Beyond Coincidence Read Free Page B

have no significance whatsoever. A little girl releases a balloon. Some time later it comes down in a garden somewhere else and is picked up by another little girl. Nothing exceptional here. Children are attracted to balloons after all, and balloons do go up and come down again. But seen from an Earth-bound point of view, and particularly from the perspective of the two Lauras, it takes on an entirely different meaning. It sends a shiver down the spine. Because it’s personal, you see. It’s so personal.
    The fact that the principals in this story are little girls adds poignancy, but the coincidence would have been just as extraordinary had they been old men, or millionairesses, or even Martians. Coincidence makes no distinction between class, religion, or creed. It happens to us all, whoever we are, whatever we believe. We all are subject to its weblike embrace. To the axiom that only two things are certain in life, death and taxes, must be added a third—coincidence.
    Even after death, coincidence can strike.
    Charles Francis Coghlan, one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of his time, was born on Prince Edward Island on the east coast of Canada in 1841.
    Coghlan died suddenly on November 27, 1899, after a short illness while performing in the port town of Galveston, Texas, in the southwest of the United States. The distance was too great to send the body back home, so it was interred in a lead-lined coffin in a granite vault in a local cemetery.
    On September 8, 1900, a great hurricane struck Galveston—hurling huge waves against the cemetery and shattering vaults. Coghlan’s coffin was washed out to sea.
    It floated into the Gulf of Mexico, then drifted along the Florida coastline and out into the Atlantic where the Gulf Stream took over and carried it north.
    In October 1908, fishermen on Prince Edward Island saw a long, weather-beaten box floating ashore. After nine years and three thousand five hundred miles, Charles Coghlan’s body had come home. His fellow islanders reburied him in the graveyard of the church where he had been baptized.
    Coincidences of the kind that befell Charles Coghlan, or the lucky key lady, Mrs. Lovell, are immensely attractive to us. They appeal to our innate need for order and pattern. They make us seem less small and insignificant and the universe less terrifying and aimless. Even the most hard-bitten skeptic can find comfort in the most modest of coincidences. Our preference, naturally enough, tends to be for benign coincidences—particularly when we are the recipient of the good fortune. But malign coincidences are also interesting to us—as long as they are viewed from a distance:
    Jabez Spicer, of Leyden, Massachusetts, was killed by two bullets in an attack on an arsenal on January 25, 1787, during Shays’ Rebellion. He was wearing the coat his brother Daniel wore when he, too, was killed by two bullets on March 5, 1784.
    The bullets that killed Jabez Spicer passed through the holes made by the bullets that had killed his brother Daniel three years earlier.
    When coincidence does dump misfortune on our doorstep, we at least have the compensation of feeling that we have been singled out by fate for special attention. Most commonly, however, coincidences are modest, unthreatening, and cheering. When we take our dog for a walk in the park and meet a fellow dog walker with an identical dog—with the same name—it brightens our day a little.
    How often have you been thinking about someone when the phone rings, and it is that person? Does it not create a frisson of pleasure, a warm feeling? When such things happen we often conclude that we are blessed with the gift of extrasensory perception or are party to some sort of psychic connectedness. We don’t like to think it is simply the laws of chance and probability at work. We see such events as transcending physical laws, as being beyond coincidence, beyond the normal—paranormal, in fact. A