SPANDEX PAS DE DEUX
A respected businessman and community leader was charged with indecently exposing himself in three Des Moines beauty parlors after being positively identified by beauticians. J. D. Mullen, a former director of the Chamber of Commerce, was said to have entered the Xsalonce, Body Bronze, and Professional Image salons dressed in Spandex leggings, to carry out acts of “bizarre exhibitionism.” The resulting publicity caused Mullen to lose his job and be shunned by neighbors.
Seven months later, however, all charges were dropped when the authorities realized they’d got the wrong man. It had been noticed that Mullen bore an amazing resemblance to Michael Long, known to police as “Spandex Man,” who had been arrested many times for similar behavior. Witnesses agreed that the likeness was uncanny. Mullen said, “It’s ripped my family apart. Even though the charges have been dropped, the damage has been done.”
POETIC INJUSTICE
It’s a humbling enough experience for any writer to find his precious book priced at a few cents on the shelf of a thrift store; worse to find it in the trash container outside a thrift store. No doubt some writers deserve such a comedown but not poet Simon Armitage, who was both humble and courageous enough to relate the tale in the book Mortification: Writers’ Stories of their Public Shame. Armitage certainly didn’t deserve the mortification that was yet to come. Taking the book out of the trash he saw that it was a signed copy. Beside the signature, in his own handwriting, were the words, “To Mum and Dad.”
GIELGUD’S GAFF
The great actor Sir John Gielgud was famous for his gaffs. One night at a Hollywood party he complained loudly about a dinner party he’d attended the night before. “Terrible night,” he said, “with that insufferable George Axlerod. Does anybody know him?” In the awkward silence that followed a man could be heard clearing his throat. “Well … I’m George Axlerod.…”
This begs the question: was George Axlerod’s attendance at the second party really a coincidence, or was he sent there by the Devil?
3
FANCY MEETING YOU HERE
It’s not just a small world. It’s a small world with billions of people in it. At the time of writing this sentence there were, according to the Internet World Population Clock, 6,385,725,918 people living on this planet (assuming you are reading this on Earth). That number will have grown considerably by the time you read this. Little wonder that we keep bumping into each other!
To further understand the nature of these kinds of coincidences we must also factor in the theory of “six points of separation.” First imagine a very, very large field. Into this field we place all the people we know. We then add all the people that those people know, plus all the people they know, plus all the people they know, plus all the people they know, plus all the people they know.
That, according to the theory, would be all the people in the world, including Himalayan hermits and Aborigines on walkabout in the Australian outback. Just try it if you don’t believe us.
Maybe the truly surprising thing is that in such a small, densely populated world, amazing chance encounters don’t happen more often. Perhaps Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had it right in this comic sketch:
PETER: Hello.
DUDLEY: Hello.
PETER: How are you?
DUDLEY: I’m terribly well. How are you?
PETER: I’m terribly well as well.
DUDLEY: I must say you are looking very fit.
PETER: I’m feeling pretty fit actually. Isn’t it amazing—us just bumping into each other like this?
DUDLEY: Yes. I mean here of all places.
PETER: Here of all places! I mean, I haven’t seen you since, er …
DUDLEY: Now, er … hold on a minute … er, when was it? Er … we, we haven’t seen each other …
PETER: Well actually we haven’t seen each other.…
DUDLEY: We haven’t seen each other … er … before.
PETER: That’s right. We’ve never seen each other before, have we?
DUDLEY: No.
PETER: You’ve never seen me.
DUDLEY: And I’ve never seen you. What a small world.
PETER: What a small world!
Here’s a selection of extraordinary chance encounters between people who, unlike Pete and Dud, were in fact connected.
FAR AWAY AROUND THE CORNER
Nellie Richardson said good-bye to her brother Joseph in the early 1940s and didn’t see him again for more than half a century. Joseph was then a teenager, enlisting in the navy.
Nellie grew old and gave up hope of ever seeing him again, but one day, sitting in her nursing home, she was galvanized by the sight of a seventy-nine-year-old man on the other side of the room. She knew immediately it was Joe.
Perhaps as incredible as the meeting was the fact that their paths had traveled so close to each other but failed to connect for so long. At the time they met, Joe had been living in the nursing home for six months, and for decades before that the brother and sister had been living barely a mile apart in the same city.
Both had a fifty-five-year-old daughter named Sandra.
MARCIA AND PETER MEET AGAIN
Peter and Jean and Paul and Marcia are two couples who lived a couple of miles away from each other and had a mutual friend who had never introduced them. One evening the friend organized a dinner dance for eighty people and as chance would have it, Marcia and Peter were seated next to each other, for all either of them knew, for the first time.
Peter looked at her name card and said, “I’ll remember your name because sixty years ago I used to play with a little girl called Marcia in India.”
Marcia said, “And I used to play with a little boy called Peter.”
They had both regained a childhood friend.
HE AIN’T HEAVY
You never know who you are going to meet when you hitchhike.
