LITTLE CHILLS OF WONDER

 

Did you ever travel hundreds of miles, only to run into a high-school friend from home in line at Six Flags?    Or find yourself in those pre-GPS years in a city you'd never visited, but heard of as the home of childhood friends who visited their MEEmaw next door to your Mammaw every Summer?    One Teenage Summer on our way to Rock City, we found ourselves in the much-storied city of Maryville, TN, home of the two "City Girls" who brought their more stylish clothes and shorter shorts and cooler high-school CHEERS, and their more discriminating taste in books and movies and music to the back fence every Summer.    I mentioned them, and my parents decided to stop for a map, for I knew the address from our Pen-Pal days so long ago, and I suppose our small-town manners account for the possible barge-in unannounced.   

We pulled into the Fifties' version of a 7-11, and all got out to go in for a cold drink and restroom stop.   As Daddy held the door, who should emerge in a snappy  shorts set holding a big bag of ice cradled like a baby, but Ruth, the younger of my childhood friends, whose sister came out right behind her, both taller and tanner than I'd ever seen them.   Now WHO, in the Time/Space continuum and the geographical layout of that big city, could EVER predict that moment when such a convergence occurred---it was so mythically magical that it's engraved in memory all my life since.

We followed them to their house for a short while, just long enough to say Hello to the parents and baby brother---he of the baggy diaper wardrobe whose efforts to climb up to our tree-house had been thwarted by both Sisters for two Summers.   (He DID, however, go on to Nashville for a lovely career with a band-you'd-recognize, until his death WAY too young). 

But the logistics of that meeting---How many of those little pitstop stores along the highways and streets, how perfect their need for the ice, for parking RIGHT THERE, for our whim to find a map and restroom just at the moment when . . .     We could have walked right in and not seen either of them in the aisles of the store, but for that little flick of TIME---astounding and chill-making in its eerie synchronicity.   

Any strange convocations or coincidences in anyone's life that you cannot explain?   There are two more that come to mind, and the realness of them still boggles.