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