Tim Henderson’s parents divorced when he was quite young. His father remarried and had another son, but Tim had never met him. That was until Tim hitched a lift in a car driven by diving engineer Mark Knight. During their long ride they discovered they were brothers.
O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU?
We’ve all had the experience of losing something and then finding it right under our noses. It happened to Rose Davies—with her brother.
Rose was just three months old when she was adopted. Years later she discovered that she had three brothers—Sid, John, and Chris—and set out to trace them.
Rose found Sid first and then John, but she didn’t have to look far to find Chris.
Rose, forty-one, was staggered to discover that her long-lost brother was the man who had just moved in across the street.
“I’d only known the family for three months,” said Rose. “But I thought they were very nice.”
Chris, thirty-seven, was equally astonished when Rose told him who she was. He’d been searching for her, too.
HAPPY FAMILIES
Martin Plimmer and his wife were close friends with two couples; let’s call them Janet and John and Antony and Cleopatra. The three couples had two children each and, come the summer, they would frequently vacation together, either the Plimmers with Janet and John, or the Plimmers with Antony and Cleopatra; sometimes all three couples would go together and the children would hit each other with plastic buckets.
This happy state of affairs changed overnight when Antony and Cleopatra split up. Antony left home and Rudolpho moved in with Cleopatra. The friendship dynamic teetered and swayed. The fundamental problem was that Janet didn’t like Rudolpho. Rudolpho, in turn, didn’t think much of Janet. At their first and only social meeting Janet and Rudolpho quickly got into an argument that flared into an exchange of insults and, in the next few weeks, matured into an enduring hard-boiled resentment. What’s more, Cleopatra resented Janet for not liking her new love Rudolpho, and Janet resented Cleopatra for taking his side.
This chopped a third off the vacation group potential. It was generally ag
reed that the only thing to do was for the Plimmers to go on vacation this year with Janet and John, leaving Cleopatra and Rudolpho to explore their new-found love alone.
All this brou haha meant that booking had been put off to the last minute, and the vacation dates loomed. The Plimmers and Janet and John decided to look for a house to rent in Provence. Cleopatra and Rudolpho, working independently, decided to look for a house to rent in Provence. The Plimmers and Janet and John found a sunny house in a sleepy little village called St. Antonin du Var. Cleopatra and Rudolpho, working independently, found a sunny house in a sleepy little village called Pontevès. Then the landlord rang to apologize. He had double-booked the house, but he had another property he could let them have slightly cheaper at St. Antonin du Var, where in the course of their vacation, they all bumped into each other.
SNAP
It’s odd to make friends with someone and then realize in retrospect that you’ve seen them before when you neither “saw” them nor knew who they were. It’s odder still to have taken a photograph of them.
Graham Freer’s hobby is taking and processing photographs. One of many he has taken is a shot of people in the town hall square. This particular picture was notable at the time of development only in that it was the one he chose at random to enlarge a section to test the quality of his enlarger’s lens. Years later he made friends with a girl and the next time he revisited his old photographs, the previously indifferent test photo had become personal and poignant. The picture hadn’t changed, but the photographer had and so had one of those distantly uninvolved girls in the square. She was his new friend.
BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND
A plumber’s wife had a rare visitor on the doorstep of her house in Crouch End, a quiet residential suburb of North London. It was Bob Dylan.
“Is Dave in?” he asked.
The plumber’s wife explained that her husband Dave had popped out but would be back shortly. If he would like to come in and wait she’d make him a cup of tea.
The tale of Bob Dylan’s unexpected call at the wrong house in Crouch End, with its delicious expectation of Dave the plumber returning a few minutes later to find the singing legend sitting in his living room drinking tea, has entered local folklore. Normally it is told and received with the kind of skeptical awe reserved for urban myths. But the story is true.
Dylan had been interested in working with the English producer Dave Stewart, founder of the Eurythmics, who has a studio in Crouch Hill. Dylan had decided to pay him a visit, but with so many road names in the area starting with the word “Crouch,” he’d ended up knock-knock-knocking on the right number door in the wrong street.
4
LOST AND FOUND
A backpacker tells the story of losing a contact lens while bathing under a waterfall on the lower slopes of a mountain in Peru. Three days later she was washing her underwear in the river further downstream when she saw something glinting on a rock by the water’s edge. It was her missing contact lens. Too amazing to be true? Possibly. But the fact remains that if something can happen it will, given enough time. So if you lose your contact lens in a mountain waterfall, don’t give up hope. Just be patient.
And coincidence stories themselves, though not actually lost, can be found in some strangely coincidental ways. While researching this book, Brian King went into the BBC’s offices to work at a computer. He was explaining to one of the department’s producers, Amanda Radcliffe, that he was looking for stories for a book about coincidence when she said, “Look at the e-mail I’ve just received from my friend Cathy in Australia.” Among some general chitchat, Cathy had written about an extraordinary coincidence she had recently witnessed. Here is the story, “Two Rings in the Bay,” along with a variety of other remarkable tales of people and things lost and found.
