Bureau of Premonitions Annual Report

Premonition Incident Report: 3 February: Cynthia Applebottom dreams of a multi-vehicle crash involving several dozen fatalities.
Correlating Result: On 23 March fourteen grocery carts collide in the produce section at SuperMart, crushing 27 avocados.

Premonition Incident Report: 14 March: Anil Singh Kumar experiences severe abdominal cramping and has a vision of mass poisoning from listeria.
Correlating Result: 18 March: 8 members of a fraternity and 12 members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians report vomiting and severe headaches.

Premonition Incident Report: 1 April: Tomiko Andrea Ikea notes a feeling of frozen water flowing down her spine and the number 9 repeating in her head.
Correlating Result: On 2 April a group of nine white-water rafters were frostbitten on an expedition in southern Chile, near Antarctica. 

Premonition Incident Report: 23 June: Baxter Hummington III feels a constriction in his throat, faints, and awakes to the chirping and tweeting of sparrows.
Correlating Result: 25 June: 1.75 million Twitter followers of Donald J. Trump experience nausea, delirium, paranoia, and loss of consciousness while reading his tweets.  

Premonition Incident Report: 3 July: several hundred thousand respondents report bright flashes of multi-colored light accompanied by thunderous, concussive booms.
Correlating Result: 4 July: Thousands of cities, towns, and villages across America celebrate Independence Day. 

Premonition Incident Report: 15 November: Olivia Humboldten dreams of an invasion of flying ghouls and goblins seen by thousands of witnesses.
Correlating Result: 22 November: The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

It All Depends

We all have them. We all have those infinitesimal moments when if the event had gone another way, everything in our life — and that means everything — would be different. In his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow,” William Carlos Williams uses the phrase “so much depends.” Although as an English major I had undoubtedly studied the poem, it took on new meaning for me when a friend used the phrase “so much depends.” Her cancer was in remission at the time, or at least was manageable. I had asked her, “Are you in pain?” She answered, “No. So much depends…” and went on to recite the poem word for word. Her point was: whether I am in pain or not matters. So much depends on that. She added that one reading of the poem suggested that it refers to a child hovering between life and death. The poet was a doctor.

So much depends between this and that, between being here or somewhere else, between saying one thing or another, between seeing that oncoming truck before you turn or not.

The King James Version has it as “in the twinkling of an eye.”

So I never forgot my dear friend’s lesson, even though we went our separate ways.

I can readily draw up my own list of personal turning points balanced on the edge of a razor blade. I am told I started life that way, as a preemie. (Today, with advances in medicine and technology my entry into the world would be unremarkable.)

Family lore has me being nearly run over by my father in the backyard when I was five or six. Unbeknownst to my dad as he was backing up, I decided to bolt out of the car. Where did I go? Why? We will never know. My dad assumed the worst. My brother ran up the steps to tell Mom, “Dad ran over Paul!”

I was fine.

Somehow.

Whenever the story was retold at the dinner table, Dad would say, “Took ten years off my life.”

And who is to say otherwise?

Some moments get lost in the tides of time, as if they are less significant with the passage of days, months, and years.

The concussive wind of a Manhattan taxicab zooming by as I daydreamed and nearly drifted off the curb.  

Falling asleep at the wheel only to be awakened by the tires rumbling on a rough surface.

Decades ago, driving drunk and not remembering it.

Which illustrates the interactive nature of this utter powerlessness. In other words, others are inescapably involved in our seemingly random, remote choices.

Turning blue, choking on meat, only to find the Heimlich maneuver my wife of that time employed didn’t work — until she said “stop fighting me.”

In a blog post years ago, I coined an amusing term for this phenomenon:

or - chasm - n. The immeasurable distance between one choice and another.

I labeled it a noun, but these infinite moments fraught with fruition or finality have their own grammar. They are gerunds and participles and most of all infinitives.

They bear the indelible signature of choice and mystery.

These moments are the “Either/Or” of Soren Kierkegaard, "The Road Not Taken" of Robert Frost.

