When I say that strange things can happen to me, I mean very strange. One as myself thinks of these strange things in terms of mathematical statistical probabilities. Then there are those events that blow statistics out of the water because they should not happen yet do happen.
For example, I gave my cousin John my telephone number in Florida. He misdials the number with one digit a 5 instead of a 3. He asks for me, and the person at the other end, a complete stranger in a state where I rarely travel tells him that he knows me. My cousin remarks that this is a strange coincidence, and that he is hot on the trail to locating me. However, this coincidence does not really help him because the person he is talking to does not know my telephone number nor how to reach me. He just knows that I exist from a relative of people who are staying with him and that they have spoken to him about me. End of story, or perhaps you would think. My cousin has to give up because there is no way to reach me. I have changed telephone numbers and no one knows the new number.
Meanwhile, I thinking that I must get into contact with my cousin do not know his number either, but he is staying with friends who send an email to me. I do not receive the email until Saturday, a few days later because I have not had a telephone number nor internet access. When I finally get a phone number and email address I open up my email to find that my cousin is looking for me urgently. I phone the number in the email and get in touch with thy cousin, John. I give him my new address and tell him to come stay a while. You would think the story would end here, but it doesn't.
On arrival, at my new address, my cousin, John tells me that he tried getting me, and that he had somehow misdialed my telephone number and had spoken with someone who knew me. This is very strange because the people he spoke with who knew me are from England and the only reason my cousin spoke with them was because he misdialed my temporary number by one digit.
All the above, I have verified. Its coincidence enough that I should be in Florida from Canada at the same time as people I know are in Florida from England, but that my cousin, who knew me, and was on a short visit from Michigan should talk to complete strangers who knew me. Well that is a second coincidence. It is strange that these people should actually have talked about me to their friends, the people they are staying with in Florida. It is a third coincidence that he should misdial bby accident and get a working numbner at all. He could have dialed the number correctly and just given up. It is a fourth coincidence that the number he should misdial would be one digit different from the number that I gave him by email more than a week earlier. It is a fifth coincidence that the numbers in Florida should be so close and the locations where I am visiting and my English friends are visiting should be so close.
I never spoke to my English friends that I was staying in Florida temporarily and they did not book a vacation to see me. That I am sure. However, by a sixth coincidence they had a meal with cousins of mine from Sidmouth in England about one hundred miles away from these friends and one of the friends is a niece of my cousin, Dorothy. Dorothy sent me an email guessing that the place where we were vacationing in Florida was the same as her niece aand husband had chosen to vaction at the same time as me. When I looked at the email from Dorothy this morning I noted that the Florida telephone number Jenny had given her was one digit different, but this not after I had phone Jenny's number in Florida.
That is the final coincidence because I had little intention of phoning that number thinking that Dorothy's email message was a very long shot and that in any event these people would have returned to Engl;and already.
Something this morning got me to read my emails, call Jenny's number in Florida. I had no idea that it was her friends that my cousin John had spoken with. Jenny was surprised to hear from me but less surprised than John to hear I had someone in Florida who knew me. She immediately told me of John's call to her firneds.
So the circle was completely until I checked for the coincidence of the telephone numbers and tied the whole thing together.
I have now to cope with the strangeness of these events and try to interpret some meaning if any. As you know, I do not think that things happen coincidentally, but that there are unseen reasons, unseen physics behind everything. Nothing is by chance. What we don't know is the extent to which events happen because of serious forces that are hidden from view until revealed by our meager logics.