TWO RINGS IN THE BAY
Graham Cappi of Bristol was devastated when he lost his wedding ring while on honeymoon in Nelson Bay in Australia. It fell into deep water, beyond any hope of retrieval. Graham returned to England not expecting to see the ring again.
Fifteen months later, another Englishman, Nick Deeks, was on holiday at Nelson Bay and lost his wedding ring while snorkeling. He returned the next day in the forlorn hope of finding it. After several dives he finally surfaced triumphant with a ring. But it wasn’t his—it was Graham Cappi’s. Encouraged by the find, he carried on diving and, incredibly, eventually found his own wedding ring.
He had no way of knowing who might be the owner of the other ring, but by chance, a few inquiries in the local town turned up some people who remembered an English visitor who had been making inquiries about a ring. Connections were made and Graham Cappi was eventually contacted in England. He was overjoyed to learn that his wedding ring had been found. It was returned to him by a young local girl making a planned trip to England. She was intrigued to discover that Graham’s wedding date, inscribed on the ring, was also the date of her birthday.
THE GOLDEN MATCHBOX
The golden matchbox was a gift from the Prince of Wales to his friend and fellow fox hunter, Edward H. Sothern—a successful actor in the 1890s.
Out on a hunt one day, Sothern fell from his horse and the matchbox broke from its chain and was lost. Sothern had a duplicate made, which, after his death, went to his son Sam. Sam, also an actor, took the matchbox on a trip to Australia where he gave it to a Mr. Labertouche. Returning to England, Sam learned that the original matchbox had been retrieved, twenty years after its loss, by a farmhand who had found it while ploughing a field that very morning.
Sam explained what had happened in a letter to his brother Edward H., the third actor in the family, who was touring in America. Edward read it while traveling on a train with a companion, Arthur Lawrence. Edward told Lawrence the story, which prompted his friend to take a watch chain from his pocket. Dangling from its end was the duplicate golden matchbox—a gift from the Australian Mr. Labertouche.
WHERE THERE’S MUCK
Barbara Hutton accidentally flushed her antique bracelet down the toilet. Months later she was in a jeweller’s when a man brought in a bracelet to be valued. It was Barbara’s. The man had found it while working in a sewer.
BACK FROM THE DEAD
Alpha Mohammed Bah feared his partner and children were dead. He describes the moment when coincidence reunited them as “like being born again.”
In early 1997 Alpha was working as a commercial photographer in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. His partner Fatmata and their two daughters Sordoh and Marian lived across the city.
“It was a good life—I was self-reliant, making a living for my family,” he said.
But everything changed when a military junta seized power and Alpha was forced to become the head of security for his local community.
“Everyone was very afraid of the government,” he said. “Random executions and other atrocities were happening day to day. I couldn’t bring myself to prosecute innocent people—but if I refused I would be shot—so I decided I would have to leave.”
Alpha was forced to flee without saying good-bye to Fatmata and his daughters—aged three and a few months at the time—as they lived on the other side of Freetown and he could not cross the checkpoints. He fled to New Guinea and waited for the situation to change back home.
In 1998, the junta were overthrown for a short time, and Alpha returned to try to trace his family. “I searched in many displacement camps for my relatives, but could not find them,” he said.
“During the year I was there I did not meet anyone who could tell me whether they were alive or dead. I started to believe they were dead because I had nothing to keep my hope alive.”
As the political situation began to deteriorate again, Alpha made the decision to emigrate to New York. En route, he was detained and questioned by immigration officials at Heathrow. He decided to seek asylum in Britain.
He settled in Wales, where he helped other refugees with translation and completing their asylum application forms. So
me months later, he was contacted by a friend who asked him if he could help a woman and two children from Sierra Leone who had just arrived in Britain.
To his amazement he found it was Fatmata and his daughters.
“I could not believe it,” he says. “She just started weeping—and I was crying tears of joy. She later told me she had given up hope of ever seeing me alive again.”
HOMING BRUSH
During the First World War, a U.S. soldier was on board a troop ship torpedoed off the French coast. He survived, but lost all his possessions. He also survived the rest of the war. In America after the war he was by the seashore near Brooklyn when he found a shaving-brush cast up on the shore. It had an Army number on the back. It was his own shaving brush.
A RADIO YOU CAN RELY ON
Canadian Mike Mandel tells this story about his father, who was active in the amateur radio scene in Toronto in 1976. Mike’s father knew his subject, having been a radio communications tutor with the British army during World War II.
One evening a radio enthusiast friend came round to pick up some gear he had bought from Mike’s father and the pair lugged it from the basement of the townhouse to the car outside, where they stood chatting.
Mike’s father asked the friend if he had ever heard of a 19 set. The friend shook his head and Mr. Mandel explained that the 19 set was an old Russian tank radio that he had used to train radio operators during the war. The gauges were in Russian but the radio had the advantage of being reliable and simple to use. He hadn’t seen one since the war, he said, but he’d love to get hold of one.
They said good-bye and Mike’s father was walking back to the house when he noticed a pile of junk at the bottom of a wall. On top of the pile of junk was a 19 set Russian tank radio.
Beyond Coincidence Page 13