Name these nano-pinpricks as you see fit: choice, destiny, fate, will, coincidence, providence, or Providence.

You have yours; I have mine.

Attention must be paid.

Iceland, day 2.5: not all is as it appears

I was tired but hungry after a Golden Circle Wednesday teeming with sights, sounds, and other Icelandic stimuli, so I went for the second evening in a row to Icelandic Fish & Chips in the Volcano House building, across the street from Katla, which is how my apartment 405 is termed in the Ice Apartments. 

Let me digress for a second to illustrate the scene from my bedroom window: a view of the Old Harbor; Volcano House to the left; a mountain or mountain range in the background that looks close enough to walk to but is, I am told, more than an hour's drive away; the modernist Harpa concert hall to the right (suitably attractive but I never did walk over to there and go in it); some ships, including work on one or two in dry dock; the library across the street closer to the right; and directly in front a construction site with ostensibly fewer than a dozen workers for a structure slated to take up half a block. They worked on concrete forms and seemed unhurried. Who operated the crane? was a big mystery to me until I tentatively concluded the crane operator was up near the top. The workers were my alarm clock, with their radio blaring pop music and their hands hammering forms securely in place, though I suppose getting up past nine was inevitable anyway. Do workers around the planet require the blare of distracting theme music while they pound, saw, cut, weld, or rivet? 

The night before I tried white hake, and loved it. I found it light and not very fishy, over roasted potatoes with a side tin cup provided for tartar sauce (it was some other zesty concoction; it changed every night). My server said she believed hake is the fish depicted on the 10 kronur coin. The place is not pretentious, very inexpensive comparatively, and low-key, friendly. I liked it. And it was less than a hundred steps from my apartment. The second night I had cod, spread over a salad with mango sauce to spread over the fish. Again, I liked it a lot, even though I am not that much of a fish eater (mostly salmon and haddock). At the table next to me, to my right, a couple spoke more quietly than Americans do. They spoke French, from what I could discern. She started weeping. He touched her elbow. I, an old stranger, wanted to comfort them though I was curious about the emotion. He seemed detached but not uncaring, leading me to conclude her tears were not about "them" but some outside upset. It passed, as they were able to eat calmly, and find smiles and laughter.

Being awake, a tad restless though tired, I strolled in my downtown Reykjavik neighborhood. I stopped at the Stofan Cafe, where I had gone for breakfast (tea, bagel, cheese, salad greens). I ordered asked for decaf tea but ended up getting Earl Grey (not decaf) and engaged in friendly conversation with my server, asking if she was the owner (no). I was promoting this book, already in its early stages. Just as I was sitting down amid the cozy and comfortable couches and warmly inviting wooden antique furniture, I spied Gordon and his wife across the street, the Irish folks from the tour today. I walked out to the doorway and called out (you have to think of downtown, at least on Wednesday, as a quiet village): "Hey, Gordon and wife! Hello!" They came in and joined me. I was wrong in my assumptions (one of the temes before, during, and after this journey). It was not his wife, but his sister, Denise. We managed to secure a table (it was fairly crowded), and chatted amiably. She's a doctor, in Newfoundland; he's an entrepreneur and consultant, who lives near Dublin. Shortly before 11 p.m., we were told upstairs was closing; we'd have to go downstairs, which would stay open for an hour. We repaired down there, where it was harder yet to find a table amidst mostly twenty-somethings conversing, playing chess, drinking, laughing. And it was louder.

This was my first inkling of Reykjavik's fabled club life: in this instance civil, orderly, gregarious, a weeknight vibe.

creating coincidence

You walk the path you trod, the air colder and the sky brighter. You go to this or that music, food, or lecture venue, this time alone. You tell yourself timing is critical. You picture the "coincidental" rendezvous, its texture, complexion, the reactions, the heartbeats. But you discover you cannot create coincidence, can you. It's not so shocking or surprising a revelation. The bigger and more cogent epiphany, however, is that you are content with the absence of so-called coincidence as you traverse your world, step by vigilant step.

