Leo Kottke and "Pamela Brown"

With the "pause" of the Covid19 Crisis, we all seem to have more time to contemplate, remember, and reflect..............I was surprised when I found myself humming a song by Leo Kottke that I haven't thought about since the 70's, as my first husband took the album when we divorced in 1979!  I just felt like sharing it here because it is just such a perfect homage to the serendipity that forms our fates, or better put, our storylines!  

For that matter, I guess I haven't thought about Paul in a number of decades.  We parted young and amiably, and not too long after I was gone he met his life partner, they got married, and we long ago fell out of touch.  But thinking of serendipity, and for that matter, Leo Kottke's Pamela Brown,    there is a perfect woven fabric of story-threads in our brief time together as well.  

Paul and his best friend Peter were from Canada, near Toronto, and after graduating, decided to take his volkswagan bug and go to Mexico.  They drove down the California coast and visited the famous political hotbed of Berkeley, where their car broke down.  I was living in a warehouse with a lot of artists in Berkeley then (back when there actually were warehouses and arts districts full of artists).  In those days if you had a volkswagon  you were politically correct to fix it yourself, and there were do it yourself manuals for "The People's Car" .  In Berkeley there was a garage where you could also rent space to work.  So Paul and Peter decided to hang out in Berkeley for a while while they fixed the Volkswagon.

Meanwhile, I and my artistic comrades were planning our Warehouse Halloween party.  I had a young man who was going to join me at the party, and on the other side of town,  Paul had met a woman who invited him to come with her to the same party.  The party was a great success, but both of our prospective dates didn't show up, and Paul and I got together out of sympathy.  

In the course of our time together in Berkeley, Paul's brother, David, came to visit and decided to remain in San Francisco, where he became a photographer.  His younger sister, Pat, also came to visit, and became a nanny for one of the artists in the Warehouse, and ended up meeting a young man from Sri Lanka there.  They married, and she moved to Sri Lanka with him, and they had three children.  And Peter, Paul's travelling friend, met Belinda while in Berkeley - they married and had a son.  Paul and I left Berkeley, and moved to Wisconsin, where Paul remained, met his future wife, and together they eventually moved to Texas.

So............Paul, Peter, David, and Pat never went back to Canada.  Marriages happened, and children were born.  New careers.  All because a car happened to break down in Berkeley, and I and Paul got dumped by our dates for a Halloween party.  Serendipity!

https://youtu.be/9cweBs-tdaA

Serendipity

"We must be willing to let go of the life we planned
so as to have the life that is waiting for us." — Joseph Campbell

I was thinking lately about Serendipity, which is actually a vague word that I kind of.....maybe....understand, or.....contribute to its continuing creative evolution by using it..........or.......? Maybe it's kind of related to synchronicity? Or, kismet?

I was thinking about how lives seem, sometimes, to be woven from random accidents.

Here's an example. Back in 1975 I was living at an artists warehouse in Berkeley. It was almost Halloween, and we were planning our big bash. I had a date for the evening, and a costume.

A little earlier, Paul and Peter from Ontario, Canada, had just graduated from college, and decided to have an adventure by driving across Canada in Paul's Volkswagen bug. They had gone through Vancouver, and were headed down the coast on their way to Mexico, their destination for the winter, until they headed back to Canada when the weather was friendly again.

When they got to Berkeley, the engine blew up.

In those days, if you were a counter culture type, and you had a Volkswagen, you pulled out your friendly counter-cultural volkswagon repair manual, and fixed it yourself. Taking a volkswagon to a mechanic was so "establishment". They even had do-it-yourself garages in Berkeley where one could rent space to work.

While in Berkeley, Paul met a woman who invited him to a Halloween party; which is why he turned up wearing a large plastic garbage bag. His date, however, never turned up. Feeling dejected, Paul wandered around looking for someone to dance with, and found me. My date had also failed to turn up, and feeling equally dejected, I started dancing with the tall, skinny guy in the garbage bag.

To make a long story shorter, Paul (and his friend Peter) stayed on in Berkeley. Peter met Belinda, got married, and had a child, Gabriel. Paul and I got married, moved to Wisconsin, and a few years later were amiably divorced. I moved to Vermont, and Paul met a woman there in Madison who he married, and they later moved to Austin.

While still in California, Paul's sister Pat came out to visit me, and there she got a job as a nanny. She lived in the Warehouse for a while, and met a man from Sri Lanka. They got married, moved back to his homeland, had 3 children, and Pat is still in Sri Lanka. Paul's brother, David, also came to visit, and ended up moving to San Francisco; he lives there still.

None of them ever returned to Canada. All those children born, and careers begun.

If the VW engine hadn't blown up, or if my date, or Paul's date, had shown up, none of it would have happened. Serendipity....................


Wikipedia says that:

"Serendipity is the ability of making accidental but fortuitous discoveries, especially while looking for something entirely unrelated. The word has been voted as one of the ten English words that were hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company. However, due to its sociological use, the word has been imported into many other languages."




“Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends”..........Joseph Campbell