THOUGHTS | COINCIDENCE CONVERGENCE

By coincidence, I had lunch with my friend Lorraine yesterday. Unbeknownst to me, Lorraine was in the midst of planning her first trip to Las Vegas. She’d read my post last week about the Las Vegas sweepstakes call. Isn’t it a coincidence, she remarked, that after all these years of not wanting to go to Las Vegas, we suddenly find ourselves actually contemplating going to Las Vegas. At that point, she didn’t know that I would be posting two Las Vegas contests the very next day. (See previous post.) So, the coincidence thickens.

Now, if you knew Lorraine, you would probably do what I did, which was to answer, “Oh, yes, that is a coincidence.” But you couldn’t leave it at that. You would have to point out that it’s simply amazing how she is always swirling in coincidence. This is a woman who is always either on the verge of a coincidence, in the middle of a coincidence or on the last leg of a coincidence. Often she is in all three stages of several coincidences at once, or in the throes of several overlapping parallel coincidences. She is without a doubt one of the most coincidence-prone people currently on the planet. When I listen to her tell one of her coincidence stories, I find myself wondering: What are the odds? What are the odds? It’s beyond six degrees of separation. It’s beyond math.

Plus, she tells a darn good yarn.

As we waited for our salad, we discussed the gamble of making hotel reservations (hers, for Las Vegas) too far ahead or too close to your stay. Then, we segued into another story. This one involved another round of coincidences involving a dear friend of Lorraine’s. There were so many coincidences in this story, I lost count. The coincidences turned on a high school reunion, a juggler, a Beatles song, a journey home. Phew!

After Lorraine got to the end, she asked me if I’ve ever won anything. I thought perhaps she wanted to discuss something that somehow did not involve coincidences. This does occur with Lorraine from time to time. Why, I told her, indeed I had, but only small things, the odd campy thing, like a trinket that constituted an official prize in the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, a costume jewelry broach that I’d pinned to my home-office bulletin board for good luck.

Then, almost as an afterthought, Lorraine asked, “Did I tell you how I met my friend?” And what happened next could only happen with Lorraine. Here she was, asking me, someone who had just started a blog about travel contests. She proceeded to tell met that the reason she met her dear friend in the first place was because of a travel contest. Yes, a travel contest. And a good one at that, to Hawaii. By chance, Lorraine’s friend-to-be invited a friend of Lorraine’s to take the trip with her. After their trip, the mutual friend suggested that Lorraine meet the travel-contest winner. He had a hunch they would become good friends.

And they did.

Isn’t that a coincidence?