folly beach

Friday night, fireworks lit up the sky over Folly Beach. An almost full moon traced a path across the waves as the Big Dipper stretched across the star-strewn dark velvet. And I enjoyed it all in the presence of my singing bird, snug in each other's arms, sharing the impromptu juxtaposition of man-made and celestial points of light.

The timing couldn't have been better. In fact, the timing was ... incredible. If this were to have occurred in a movie, you would have thought it such a contrived bit of romantic wishful thinking. But 'twasn't in a movie. The event was real, the setting was real, I was there and so was he. Perhaps it was simply a dream. But I was fully awake and so was he. Maybe it was a drunken hallucination... but no alcohol was involved, not a single drop.

Coincidence? Simply "a striking occurrence of two or more events at one time apparently by mere chance"? A phenomenon which appears to, and is constructed by, the mind? Hmmm... You certainly must be actively looking for correlations between events to say "Aha! A coincidence!", but that is common for an analytical mind. We all seek guidance outside ourselves, we all want to believe that we are on the right path, that our decisions are sound. So, I can look at the above event in scientific terms: we were both there by decisions made in the past, deliberate decisions which made both of us who we are now, conscious decisions which led us both toward that moment in time. Perhaps they were not always perceived to be the right decisions at the time, but neither of us would be who we are today if we had made different choices. I prefer to refer to the wise (and even somewhat wise-aleck!) words of one of my favorite authors, Douglas Adams. "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." Even Dr. Seuss would have agreed with that description, especially when used in accordance with the phenomenon of coincidence.

We have no friends in common, no coworkers to have introduced us, no soirees where we might have even accidentally seen each other. And yet... there we were, on the same beach, under the same moon, thrilled by the same fireworks... in each other's arms. Incredible.