Coincidences

Last night we took part in a "progressive dinner" with around two dozen members of our church. We met at one home for starters, then moved on to our home for soup and salad, on to a third home for the main courses, and then to the fourth and last for deserts. All pre-arranged, but all pot luck as to what kind of food would be found at each home.

We fell upon two sets of coincidences during the evening. When we first moved to Ottawa in 2001, we met another family, the Wrights, who have twins with autism. We knew these boys were about Adrian's age but what we discovered last night was that Adrian and the twins attended the same behavioural camps near Haliburton in the early 1980s. At that time we lived in Red lake while the Wrights lived in Ottawa some 2000 kms away. When the boys attended the week long camps, we, the parents, never met each other. It was only 25 years or so later that we met as we attend the same church.

For the second coincidence, one person turned out to be the daughter of  immigrant parents from our home town, Burslem, who emmigrated to Canada the same year as we did. We had long conversations about "pot banks", "seconds", the Trent and Mersey Canal, Shelton Bar (The steel mill where her father worked), and Royal Doulton. Our pen-and-ink drawings of scenes from The Potteries were fascinating to her.

It is a small world.