A Simple Twist of Fate

This will be hard to explain, but I'll try. I solipsistically did a Yahoo search of my real name (not my nom de plumage). Results? 2,000 hits, most inaccurate in their attribution, which I find amusing. Around hit number 700, there was a link for a poetry magazine I had long ago forgotten. The link apparently provides digital archives (or maybe just an index) of all the issues of the magazine, going back over 40 years. My name shows up, on an endlessly long and unreadable litany of names, many of them literary lights, right next to a former poet laureate of the United States, side by side, as if we are rubbing elbows, literarily and metaphorically speaking. (I actually met the guy about 18 months ago at an event, and he signed a book of his poems that a friend had sent me as a gift. You already know I am a shameless name-dropper, but not as bad as my brother, methinks. Isn't it a sign of neurotic low self-esteem?) I had something published in the magazine in 1967, the datastream tells me. A poem. A vague memory tells me that contributors had to pay to get into this poetry press's anthology. I would probably cringe now at what I wrote, but I'm still curious. Then, after my name, the website reports that the celebrated poet published something in the magazine in 2006, if I'm reading the streaming run-on river of data correctly. Earlier in the stream is the maiden name of my son's new bride. Sheeeesh! What next? The date, hour, and minute of my death? On the surface, none of this is the least bit noteworthy or remarkable. It is so obvious: We all have K at the outset of our last names. A simple-enough explanation. So what? you say. Big deal. But it all struck me as eerily coincidental, even providential. It creeped me out, as if it was fore-ordained that these connections should occur. It reminded me of the saying "Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous." But if I allow that the connections and their discovery may've been providential, why did it scare me? Is my faith that shallow? And, after all, are the connections more alphabetical than coincidental? Are they more alphanumerical than providential? Or is it all a modern personal message of the Alpha and the Omega? And, if so, how do I decode it?

Photo by Matej "Dedek" Batha; at least, I surmise as much.

Alphabetacoincidence

So the four of us are there at Starbucks on a Friday night. Playing Scrabble. Yup. Wild night. You snicker? (Or is that snigger?) You titter? Words can be wild! After all, they can start wars, make peace, declare love, ignite lust, or seal the deal. Amidst gale-force winds generated from air handlers, we trot out a very worn Scrabble board made available for customers. Several of the letters are overwritten with markered letters, presumably to accommodate missing letters. Or because our predecessors were cheaters. So there we are: Beloved Spouse, Ballet Daughter, and Irishstep Daughter (which is infinitely different from Irish stepdaughter), and El Laforisto himself, Pawlie Kokonuts. Our gales of silliness are interspersed with observations regarding fellow customers, stuff like, "They're a handsome couple," or "No, they're not; you're so old," followed by "You're right" when Handsome Couple (he, possibly Italian with ponytail; she blonde and fit; both contagiously smiling) come over to chat it up with us.

A short time later, picture this. I have the letter A in my left hand (since I am the sinister sort). I move to place it on the board. On the board, if you please, picture the word MEN positioned horizontally. Perpendicular to it, separated by a conjoining blank space, reading downward is the word GIANT. At the precise moment that I move my hand downward with the letter A and I kind of mumble self-mockingly, "Heh, amen! a giant!" at that exact moment in through the doors walks a giantess of Olympian proportions. We're talking H-U-G-E. I'm sorry, don't be offended. It's just T-R-U-E. I could not help it. I just stopped in mid-air, mid-sentence, mid-Scrabble-word-placement (of course, I was not seriously about to posit the word "agiant"), and did a double take at the door. "A-men. A-giant."

We just broke up. What else can I tell you? You could not have choreographed it better. It even made dour ol' me laugh out loud in real life.

Fortunately, Amazon Dot did not seem to hear me. Relieved at that.

Your turn.

Any Scrabble stories?

(Aw, c'mon, I'll bet you've played Dirty Word Scrabble, Mist1. Or Glamourpuss, have you? Army, you? Dafaths? Any Scrabble stories from The Ephemerist Cohort, e.g., Michael C? Wanderlust Scarlett? Odat? Diapering Madwoman? JR? Ralph? Patti? Others?)

C-A-R-R-Y O-N.