The Serendipity of Crossing Paths — Then and Now

Follow Jean as she reflects on how a viral quote about destiny and connection unexpectedly intertwined with a moment from her own past. What began as a simple search for proper attribution — the kind of rabbit hole she falls into with Olympic‑level skill — turned into a walk that reminded her how the roads we choose, and even the ones we avoid, sometimes lead us straight to the people and moments that shaped us the most. In this piece, she follows that thread of serendipity all the way to a dusty construction site and a quiet, unexpected smile… AL

There’s a lovely viral quote going around that I now know is attributed to a blogger named Darius Roman. It goes like this:

In English they say, “I’m lucky to have you.” In poetry they say, “Out of all the people the world has created, of all the roads I could have taken, and all the lives I could have lived, some miracle of timing allowed my story to cross paths with yours.”

If you know me, you’ve already guessed I went down the proverbial rabbit hole to figure out who authored those words. I hate it when people don’t give proper credit to things they copy from one place and paste into their own corner of cyberspace. Even an “author unknown” is preferable to letting people assume the author is the person sharing quotes like this. If you do that, stop it.

After following several false leads, my good old friend Google AI finally found the target of my sleuthing. It describes Darius Roman as “a contemporary internet poet who achieved viral popularity on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. He is best known for his modern, romantic rewrites of common phrases.” Blah, blah, blah — whose “writing relies on accessible language (does that mean he doesn’t use big words?), grand romantic imagery, and themes of destiny, fate, and connection over sheer luck.” I swear, sometimes these AL bios sound like they were written by someone who got paid by the adjective.

The first time I read the quote, I hand‑copied it off my computer screen and carried it around with me on one of my daily walks around campus, trying to decide if I could turn it into a blog post. I do that sometimes for inspiration. Finally I gave up trying to figure out why this quote resonated so strongly with me and asked AI that question — and this was the answer:

Why It Resonates • Contrast: It starts with a simple, everyday phrase and upgrades it into deep gratitude. • Scale: It contrasts the vastness of the universe with a single, specific meeting. • Timing: It frames love not just as a choice, but as a rare accident of time.

Well, of course it does. I could have told you that… if I had sat in a corner from here to next week. Instead, I outsourced the thinking to AL, which at my age feels like a perfectly reasonable life choice.

Back to the walk: I took a route I rarely go on because it means spending a block in close proximity to a large construction zone. It was after dinner, so I assumed the workers had all gone home and it would be quiet enough to hear my own thoughts. I was wrong. A street sweeper was going back and forth, cleaning dirt off the future parking lot, moving around pallets of construction material, scaffolding, and other machinery. I set the brakes on my rollator and sat down to watch him work. Nothing says “wild night out” like parking your rollator to watch heavy machinery.

I had more than a passing interest in the machine across the street. My husband owned a street sweeper before his massive stroke and he used it to clean large malls and a multi‑plex theater around town. He even had a contract to clean the streets in a small nearby town. The sweeper I was watching, though, was 35 years newer than the one my husband had before the turn of the century. Don would have loved the fact that the newer one has water jets underneath that dampens the dirt before the gutter broom spins debris to the center broom that, in turn, spins it into the collection hopper. Street sweeping back in his day was dusty business — but he loved it. He loved big machinery, the bigger the better.

One of the blessings or curses — it can change from day to day — of getting old is that memory triggers come at you when you least expect them. Some days it’s sweet nostalgia, and other days it’s ‘why did my brain save that?’ It was like looking at a snapshot from the past when the man across the street stopped his work to raise a coffee cup to his lips while letting another vehicle go by. I’d seen my husband do the very same thing hundreds of times while he sat high in a street sweeper or front end loader seat.

It also occurred to me that I was experiencing a moment of serendipity. Had I taken my usual route around the lake, I wouldn’t have crossed paths with a memory trigger that brought a smile to my face. And I wouldn’t have been reminded of the simple truth behind Darius Roman’s sentiment — that out of all the people in the world and all the roads any of us might travel, sometimes a small miracle of timing lets our story intersect with someone who changes everything. ©

                                                         How do street sweepers work?

