A SMALL WORLD "COINCIDENCE"

By Ute Kaboolian

During the sixties we lived in Clearview, N. Y. where my children attended P.S. 209. My husband, Haigaz Kaboolian, a spot builder - he built a few houses here, a few there - had bought a small triangular lot from a builder friend of his, complete with an architect's plans for a one family house and the assurance that a certain doctor would, after its completion, be interested in buying it, due to its proximity to the school. Haigaz built the house directly opposite the schoolyard of P.S. 209. The doctor, however, never materialized, and we moved in, instead. In its building stages, the triangular house looked peculiar from one side, though the sharp corner had been blunted. Ours was the only house on the block. It was framed by Willets Point Blvd, 16th Ave. and 166th Street. Explaining what a landmark was, the teacher told my daughter's class, "The Kaboolian house is a landmark."

I belonged to the PTA of P.S. 209 that, in April 1970, put on a talent show. The muse had just hit me. Out of the blue, I had written three poems, entitled "Universal Ideas", "Thoughts" and "Now" and I thought, 'here is my chance to prove to myself that I'm not afraid anymore to speak in front of an audience.' In high school I'd been allowed to recite from my seat. On the day of the talent show, the auditorium was filled to capacity. The MC had introduced me, saying that I had kept my light hidden behind a bushel long enough, and now, here I was standing upon the dreaded stage, dumbfounded, with my mind a total blank! All eyes were riveted on me, and I couldn't even remember my name! The nerve of me to think that I could do it. 'Get off the stage right now, Ute. Don't waste another moment of these people's time. This is embarrassing enough,' I thought.

I tried to walk off the stage, but couldn't. My feet seemed to be glued to the floor. I was terrified. My heart beat faster and faster, and the blood rushed to my head. But just at that moment, everything came flooding back, and I started to recite the first of my poems. A woman I didn't know sat in the back, right in the center of my field of vision. She caught my eye. She smiled and nodded with enthusiasm in time to the rhythm of the poem, as if she knew it by heart. Looking at her, I thought she was prompting me, and I finished all three poems without a hitch. Later, she came up to me and told me how much she had enjoyed my poems, and I thanked her for her encouragement. When I joined my family and asked them if they had noticed anything strange or had wondered at the long silence in the beginning, they said they thought it was deliberate. "It was effective, Ute. You had everyone's attention." I was elated.

Where had those answers to my questions about existence, which prompted me to write the three poems in the first place, come from? I wondered when, 14 years later and living in New Jersey, I came upon the Seth material and recognized a common theme. Had I listened to Seth in the inner realm? This reminded me of the time in 1950, in Germany, when I had wondered about the origin of language per se and subsequently had a series of vivid dreams speaking and understanding a Roman sounding language that was neither Latin nor French, nor Italian, nor Spanish. "Look up 'cordellas'," I was told in the dream – we had a Corda in class, that's how I remembered the word. I asked Frau Robe, who taught our class English and German. I tried looking it up in dictionaries and reference books in the library – to no avail. I had to wait until 1984 when I read my first Seth book in the spring, then devoured all available Jane Roberts books in short order and finally found out about my mysterious 'cordellas' and my dream language that I then realized had been Sumari all along. I read "Conversations With Seth" by Susan M. Watkins and read about the New York Boys who came to Jane's ESP class every Tuesday from Bayside, Queens. Some said Clearview was part of Bayside, others of Whitestone. 'Well, I would never find out if we were neighbors,' I thought.

Imagine my surprise when, on December 18, 1999, I e-mailed Barrie Gellis (Stewie Gould), one of the N. Y. Boys, after having come upon his website and the same day received the following from him:

"Hi, Let me just reply quickly for now…and do the longer reply later. I moved to Clearview in 1952--& went to P.S. 209 along with some of the other N.Y. Boys of Jane's class. All of us though, including those who didn't go to 209, hung out at 209, the bay, and Jerry's Candy Store on Utopia Parkway and 19th Ave. I lived down the block from you at 19th Ave & 166th Street– in the drive-in court. Ricky Stack lived right across the street from me. Richard Kendall lived around the corner of Jerry's Candy Store but went to P.S. 184."

Before attending P.S. 209 two of our three children attended P.S.184. My daughter, who knows html, on November 8th, 1999, made a website for me, entitled Ute's Poetry and Musings . I posted the three poems of the talent show, one of which, "Universal Ideas", was printed in THE UTOPIAN, the P.S. 209 PTA newspaper for which I became the artist the last few months we lived in Clearview. We sold our house in August of 1971 when we moved to Cliffside Park, N.J. Barrie told me in his e-mail to check out the Clearview site, put together by some of his friends. My daughter and I did so the very same evening and enjoyed going down memory lane. We both dreamed of the old neighborhood that very night. Finding out that the New York Boys were such close neighbors of ours, I almost flipped. It is such a small world! I took "Conversations" off the bookshelf and am reading it with renewed pleasure. It's like a homecoming all over again.