“It is no great wonder if in the long process of time, while fortune takes her course hither and thither, numerous coincidences should spontaneously occur.” — Plutarch
“I’ve been looking for you my whole life!” I chortled, running around the table to give my birthday twin a big embrace. She reciprocated, but barely — she is a Brit, and, though I was raised in the U.K., I’m now a classic Californian hugger. My wife and I were having lunch in London with my old school pal and cycling buddy Paul and his girlfriend, and I’d just discovered that she and I shared a birthday — year, month and day. What an amazing coincidence!
Well, not really that amazing, considering Paul and I had been in the same class, and he’d met someone about the same age as himself. It was, in retrospect, a classic example of apophenia, our natural tendency to find and celebrate meaningful connections between unrelated things. In the 1950s, psychologist Carl Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli went one step further with their notion of “synchronicity,” defined by Jung an “acausal connecting principle.” In this now discredited theory, a supernatural psychic factor is at work, behind the scenes as it were, creating meaningful connections for us to marvel over. In Jung’s go-to example, a patient was telling him about a dream that featured a golden scarab, when (gasp!) a shiny beetle suddenly appeared at the window. He didn’t, naturally, write about the times he was hearing about a dream and nothing untoward happened.
For a string of supposedly amazing coincidences, there’s the now classic meme citing similarities between the deaths of John F. Kennedy (assassinated in 1963) and Abraham Lincoln (assassinated in 1865). For instance, Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846, becoming president in 1860; with Kennedy, it was Congress in 1946 and president in 1960. But there’s nothing intrinsically special about 100 years, it’s just our illogical fascination with round numbers. And since presidents are only elected in years evenly divisible by four, it’s not that surprising. This “coincidence meme” goes on to claim that Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln (true, first name Evelyn), while Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy. Except he didn’t, his secretaries were John Nicolay and John Hay.
The meme goes on to assert that assassins John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald were born 100 years apart. But they weren’t. Booth was born in 1838, Oswald in 1939. Then there’s the fact that both presidents were succeeded by someone with the name “Johnson” (Andrew and Lyndon). Not that big a deal, Johnson being the second most common surname in the U.S. after Smith. And if you’re still thinking “Johnson coincidences,” consider all the non-coincidences: One Johnson supported slavery, the other civil rights. One was impeached, the other wasn’t. One was from North Carolina, the other from Texas. And so on.
(In case you’re familiar with the salacious “Monroe” connection, let’s put it to rest. Supposedly, Lincoln was in Monroe, Maryland, a month before being shot, but no, Kennedy wasn’t — as the crass theory goes — “in” Monroe, Marilyn a month before his assassination. That misogynistic pun is in especially poor taste since she had died over a year before.)
I suppose we can all rattle off a couple or more amazing coincidences in our lives, of the “I dreamt of someone I hadn’t thought of in decades and bumped into her the next day in a coffee shop” variety. However delightful these happenings are and how much fun it is to relate (my birth twin!), truth is, they’re bound to happen once in a while, given our busy, peripatetic lives. What’s also bound to happen is the opposite: Thousands — perhaps millions over a lifetime — of completely unremarkable sightings. Somehow, “I was in Ramone’s earlier today and guess what? I didn’t see anyone I knew!” just doesn’t make for a conversation starter.
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9@yahoo.com, planethumboldt.substack.com) will buy anyone born on Sept. 6, 1942, a Humboldt Mud at Old Town Coffee and Chocolates.
This article appears in After the Flooding.