside diner to get lunch, and a motorcycle pulled up beside me. I got out of the car, and one of the people on the bike said, “hi Brad.” She was a woman I’d gone to high school with, in a town two hours to the south. She wasn’t there for the wedding and didn’t know my roomate; she and her husband just happened to be riding their bike through town on the way to somewhere else.

I once sat on a jury whose job was to decide how much to award in damages in a civil case. The case in question involved a guy who ran an auto repair shop out of his garage in rural Vermont. He had finished repairing a car one morning and took it out for a test drive. As he was preparing to turn left off the main road into his driveway, a car rammed into him so hard that the seat broke and he fell flat against the backseat, causing him a permanent back injury. The twist is that the car that rammed into him happened to be driven by his sister, who lived a few hours away in New Hampshire. She was driving to visit their mother, who lived another hour to the west in Vermont.

I’m sure many of you can think of stories like this…let’s hear 'em!

2

You’d enjoy “Das Gesetz der Serie” (The Law of Series) by Paul Kammerer - if only it were in print and translated to English. A thick tome devoted entirely to coincidences and to Kammerer’s theory of seriality - which was subsequently ripped off without credit by Carl Jung for his concept of Synchronicity. Fascinating, and slightly goofy, stuff. (Also quite sad, given Kammerer’s personal history.)

One time I was running for a taxi in the middle of Paris when I heard my name being shouted improbably from a nearby charter bus. The shouter was a long lost friend - a Bulgarian-Israeli girl from Brazil I’d last seen in Indiana 25 years earlier, now a docent giving culture tours of the Louvre. How she recognized me, looking very different after all that time, and in a street crowd of hundreds of people, is beyond me.

3

And then by James Redfield for The Celestine Prophecy.

4

Yeah, I don’t believe any of that synchronicity stuff. I do believe that people with similar interests and habits are likely to encounter each other serendipitously, that’s explainable. But I’m a great believer in pure random coincidence, without trying to place any meaning, structure, or causation on it. Randomness plays a far greater role in our lives than most of us believe or understand. That doesn’t make it any less amazing when these things happen; I’m happy to be amazed but I don’t try to read any meaning into these chance encounters.

5

Well just to be clear, Kammerer’s seriality is not Jung’s synchronicity. Jung took Kammerer’s framework and twisted it into his quasi-mystical model of archetypes and mandalas and such. Kammerer was more informed by the same early intellectual currents that produced relativity and quantum physics, looking for underlying regularities in what is clearly randomness. A failed effort, I think, but the sheer weight of his documentation shows that when you’re primed to look for coincidences, big and small, they turn up everywhere.

6

oh…

so ya ain’t going with yer bein’ in tune with the cosmos, eh? :smiley:

Just as well, I suppose… :wink:

7

3 days ago I saw a lady walking her dog with a crosscut saw in her non-leash hand.
If I ever write a book, that is going to be part of it.

8

With me, it wasn’t someone as famous as the Chieftains, however the setting was pretty much the same.
I worked at a holiday camp in the Catskills, NY, in summer 2009. The camp ended early in August. The camp counselors came from all over the world and most of them went travelling through the US for some time afterwards. On my return flight, I had to change planes in London. When I was waiting for my connection to Germany, I ran into a familiar looking girl: Raluca, one of my colleagues from camp was waiting for her own flight back to Romania…

9

Isn’t this what Jung called synchronicity?

–James

10

See above. :wink:

11

“Jung At Heart”

Fairy tales can come true ~ it can happen to you
If you’re Jung at heart.
For it’s hard you will find~ to be narrow of mind.
When you’re Jung at heart.

You can go to extremes with impossible schemes
You can laugh when your dreams fall apart at the seams
And life gets more exciting with each passing day
And love is either in your heart or on its way.

Don’t you know that it’s worth
Every treasure on earth
To be Jung at heart?

For as rich as you are~ it’s much better by far
To be Jung at heart
And if you should survive to 105 ~ look at all you’ll derive
Out of being alive~ and here is the best part~
You have a head start~ if you are among the very Jung at heart.