 

If you like Political Humor you might enjoy this AL created video about Trump's claiming to change the name of Lake Ontario. The creator has a Facebook page called Canadian Resistance Army and all of its videos make me laugh. 

On related political note: Google is no longer my good friend. Google Maps changed the name Lake Ontario to Lake America on their map and Mapquest didn't (at least not as of today). Boycott on for me.

S is for Stories—the Ones I Didn’t Tell

I came up with four words for the letter S in the A to Z Challenge: secrets, stuff, snow and serendipity.

Serendipity was the first to go. It’s one of my favorite words in the English language, and I’ve had plenty of serendipitous moments in my life, but none of them fit my theme of the humans, habits, hidden joys and heartaches that shaped my world. Still, who doesn’t love a story about the universe lining things up just right? That thought reminds me of the day I got myself in trouble at book club by using the word serendipity in the wrong company.

The book was My Mrs. Brown. As the facilitator went around the room, women offered comments like, “It was a sweet book,” and “It was a feel-good book.” When it was my turn, I said I thought it was mostly boring. Someone laughed and said, “We can always count on Jean to have a different opinion.”

Then the next woman gushed about how the book was full of divine interventions. “It was so inspirational!”

Say what?

I asked her for an example. She said it was a divine intervention that the main character took a job packing up the house of a wealthy woman who had died. Finding a dress in the closet was a divine intervention. Someone giving Mrs. Brown a book about fashion was a divine intervention.

I couldn’t help myself. “I’d call all those things serendipity. How do you define a divine intervention?”

She bristled. “I don’t believe in serendipity. Everything is divine intervention!”

I took that to mean only non-believers use the word serendipity. Since I’m an agnostic and it’s one of my favorite words, I would have let it drop before we wandered into religion—but someone else asked if I thought serendipity was always happy little events. She threw me a life-line.

“Yes,” I said. “I just don’t think God has time to help someone find a dress when there are more important things going on in the world.”

“So you’re saying divine interventions are more like miracles,” she said, clarifying my words.

Bingo. She won the Kewpie doll.

Next I tried snow as my prompt, but that went nowhere fast. Long-time readers know my husband plowed snow for over forty years and I did it for seventeen. It’s well documented in this blog. But newcomers might enjoy hearing about a game we occasionally played in the middle of the night when conditions were just right. We called it Rat Hockey.

Yes, real rats.

They’d venture out onto the mall parking lot and we’d escort them across it with two or three trucks, turning our plows back and forth to make the rat slide across the icy surface. We’d “steal” the rat from each other mid-slide, and you scored if you were the one who ran it into a snowbank. As far as we knew, none of the rats were harmed. We’d see them dig their way out of the snowbank and look around as if to say, “What the hell just happened?” It’s a wonder none of us ever collided. Imagine explaining that to an insurance adjuster.

Then I moved on to stuff, but that got cut too. I’d just watched a couple episodes of Hoarders, and I didn’t want readers thinking I had—or ever had—stuff in that quantity or quality. But lately I’ve been scaring myself with my inability to throw out three glass jars that once held Meijer-brand peaches. They’re such a pretty shape. Surely I can find a use for them. I’m almost afraid to go to Meijer this week for fear one of those peach jars will jump in my cart like a stray kitten no one could leave behind. If I buy peaches every two weeks, you do the math. Hoarding has to start somewhere.

The last word I crossed off was secrets. As much as I up-chuck my life online, one could assume I’ve already dissected every minute of my time on earth. I haven’t. Not by a long shot. One secret in particular I've been keeping since 1969. I finally told my youngest niece a year ago. She said all the right things—“I’m so sorry that happened to you” blab, blab, blab—but it didn’t make me feel better. It wasn’t cathartic. Remembering that made me realize I can’t write about secrets. Not this year.

Having eliminated all my S word prompts I have nothing left in my writer’s tool box! I guess I’ll have to skip forward to my T topic for tomorrow. Please come back. ©

My Second Gay Date (Sort of) and the Off Broadway Elephant

Some stories arrive dressed in sequins and drama. Others show up in bowling shoes, clutching a free ticket and a bottle of Imodium. This one has a little of both. It’s about mistaken signals, unexpected invitations, and the kind of serendipity that only happens when you stop trying to choreograph your own life. It’s not a coming-out story—it’s a coming-around story. To friendship, to truth-telling, and to the curious ways we find ourselves in the company of elephants, both literal and metaphorical. It's about how far society has come—or hasn’t.  AI…..

