Perhaps it’s just my over-active imagination, but I feel like I am witness to an ever-increasing series of coincidences as I age.
Let’s take last week, for example. One day I went home for lunch and the phone rang. Caller ID said the call was from an Eckersley, so I picked up the phone and heard my aunt from Burnaby on the line.
“Hi Lorne, it’s Tina,” she said. “I just want to let you know that Emerson Eckersley died in Kimberley this morning.”
Nothing particularly odd about the call, other than that I have only talked to this aunt once in the last decade or more, and that was to inform her and my uncle about my mother’s death.
With the passing of Mom I have become largely out of the loop of extended family news. No more regular phone calls highlighted with who died this week. Even so, the call caught my attention because it included news about my cousin, who I run into occasionally—he attends the family functions that his parents did not.
Strangely, I don’t believe I ever met Emerson Eckersley, though I was aware of the family in Kimberley. I’m not even sure how he was related to my grandfather, who spent most of his life in Fernie but didn’t have much connection to his other family members.
The next day, I was working at my desk when a phone call came asking if we would be interested in printing a story about the 80th anniversary of the Grasmere Women’s Institute. The caller said our readers might be interested because of Creston’s own long history with a Women’s Institute. I told her that at the very least we would run the story on our web site if space isn’t available in the newspaper. I asked if she had a photo to go along with it.
Yes, she replied, there is a really good photo of a float in the Fernie parade in the 1950s, she said. It’s taken where the fire hall is now. Are you familiar with Fernie, she asked.
I was born in Fernie I told her.
Why don’t I know you?
I don’t know.
She hadn’t actually caught my name and when I told her she immediately said, “From West Fernie?”
She knew my grandparents house, which sits on the west corner of Highway 3 just before one hits the West Fernie Bridge from the west. In the 1950s and 1960s everyone seemed to know that house, because my grandfather had a spectacular garden with more than a thousand gladiolas among its many flowers. People routinely stopped and purchased bouquets, although he never advertised.
Mary, the caller asked.
My mom, I said.
And Bill was your dad.
Yup.
Then the little coincidence kicked in.
“I am a distant relative to the Eckersley family in Kimberley,” she said.
“Did you know that Emerson died yesterday,” I asked.
“Yes, I got a call from Kimberley,” she replied.
So within 24 hours I got a call reminding me of a part of the family that I know very little about, and another one from a relative of that very family.
In recent years I doubt that it is a rare week that passes when I am not reporting a curious little coincidence to Angela. Not a coincidence like me seeing someone in one place one day and in a different place the next. That’s just small-town living. The coincidences are never monumental, jaw-dropping experiences, just little tweaks that remind me of how and why life is so endlessly interesting.
