A good friend of mine, who is notable for being an accomplished and published writer herself, sarcastically commented (and let me tell you, conveying sarcasm in a post or a comment is no easy task) that whining is a great way to increase readership. Ok, so maybe she had a point, although urging me to refrain from whining is like asking the Pacific to give it up already with all the waves. But I think I’ve discovered an actual effective shortcut to a larger audience, short of producing genuine scintillating content, which sounds like a lot of work to me. You just need to track down long-lost family members, especially the ones who have huge families of their own, and better still, ones who seem to have more than a passing familiarity with electronic communication and social media…and voila! Before you know it, you’ve gone from Mr. Backwater Obscurity to Dr. Up And Coming. Yesterday marks the first time that Kibbitz Corner broke the triple digit barrier with over a hundred page views. A few more days like that and maybe The Daily Beast will finally start accepting my calls.
One of the best aspects of this new blog of mine, written without the counterpoint scoffing and mockery of my pragmatic and skeptical blogmate, is that I can freely explore some of my less mainstream theories and beliefs. If there’s going to be subsequent mocking and scoffing, it’s going to have to come from the readers, and I always welcome contrarians to the discussion. Anyway, in the last couple of days, I’ve done a lot of talking and writing about synchronicity, which is a concept at the core of the New Age bestseller “The Celestine Prophecy“. The whole idea of synchronicity is one familiar to every homicide detective in America, which basically stated is: There are no coincidences.
My whole last week has been just one instance of synchronicity after another. I’d just spent about a month exchanging multiple emails with my cousin Fred in Chicago. Fred is an elderly fellow (and by that I mean someone at least a year older than me) whose hobby and passion is genealogy. Fred has lovingly compiled as thorough a family tree of the Wendell clan as is possible with a lineage that can’t exactly be traced back to the Mayflower or the Tudors. Most of my ancestors arrived at Ellis Island with only very limited knowledge of their own points of origin or of their own forebears much beyond parents. Fred has long known that my father had two other children before me. One was a son, Michael, born to Dad’s first wife, Althea, but we didn’t know where or when. Best guess was about 1940. The other was a girl born to his third wife (like I said before, Dad got around), Jean. In that case, we had no further information. Not maiden name, date of birth, or place…nada. I’d tried to track down both of these lost Wendells over the years, with absolutely no luck. Fred, however, was convinced that he could somehow crack the code and pull a rabbit out of his hat (don’t you just love mixed metaphors?). In my last email to him (it was March 18…I looked it up), I wished him the best, but offered little hope of success. Prior to Fred contacting me in March, I hadn’t given my MIA siblings much thought. I figured that there are just some mysteries in life that are meant to be forever unsolved.
Fast forward to April 11 (4-11-14, a numeric palindrome…meaningful?) and I’m contacted out of the blue by a woman looking for information on my father, and the woman turns out to be my niece. Her mother is the sibling I had zero expectation of ever locating. Going from thinking about that sister, Lynn, in March, to being contacted by her daughter in April was synchronicity. That her daughter, Tami, lives in Champaign, Illinois, where Mrs. Left and I resided before moving here, is synchronicity. That Lynn is a cat person (She has three cats. We have three cats) is synchronicity. That Lynn and her husband are dancers (albeit squaredancers) and Mrs. Left and I are dancers is synchronicity.
But here’s where it gets weird, and where I get more convinced than ever of my most cherished vanity, that the world really does revolve around me, or as chronicled in the song by brilliant comedian Sean Morey, “It’s All About Me”. Want to know when the last time I thought for even one second about Kansas City was? Well, I’m not a baseball fan, so I only know that the Royals play there because I know a lot of otherwise useless information. And I haven’t eaten meat in over fifteen years, so I haven’t paid a lot of attention to any Kansas City steaks on the menu. But on Friday, I found that I had a whole other family living in Kansas City. On Sunday, the lead story on the national news was of the three shootings at Jewish facilities in Kansas City. Synchronicity. Is there some kind of psychic message in that tragedy meant for me? I hope not, but it still gives me goosebumps. And as an aside, and a topic for a whole different blog post, the hate-blinded anti-Semitic bigoted murderer in Kansas got a taste of irony that could have been dished out by Rod Serling himself. He took his gun to a Jewish Community Center and a Jewish retirement home and started firing at anyone he saw, looking to bag him some Jews…and all three of his victims were Christian.
BW
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