Top 15 Amazing Coincidences
Another 10 Amazing Coincidences
When I was 14 I had a Vespa motor scooter. One day I drove into a Fina gas station for a fill-up. The local Fina stations were having a promotion going on with KELI, a pop radio station: they were handing out a small plastic trash bag to each customer. Each bag had a unique seven-digit number. If KELI called out your number and you were the lucky listener, you won a hundred dollars. As a joke, the gas station attendant gave me a trash bag for my motor scooter. The number on the trash bag was 1690245--which exactly--exactly--matched the license plate on my motor scooter. Blew my mind big time. Still does.
One day in May when I was in college I was hanging out in the backyard with four of my housemates when suddenly apropos of nothing I said "You know, I've never had a bird shit on me in my life." Less than two minutes later a bird flew by and--splat!--all over my right shoulder! We were all suitably impressed: "Dude!"
If by some chance you have a coincidental anecdote, please send it in. You might win a prize--stranger things have been known to happen.
I dated a girl named Cindy when I was in high school in Tulsa Oklahoma. I dated Amanda when I returned to Tulsa from a three year tour of duty in the US Army. Ciny and Amanda never met each other. Almost ten years later I moved into an apartment building in San Diego where I found both Cindy and Amanda living within 100 yards of each other. Further, they had become close friends - never having known that they both dated me over ten years ago in a city a thousand miles away. We never figured out the significance, but the coincidence of all three of us winding up in the same apartment building in a completely different city amazed us all.
ReplyDeleteIn 1997 I was driving hundreds of miles on the most godawful gravel road towards the Arctic ocean to go for a swim. You might think that would be a lonely objective, but along the way i was passed once, only once, at high speed, by a rusted-out, if it broke down you’d leave it, Volvo. As it passed I could see written in block letters on the back window: I HATE VOLVO DRIVERS.
ReplyDeleteI knew these were my kind of people and once I got to the small town of Deadhorse it was not hard to find them. The boy driving was a crazy Australian. With him, inexplicably, was a middle-aged man from Texas who had been in a terrible accident and was burned over most of his visible body and you could only imagine the rest. They had become travel friends and together we completed our mission in a heart-stopping, mind-blowing cold water plunge in the Arctic. That night we camped out and during dinner preparations the Texan realized that he no longer had his prized possession -- his boyscout knife. A knife that had also survived the fiery plane accident that had left him disfigured. He figured it had fallen out of his pack on the way up and through the porous undercarriage of the old Volvo. He could never find it by looking.
On the way back to Fairbanks we caravanned, stopping to camp and check stuff out along the way. Somebody spotted a herd of Musk Ox about 50 yards off the road. We pulled over and watched the family’s slow progress. After some time, the Texan bent down to the road and picked something up. He said, I can’t believe it, and neither could we. In his hand was his boyscout knife. We had stopped at the exact spot where it had fallen out of the Volvo on the way up, on a road nearly 500 miles long.