Coincidence

I recently read Agatha Christie’s autobiography, which I found quite interesting. She would seem to have been a nicer person than her sister English mystery writer, Dorothy Sayers, who was a vastly better writer. Do you suppose there’s some significance there?

At any rate, reading this book has made me want to read a biography of Christie, to get more of an objective take on various aspects and incidents of her life. For example, she doesn’t even mention the fact that she disappeared for eleven days in 1926, after she learned her husband was having an affair with another woman (though she does mention the affair). And supposedly her second marriage was happy in the early days, but less so later on because of her second husband’s frequent philandering (oh, those men). However, her autobiography gives no hint of problems in the second marriage. I suppose it’s prurient of me to want to know about that sort of thing – although the disappearance was a bona fide mystery, and wanting to know more about it is not necessarily indicative of an unhealthy interest in other people’s sex lives.

But the real reason I’m bringing this book up is that it produced one of those coincidences that make life seem so amazing at times. Christie’s second husband was the well-known archeologist Max Mallowan, whom she met in Iraq in about 1929 (among other things I didn’t know about Christie, was that she spent so much time in Iraq, and loved it). She met him while he was working with an even more well-known archeologist, Leonard Woolley, who was at that time excavating the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, in southern Iraq. Yes, yes, all very interesting.

But here’s the coincidence. Another book I had started, when I was about halfway through the Christie book (I usually have two or three going at once), was called Looking for Dilmun, about the archeological excavations on the island of Bahrain, off the Arabian coast, in the early 1950s. The author, Geoffrey Bibby, mentions Leonard Woolley and the excavations at Ur several times. This might not seem so very amazing, but consider that when I started reading the Christie book I had no idea that there would be anything about archeological excavations in it, and that when I pulled Looking for Dilmun off my shelf it was just a second-hand book that I’d had for a long time and thought I might try reading, when biography began to pall.

But this coincidence is as nothing compared with the coincidence of starting up a conversation with a good-looking man in a bar in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1983 and discovering that not only was he a fellow Texan, but he had been at the University of Texas in the fall of 1967, when I was, AND our mothers had both lived in the Dallas suburb of Duncanville. I mean, what are the odds? Rick and I are still friends, by the way, 25 years after that illuminating conversation at the Casablanca.

But even this pales when compared with the coincidence of running into the wife of a friend of Friend Ernest’s (a native and all-but-life-long resident of Long Island, if you’ll recall from a previous Note) while strolling through the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. This was in the summer of 1974, when I was just beginning my six weeks stay in France. Zoozie and I had known that we were going to be in France at about the same time, and we had agreed that we would try to contact each other to see about getting together, once we were settled at our respective destinations. But here I was in Paris on one of only two days that the study group I was traveling with would be there, before going on to our final destination in Brittany, and here was Suzy, strolling with a friend through the very park that I just happened to be cutting through on my way to the subway. Incroyable!

I find coincidences fascinating, and maybe in another life I’ll write a dissertation about them.