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Coincidence
I've forgotten more than I remember. I've forgotten events, people, places. And when I'm reminded of them I'm positively shocked. Once my ex-husband said, "Oh, you remember so-and-so. The whole five years we were in Tuscaloosa, the two of you would get together every other week to play four-hand piano." Did I really do that? How could I have done it and yet have no memory of it at all?
A friend of mine from university days (I'll call her Joan) has become a new email friend. We were out of touch for fifty years but we took up that old friendship as if no time had passed. Of course, our current lives remain very much a mystery. Such friendships have a very modern feel: friendship, fifty years of no contact, and then, through the magic of email, a recreation of the friendship, somewhat hampered by a fifty-year gap during which we lived the bulk of our lives. Very odd. Very modern.
Anyway, Joan and her husband visited family in Florida for a few weeks, and while there they attended a community spaghetti supper. Such events offer random seating on benches set up at trestle tables, and you never know who will be sitting across from you. As one does at these community events, Joan immediately began making conversation with the couple across from her. Finally came the inevitable "Are you folks local?" "No," said the woman, "we're from Indiana."
"Oh," said Joan, "so are we. Where in Indiana do you live?"
"Near Kokomo and Frankfort."
"Did you grow up there?" asked Joan.
"No," said the woman, "we went to school in a little town called Delphi."
Well, Joan jumped into that with both feet. "Do you know the Johnsons? Dinty and Ann?"
"Well, of course we do. Jim here was in their brother Mike's class. And Ann might remember that I played baritone sax in the band. And I think their brother Dinty was drum major for the marching band. And there were some other Johnsons, too."
Yes, indeed there were. A whole heap of other Johnsons. Joan was beside herself with excitement, imagining my response to this bit of Florida serendipity.
Now, was this not an amazing coincidence? Leaving aside the fact that Dinty played the baritone horn and was never the drum major (although our sister Sari was, a couple of years later), there was my old friend Joan in the presence of a couple who remembered me from my high school days, however imperfectly.
And now I have to say that "however imperfectly" they remember me and mine, they're way ahead of me. I have no memory of this baritone sax player. Her husband's name rings no bells, despite the fact that he was in my brother Mike's class, two years behind me.
I told Joan how little I remember (i.e., nothing) of her new friends but asked her not to tell them that. The baritone sax player had a memory of being once in our kitchen where my mother, Eileen, was deep-frying rosettes with her rosette irons for a crowd of kids (probably all the band members). I still have Eileen's rosette irons (though it has been 25 years since I used them).
A chastening experience, this. We're back to the memory thing. I do, however, have the excuse that high school was so unpleasant for me that I have made a conscious effort to delete the whole period from my mind. No "Control-Save" for THAT era.
Still speaking of memory, I told my husband recently—after my umpteenth trudge from basement to main floor to second floor to basement to second floor to main floor—that my faulty memory is the must frequent occasion of exercise in my life. My weak memory is making my heart strong.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ann Tudor
