Let me share an interesting story of coincidence, love, and – just maybe – one of life’s mysterious details. It begins (and, mostly, ends) with an ear worm on a long drive. I was driving home from my camping trip, with a snippet of music stuck in my head. It was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time… like a piece of music I’d surely heard at some point, but can’t say I’m particularly familiar with, don’t listen to really at all, hadn’t heard recently anywhere… nonetheless, I kept humming it, kept trying to “figure it out” with da-da-dah’s, and dum-dee-dums… could not place it, at all. Kept humming it, kept trying to sing it, kept driving…
I finally arrived home, and soon after I made a point of mentioning the song stuck in my head to my Traveling Partner, and how mysterious it was to have this unfamiliar (and, I suspected, possibly “classical”) music stuck in my head (still). He rather matter-of-factly asked me to sing it for him – a request that in many years past I would have been purely unable to accommodate for anyone, and would have frozen me completely with dread and anxiety (I promise you, I’m no singer). Still, with love and trust in my heart, I went for it… carefully trying to capture the phrasing of the tune, and hopefully not be too terribly off key… it began quite slowly with a soft prolonged note… then a cascade of notes with a very distinctive cadence. It was what I could recall, and as I’d been singing it to myself for literal hours, that bit was pretty firmly fixed in my recollection. I was inclined to simply repeat it many times, though I felt certain there was “more to it than that…”, and said so. My partner had a most peculiar look on his face, and muttered something about how unlikely…
…He turned to his keyboard, and pulled up a piece of music… “That’s it!” I exclaimed. “Is this it?” he asked almost at the same time. He told me he’d been listening to it that very day… and we compared the time and timing… I was “listening to it” at the same time he’d been listening to it… though he’d never shared it with me, or said anything about it. Classical music isn’t really “my thing” generally… Bolero. Huh. Now when I hear it (and I’ve listened to several versions since that day), I entirely associate it with him, with us, and with this love we share. How strange is love? How strange is this odd coincidence?
I’ll say now that I tend to be a rather practically minded woman, day-to-day, largely because without the secure “guardrails” of rational thought, I could easily stray into the surreal, the unfounded, the ridiculous, and even the conspiratorial…but… I don’t know everything. None of us know “everything”. There’s a lot out there yet to be known, by anyone at all. There are mysteries still unsolved, unexplained. I put pretty much everything “ESP” or “psychically” connected into that category. No proof, really, so… I just don’t know. I refuse to stake a claim to knowledge or adopt an attitude of certainty. I recognize a coincidence when I experience one. I’m familiar with the bizarre and unusual. Like I said, there’s much I don’t know. I’m okay with uncertainty and with not knowing.
…I do know that I now love the music of Bolero, and this human being who listened to it on the day it was stuck in my head, when we were separated by distance and connected by love…
Does it need to be anything more than what it is? Does it need an explanation at all? I don’t think so. It’s enough just as it is. Mysterious and fond. Like love. 🙂
Evening Light 