Celebrating: Coincidences that matter

First, this from Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed*:

One time I was hiking up a mountain in New Mexico. It was March, the trail still covered with snow in places. There was no one around but me for hours until I came upon two people — a man and a woman — who had just come upon each other. We were three strangers who met on a mountain in New Mexico. We got to talking and somehow within the first five minutes of knowing each other we figured out that we all had the same birthday, and not only that, we were born in three consecutive years. As we were talking, three feathers blew up to us on the snow. We picked them up.

Reading this summoned a memory. A week before I was to turn 19 I drove up to Cape Cod to find a job for the summer. A Florida boy, I didn’t know anyone up there. All I had was a contact from my Dad — a woman I hadn’t met, who’d stopped by his tire store for work on her car. She worked baking cakes and pies in a restaurant in West Harwich during the summer. 

I arrived . . . and in that week met three women who shared my birthday . . . (I know what you’re thinking — so was I!) . . . Three of the four of us got together for a mutual far-from-home birthday celebration. It was a sweet quiet affair, there we were, lone individuals who’d inexplicably found each other in time for an unlonely birthday.

. . . . . . . 
* Cheryl Strayed is also the author of the best, most soul searing book I read in 2013: Wild (from Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail).

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