SOME
NONPAREIL SYNCHRONICITIES
By Ute
Kaboolian
On Monday,
March 25, 2002, the phone rings. It's Wayne Thiel, our friend, an artist
and excellent guitarist. He calls me Mutti. His father was German, and
the
subway station nearest our high school in Berlin was called Thielplatz.
"Mutti, I just had to call you," Wayne said. "Wait till you hear this:
You're gonna love it. I've got this camera, okay? It takes pictures of
our
driveway. Some kids have been stealing hubcaps, and now even a plant of
ours is
missing, and I thought I'd better put the camera up again. To cover the
whole
driveway, I have to do it from the top window of the house. But from up
here, I
can only mount it sideways; there's no room to have the camera upright.
So the
picture on the VCR will show vertical what should be horizontal,
but it's better than nothing, right?"
"Right," I said.
"Well, as
soon as I was finished with the camera, I put the TV on; and there were
these
three guys talking about music. I listened for maybe a minute or so,
and was
wondering what group it was, when the host said, ‘And the group is
called 'Vertical
Horizon'. How'd you like that?"
"That's
just too good!"
"Thought
you would like it, Mutti." Wayne
said.
"I
certainly do. It's a great one. And guess what? I have a coincidence
for you
too. Remember John? You know the musician, Johnny Byrne? You met him at
one of
our barbecues?"
"Yeah,
sure. We had a good talk about music. He knew Muddy Waters and played
with the
John Earl Walker Band. I remember him," Wayne said.
"Okay,
then listen to this, Wayne.
He was over last Thursday, March 21, 2002."
I told Wayne the following: John
was here and I wanted to make chicken fricassee and needed capers, and
he went
to go get them for me.
"You want
me to get the nonpareil? Those are the ones I get for Marie.” Marie is
John’s
wife.
"What's
nonpareil?" I asked.
"I don't
know, but they're supposed to be the best."
"Oh, I
see," I said, "Then you might as well get them."
While John
went shopping, I looked at the journal he had wanted me to see, which
was
printed on the occasion of the 125- and 75-year anniversary of the
Sacred Heart
Church and School respectively, and when he came back I told him that
the three
introductory letters by the archbishop, the pastor and the principal
had all
been dated May 12, 2001.
"Guess whose anniversary May 12 is?" I asked him, and
when he shrugged his shoulders I said, "It's the anniversary of my
coming
to this country from Germany
in 1958, and I think of it as my second birthday."
"Then you
arrived on my mother's real birthday," John said. "She was born May
12, 1928, exactly 30 years before you came to America."
"Oh, wow,
that's some neat coincidence, isn't it, John? Wow!"
"Sure is.
Here's the jar of capers." John pointed to the writing on the jar.
"See? Nonpareil."
I put them on the table next to me while I kept reading the
journal's
"The Story of Sacret Heart and Highbridge" by Kevin T.
O'Reilly, Class of '56.
"Holy
cow," I said, "Look at what I'm reading here. It says, "In a
well planned maneuver, these opponents led by Lewis G. Morris brought a
flat
bottomed boat, named the "Nonpareil", loaded with
coal..."
John laughed out loud.”That's too
bizarre," he said, and I thought, how often is it one comes across the
word 'nonpareil'?
At this point
in my story Wayne
said, "That's too good."
"Yeah,” I
said, “and I’m not even finished. Wait a minute. I made myself a copy
of this
part of the journal. Hold on a minute." I got the paper. "Here, Wayne, listen to this: A little further down on
that same
page it says, 'However, because Morris's caper had
proven the Harlem River navigable...'
wild, hm? Both 'nonpareil'
and 'caper' on the same page, and I still had the jar with nonpareil
capers sitting next to me on the table!"
"Unbelievable."
"Yeah," I said, "I can't wait to tell my daughter about both our
coincidences when she stops by here after work tonight."
"I'm sure
she'll get a kick out of them," Wayne
said.
<>
That night
I told my daughter, and she agreed that the synchronicities were
amazing and
worthy to be recorded. The following night, Tuesday, she called me up,
"Mom, you won't believe this. I'm taking down a book to read that's
been
sitting unread on my bookshelf for, I don't know how long, and guess
who the
publisher is?"
"I have
no idea. Random House?" She had been working there at one time.
"No, get
ready for this: Nonpareil.”
"No way.
I don't believe it. First we don't seem to have come across the word at
all; we
don't even know what it means, and then it follows us everywhere?" By
then, I had looked it up in my little Scribner Bantam English
Dictionary. It
said: Nonpareil - 1. - without
equal; 2. - person or thing without
unequaled
excellence. Those timely coincidences were unequaled in my
book, and
they seemed to always come in clusters.
Next day,
Wednesday, the 27th, I'm calling my daughter at work to ask for the
book's
title and author because I'm getting ready to write it all down, and
she says,
"It's Desperate Characters by Paula Fox, and you won’t believe
when
I tell you that I just emailed a friend of mine to tell her how much I
like the
book so far, and the second I click “SEND” the phone rings, and
it's you
asking about the book. How's that for a timely finish to your story?"
"It's
nonpareil."
It turns out, however, that the story is not
quite finished. I had no title for my memoirs and thanks to John Byrne
and Kevin T. O'Reilly came up with the following: FACT OR FICTION - A Nonpareil Caper of Names And Numbers
And The Stories They Tell - A MEMOIR.
Six years later, on Monday, February 4, 2008,
at 4:30 AM we lost our dear John to cancer. Twelve years before, he had
lost part of his right lung, had been in remission for years,
but it had come up
on him again and beat him, this time, despite one whole year of heavy
chemo. Marie called me that Monday afternoon to tell me the sad news.
She had brought him to me for Christmas for the last time. We lit
candles and reminisced and were glad to be in each other's company. I
always thought of him as another son. The last phone conversation in
the hospital had been short. He was very weak. But he said, "It's so
good to hear your voice." I said, "It's so good to hear yours." That
Monday morning, when I went to turn on the lights because it was a
gloomy morning, the three fixtures John had mounted, malfunctioned as
soon as I used the one switch
he had also installed. Nothing else was affected, and there was nothing
wrong with any of the fixtures, or the switch, it turned out. I like to
think that that was John's way of saying good-bye to us. When we told
Marie, she said that her bulb had also gone out on that same Monday
morning. We all miss our dear John.
March 15, 2008, the same Kevin T. O'Reilly who wrote
"The Story of Sacred Heart
and Highbridge" emailed me, told me that he had googled his
name, had come upon my website and thought he should add some more
coincidences to the story. It turns out that in1958, the year I came to
the States exactly 50 years ago this year, he had a pen-pal, named Ute
- her name was Ute Siebert - and if that wasn't enough, she was also
from Berlin, namely Berlin-Grunewald, Cunostrasse. He lost contact wth
her in 1962. It just so happened that I opened
Kevin's email two days after he had sent it, namely March 17, 2008, St. Patrick's Day, which, brace
yourselves, is none other than Wayne Thiel's
birthday. To top it all, Kevin's first email was in excellent
German. I am only sad that our dear John did not live to see
Kevin's email. But maybe he knows about it anyhow.
On April 7, 2008 I called Marie to tell her about
this addendum to my website, and she said, "Do you know where Joseph is
at this moment?" Joseph is Marie's son and John's stepson.
"Where?" I asked.
"He took his vacation and as we are speaking is on
his way to Berlin."
"Wow!"
Ute's
Poetry and Musings