Coincidence

Next to my mom’s bed, in the dining room at home while she’s in hospice care, there’s an Aura Frame, one of those electronic picture frames that you can upload photos to from a distance. It’s a godsend for Mom who spends a lot of her lying-down time looking at what she calls her babies. Most are pictures of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren going by every 20 seconds or so. There are over 1400 pictures in Mom’s Aura. Four of them are of Forrest. One of them is the one I keep on my desk. My favorite one. His eyes look through me and into my heart as if he knows everything about me and loves me anyway.

Mom was having lunch in the living room on Friday when I went by her bed to the kitchen. It was Forrest’s would-be 26^th birthday so he was on my mind. When I walked into the dining room, there he was, that picture of him, looking at me from the Aura Frame. I stopped and took him in, said Happy Birthday, Forrest, waited till he was gone, then went on my way to fetch a cookie for Mom. What are the odds that that one photograph out of 1400 would be the one on Mom’s Aura as I came into the room? And how do I explain how ordinary it felt? Forrest has a way of showing up. I don’t expect him to, it just doesn’t surprise me anymore.

On Saturday, with two-and-a half hours to kill in the Chicago Airport, I found myself following all kinds of links on my phone. One of those was sent by The Atlantic Magazine with the title, “A 97-Year-Old Philosopher Faces His Own Death.” How could I not watch it? One of the old man’s persistent questions is, What’s the point? It made me wonder if the point is to ponder. I do that a lot. And I love coincidences.