The Past in the
Present
April 2006
Coincidences have been creeping into my life lately. Strangely, each
coincidence links to my paternal grandmother, a woman I was too young to know.
She died in 1980. Since watching the film, I (Heart)
Huckabees, I’m wondering
if my coincidences point to the meaning of my life. It all began in the year 2000
when my mother died in Ohio. At her memorial service, a man began talking to me and told me that a
relative of mine had lots of family photos for me. I gave him my address and
cell phone number and asked that the photos be mailed to me. I heard nothing
back and received no photos. Okay, here’s the first coincidence. I was in Ohio visiting my brother (I lived in Minnesota at the time) for one week in August 2004. I received a call on my
cell phone from my relative asking me to come pick up
the pictures. She lived about 40 miles from where I was standing at that moment.
Wow. After four years, the week I’m in Ohio, she calls. It turns out that she is my second cousin once removed.
She had two suitcases full of photos. That’s why they were never mailed. There
were piles and piles of photographs of relatives I never knew. Some photographs
dated back to the late 1800’s.
Two months later, during an idle moment, I decided I needed a picture
of Abraham Lincoln to hang on my wall. I found a nice one on eBay. A week
later, it was on my wall. My fascination
with Lincoln had begun. One day, while looking in a book at a picture of the
interesting fence surrounding Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois, those suitcases of photos came to mind. I had seen that fence before.
I rifled through the suitcases and found about 40 photos showing my grandmother
in Springfield, visiting all the Lincoln sites! My grandmother and I both had a strong Lincoln interest. I felt like I had come full circle. Is there a revealing
connection here? You may not be convinced, so here’s one more coincidence.
My grandmother must
have enjoyed writing as much as I do. In the suitcases, I found several stories
that my grandmother wrote during the 1930s. I had been looking for those
stories again last month, searching through the ubiquitous boxes filling my
home since my recent move to Wisconsin. The other night, I finally
found them. Okay, here’s the second coincidence. Along with the stories was a
printout of a family tree. On it, I noticed that my grandmother’s birthday was
March 7—the same
day I located the stories. She would have been 92.