You can go to extremes with impossible schemes
You can laugh when your dreams fall apart at the seams
And life gets more exciting with each passing day
And love is either in your heart or on its way.

Don’t you know that it’s worth every treasure on earth
To be Jung at heart?
For as rich as you are~ it’s much better by far
To be Jung at heart

And if you should survive to 105 ~ look at all you’ll derive
Out of being alive~ and here is the best part~
You have a head start~ if you are among the very Jung at heart.

12

Cycling to work one morning last summer, I was going down this lovely disused road when three blackbirds came out and travelled alongside me. One to the left, one to the right and one in front. A wonderful sight at five thirty in the morning.
The stranger than fiction part is that at the time, on the MP3, Paddy Keenan was playing “The Blackbird”.

Slan,
D. :boggle:

13

Good thing he wasn’t playing “The Diplodocus”.

14

dubhlinn’s story reminds me that a few years ago I was in Tucson, Arizona and while walking down a street we were attracted by a lovely courtyard just visible down a short alley. We walked into the courtyard and discovered a small restaurant serving great Southwestern food and what turned out to be an outdoor concert venue for Robin and Linda Williams. We had no plans for the evening so decided to stay there, have supper, and listen to the concert.

Robin and Linda Williams sing mostly classic old Country/Western and Carter Family songs, and as is pretty much unavoidable in that genre at least one of the songs was about a train. Just as they started singing the chorus to “Don’t You See That Train” a real live train rushed by on the tracks a few blocks away and blew its whistle right after they sang the word “train.”

15

OK, It’s been years since I told anyone about this, but I’ll chance it here.

For a period of thirteen years, up to maybe ten years ago, I was not once rained on. This despite my not making any effort to stay indoors when inclement weather threatened.

Once I noticed this was happening, I became so confident of it that I would tell people walking with me on an overcast day not to worry. Typically, a few drops would begin to fall just as I/we were approaching the destination’s doorway, and then the cloudburst would open up. This happened over and over again.

The most dramatic example was one day in Washington D.C., when I rode the buses with a friend to do an errand. As we sat waiting for our bus back to where we were staying, it looked like a heavy thunderstorm was about to let loose.

My friend commented that we might get rained on. I told him not to worry. I was certain we wouldn’t get wet, and I told him what had been happening with me and rain. He was extremely doubtful and clearly looked forward to proving me wrong.

As we stood waiting for fifteen minutes or so, the rain held off. Just as we got on the first bus towards home, it began to rain heavily, and we heard the rain drumming on the bus roof most of the way to the stop where we would get off and wait for the second bus to take us the rest of the way. For the last block or so, we heard the rain on the bus roof getting softer, and by the time we got off, the rain had let up completely.

So we stood waiting for our second bus, still dry. Then we rode the second bus to where we would get off and walk the remaining two blocks to where we were staying. It looked about to pour again, and my friend again stated his doubt about my claim of invincibility. I told him again not to worry, and I guaranteed him we wouldn’t get wet.

When we were half a block from the doorway of our lodging, the rain let loose and started to come down in buckets. And in that same instant, just as my friend began to turn to shoot me a triumphant look, an umbrella appeared over our heads, so quickly we weren’t wetted by the start of the downpour. Another friend, also heading for the same destination, had come up behind us just at that moment.

The thing with rain continued for several years after that, and then just as mysteriously, stopped happening.

Best wishes,
Jerry

16

Here’s a sad one for you. After dating for almost a year, my then girlfriend (now wife) and I were interrupted by a phone call one evening by my parent’s neighbor that my mother had collapsed, that it wasn’t looking good for her, and that EMS was on the way. She was pronounced dead at the hospital. The next morning I was woken to the sound of my girlfriend screaming. I rushed out of bed to find out that her dad had died in his sleep, and his body had been found early that morning by his neighbor.
My mom died at 9pm from a septic infection following gastric bypass surgery, and had aspirated vomit, making resuscitation unlikely by the paramedics. Her father died around 1am, according to coroner estimation, again from aspirating vomit. He weirdest thing is that he had no alcohol or drugs in his system, so we still can’t imagine how he never woke up from this in time to save himself. He was still on his back with a peaceful expression.