By coincidence, we all seem to love coincidences

From FEbruary 2006

        Talk about your synchronicity.
  In a little room just off where the city council meets in Lancaster, NY., 17-year-old Kevin Stephan earlier this month got a little plaque to hang on his wall. The folks there gave him a nice round of applause and his picture was taken, standing alongside the woman whose life he is credited with saving. Kevin is a volunteer firefighter and known by all as a good kid and when restaurant employees shouted for help, they looked to him for aid when a woman fell to the floor, choking on food.
   "They called me over and I did the Heimlich and helped her get breathing and I guess you could say I saved Mrs. Brown," he said, when pressed for a response at the picture-taking session.
        Ahh, Mrs. Brown. As he was helping the woman recover, he recognized the woman as -- are you sitting down? -- the same woman who saved him, seven years earlier when he was accidently hit in the chest with a baseball bat swung with full strength by another Little Leaguer. Brown, a nurse whose son also played on the team, performed CPR "and he came back," she said. He saved the life of the woman who saved his life. "It's almost unbelievable," said Stephan, who is also an Eagle Scout.
        Maybe you saw this little news item when it was broadcast on NBC.  Everyone I tell the story to says it gives them chills. Everyone calls it a remarkable coincidence. 
        I get a kick out of coincidences. Especially true ones, like Stephan and Mrs. Brown. Do you remember hearing the one where Winston Churchill's father puts the son of a poor Scottish farmer through school, because the boy's father saved his little boy. Turns out the Scot's son was Alexander Fleming and he, in turn, saves Winston Churchill's life because of the penicillin he discovered. Something like that.
        I've heard that one a half dozen times in several similar forms. The Winston Churchill Center in Washington, D.C., says they have been fighting this one for years. Not true. Never happened. No synchronicity there, just the Internet.
        Even though I'm fascinated with coincidences, they don't happen to me much. Oh, I remember once softly singing the repetitive bars of a somewhat memorable oldie (OK. Elton John, if you must know) while walking to my car and when I started the car and turned on the radio, the same song was playing. Oooh. That's about it for me. No tingles up your arms on that one, is there?
        There is a great little book with lots of true, verifiable, published, not-just-on-the-Internet coincidences that will give you plenty of tingles. If you can still find it, it's called "Incredible Coincidences: The baffling world of synchronicity," by Alan Vaughan.
        The book has things like the account of a coffin being washed off an ocean liner in a storm in the Gulf of Mexico and months later being found in the harbor of a small town in Maine, hometown of the deceased. Or the woman in Berkeley who is locked out of her house and the mail carrier walks up, holding a letter from her brother, who had stayed at her house a month earlier. Inside the letter -- sure enough  -- a house key that he was mailing back to her.
       Several stories are rehearsed in the little paperback where people with the exact same name were in auto accidents, colliding with one another. There's some great stuff, some great goose-bump givers.
        I remember reading a few years ago of a family that was water skiing on Pineview Reservoir and lost a wedding ring. They gave up after a futile search for the valuable. They came back to the spot the next summer ... and found the ring.
        Maybe it is no coincidence that both you and I like these things. Here's a few odd coincidences I have noticed in day-to-day life:
        When two Hollywood actors make a movie together where they play a couple, dang it if they don't end up leaving their former "partners" and shacking up, er ah, taking up with a new partner. What a coincidence. Who is Meg Ryan married to this week, by the way?
        Just yesterday I saw again a common coincidence -- when a group pushing a social agenda was not able to get favorable legislation passed, they promised "litigation" and "a court battle."
      When some Muslims want to demonstrate how much they hate being characterized as warmongers and how they deserve respect, they end up burning something and a half-dozen get killed. Weird, isn't it?
    Was it a coincidence that the first four storms of this winter season were oversold and over-anticipated, and then the one last week left me shoveling about nine inches of "30 percent chanceÓ off my driveway? And is it just a coincidence that as soon as the "pumps" were built out by the Great Salt Lake they have never been used?
      Isn't it a odd coincidence that when massive amounts of government money are given to a single contractor in Iraq without any oversight, abuses and misuse soon follow?
        A real coincidence, this one: Ninety-five percent of those who jog don't look like they need to.
        I've also noticed that any column written by an amateur like me better stop any list at six or seven items -- beyond that boredom sets in.
       And that's no coincidence.