what's for supper?

when is a coincidence just a result of random choices and situations and when is a coincidence something else...? if you google 'coincidence' you end up getting many many sites with many many explanations on why true coincidence does not exist and is rather just a mathematical equasion. and let me tell you that these mathematicians LOOOOOVE to go into incredible and excruciatingly boring detail about the how's, why's and wherefore's.

i am not a scientist. i am not a mathematician. i am an instinctive and intuitive creature... so my bias, when presented with a coincidental occurrence is to look at it and either get shivers or not. lately, i've been getting shivers.

my mom's side of the family has always seemed to just be a little more linked and in touch with each other than my dad's side. there's no hard evidence other than how supportive that side of my family has been, how close they were (and still are) and how much my grandmother just 'knew' stuff about you. :) my grandma k was very much a devoted catholic, but she was somehow wired into the magick of her scots and irish blood. perhaps it was through her great faith (in her deity and in her family) that she seemed to know events in your life before they happened - or perhaps she just willed the events into destiny... i don't know... i'm also not a theologist!

but back to coincidence and my life. when i was a university student here in toronto, i had to survive on very little money. from time to time my mom would send me 'care-packages' from my alberta home. often times there would be something in that box of goodies that i had thought i needed only the week or days before. for example, i remember thinking i needed to head to honest ed's to pick up some new cheap facecloths and low and behold.. when i opened the next box - there was a stack of 4 new plushy white facecloths for me. another time i was thinking i needed a hardcover book for a new journal that i wanted to keep for story ideas. the next thing you know, i had a care package that included 2 hardcover journals.

a skeptic could say that facecloths and notebooks are standard things that a mom would send to a child in university - but the fact remains that she sent those items just when i needed them.

i believe.

and more recently (since my university days are LOOOONG behind me) the coincidences have spread to cooking and baking and now also include my sister. i'm still in toronto and my mom is still in stony plain and my sister now lives in edmonton. this weekend while i was on the phone with my mom she was telling me about a dish she was making for supper (a yucky dish i can't stand, but that she and my dad love... sauerkraut with potatos and pork hocks). i told her that the last time we talked she was making sauerkraut. she laughed and said she hardly ever made it, and was only making it this last time because of some big edmonton eskimo football game that was going to be on tv that afternoon.

i agree that is just a coincidence. i tend to talk to my mom on weekends and on weekends she would be more likely to make a big dish like sauerkraut because she and my dad would be more likely to have guests over. you know, to watch things like important football games. i see that. i'm not that touched!

but where the coincidence factor kicks in is when my mom told me that she and my sister had begun starting to make the same dish for dinner several times over the last while. dishes that they hadn't talked about in advance. they would be talking on the phone and discover that they're making the same soup or casserole or other things that meat-eaters in alberta might make.

my sister and i both love to cook and we both grew up in a house where our mom made dinner ever single night... and made full dinners with a main course, a veggie, bread and a salad. every single night. so my sister may have picked up some recipes from my mom's repertoire... that is true... but to make the same thing on the same day... that's just beyond random. there's some sort of connection there beyond just looking in the 'fridge and pulling out the same ingredients.

and to further prove that... as my mom was telling me about her sister and their double hamburger soup incident i said, "since we're talking recipes, i need to ask you for your banana bread recipe." she asked why, in a somewhat strange voice. i had made banana bread the day before and i was not happy with it. it was good, yes, but it wasn't as good as my mom's is. as it turns out, my mom had made 3 loaves of banana bread on the same day i did. weird, huh? she made a loaf for herself and a loaf for both my sister and brother's families.

now i think that's just too bizzarre for words.

[music | sigur ros, "glosoli"]