Coincidence or Miracle?

​When we’re walking down the street, visiting a store, or out dining in our hometown, we’ll occasionally run into someone we know from a different context in our locale. For example, my wife and I go swimming three times a week in a water-fitness class at our local YMCA. If that person we “run into” happens to be from our class, the usual line is, “What are you doing here?” followed by something like “I almost didn’t recognize you with your clothes on!” It’s a pleasant enough meeting but it’s clearly just a coincidence. I reckon similar run-ins happen at least two or three times a year. But let me recount three meetings so unique and unlikely that I’ve always wondered, are they coincidences or miracles?

The first one took place in the late 60s in New York City. At the time I was teaching in the English Department at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. One of my colleagues was a woman named Elizabeth Heine. If memory serves, she was the Department’s Victorian literature expert. I was returning from Staten Island to Manhattan on the ferry and sitting in the large inside passenger area. So was she. I noticed her and then got up and moved closer to assure myself that it really was my colleague Elizabeth. It was her all right. For some unaccountable reason, I didn’t go up to her and say hi. Even now, so many years later, I still don’t understand my choice of action. Back in Honolulu I checked in with her. Sure enough, she had been in the City to visit a friend or relative on Staten Island. I mean, what are the chances of being on the same ferryboat in one of North American largest cities and run into, at least figuratively, someone who, like you, lives 5,000 miles away and happens to be not only in the same place at the same time but on the very same ferryboat?

The second highly unusual encounter also took place took place in New York City, this time in a well-known Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village. I had just arrived for the weekend from Europe on my way home to, I believe, Chicago, where I was working and living with my family at the time. I was staying in the City with my best friend, later a distinguished history-of-design professor, the late Victor Margolin. There, just two tables away was my graduate-school girlfriend, Jane Tompkins, who was speaking Italian with a couple. (Jane had spent her junior year at Bryn Mawr College as an exchange student in Florence and could speak the language fluently.) This time I went up and greeted the three. Victor may have joined me, since he had met Jane during his visits to me at Yale. Jane was at the time a literature professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The third and most recent impossible meeting took place on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Cedar, my wife, our housemate Phil, and I were attending the annual Bioneers Conference there and were walking to lunch off campus. Standing near the path was a very familiar person who had been a former housemate in Boulder. I went up to her first, with my two companions quickly following. Saelyx, now living in Akron, Ohio, had been our housemate a few years prior to this encounter. Needless to say, none of the four of us could believe our eyes. It turned out we were all short-term visitors to the city, and Saelyx was there on private business, not at the conference. We ended up having lunch together.
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So, were these chance meetings simple coincidences or, in fact, miracles? What do you think?

Saelyx with me in front of our Boulder house, late February 2022