Over the years I’ve had several friends who are gay. One I'd known since we were both toddlers and his parents ended up divorcing over their son’s sexuality. Another guy I thought I knew well in college didn't come out of the closet until after his elderly mother died. By then he was in his sixties and his coming out was an ‘aha moment’ that made pieces of my own life fall into place. We had dated for several years and while we talked about getting married, I’m grateful that we didn’t. I can’t imagine the pain a woman goes through when she thinks her closeted spouse is rejecting her in the bedroom and she has no clue why. 

And then there was my work friend and ski buddy in the '60s who agonized over telling his military-career father that he is gay. I'm not sure if he ever did. He moved out of town to put distance between him and his family and we lost track of each other. These three guys are the defining factors in why I fully support working towards a world where sexual orientation is no longer a “dirty little secret.” Secrets hurt both the teller and the ones being sheltered from the truth. Live and let live, that’s my motto. 

Sidebar here: I thought ‘live and let live’ was a proverb based on Bible scripture but Google corrected my misconception. The phrase is a Dutch proverb and it’s earliest appearance in print was in a 1622. “The core idea of tolerance and peaceful coexistence is central to its meaning” and that’s something our country would do good to resume working toward. (Rant off.) 

Back on topic: Another related event involving a gay acquaintance happened in the same time frame as when I met my husband. I joined a women’s bowling league on the advice from newspaper columnist Ann Landers. I had sent her a letter bemoaning the fact that I was 27 and still wasn’t married. Blah, blah, blah. Apparently, it wasn’t an unusual problem because I got a form letter back telling me to not sit at home waiting, get out and do things I like doing and I’d meet someone. I leaned into that advice as if my life depended on it. I joined clubs and gyms and took night classes. The only thing I didn’t try is church. 

It did work—it’s how I started dating Don—but not before I accidentally went on a date with a gay woman. She knew we were on a date. Naive me, didn’t. I figured it out the next league bowling night when afterward I went to the attached bar with my future husband, who I’d met the week before. She came in, sat down next to me and put her hand on my thigh possessively. I removed it. That was repeated a few times before she said words to the effect that she thought I liked her. “I do, but not like that!” I replied. To this day, I don’t know what gave her the wrong impression—I was the most boy-crazy person I knew. That “date” we were on? I thought we were two lioness out for an evening of making ourselves available for the King of the Jungle to find us.

Where is all this going? I just went on my second gay date. Not really. It wasn’t a date but I did go to an off Broadway play with two gay ladies. I don’t know whether to call it a stroke of luck, a happy accident or a $209 fluke or something else. Here’s how it happened.  I play Mahjong with one of them and she mentioned that she and her partner had tickets to see Water for Elephants and I expressed how much I loved the book and the movie. Both are on my list of top favorites. “How are they going do a story that features an elephant?” I asked. “She’s a major character in the story.”  “Puppets,” she replied.

The next morning, I got phone call from Ms. Gay Friend and her partner. A woman they were going to see the play with that night couldn’t go and she was offering me the ticket for free. I hemmed and hawed, listing every excuse I could think of to talk myself out of going. Not because of who I’d be going with but because I was having a bit of IBS at the time and I knew those seats in the theater are in long rows of 30 to 40 seats and their bathrooms not the easiest to find.

I’m also not a spur of the moment person but no matter what excuse I came up with, Ms Gay and her partner came up with a solution or answer I couldn’t refute. Finally I caved, promised I’d take an anti-diarrhea pill and two 500 mg of Tylenol and all would be fine. They promised to take good care of me. Said they wouldn’t leave me alone to have a panic attack—which, the older I get, I’m more prone to having in new situations. Not serious panic attacks, mind you—it was just a tiny stretch of the truth I used to wiggle out of going. But once I said it, I was locked into that little gray lie.

If you’ve seen Water for Elephants on stage, you already know that the large cast was full of feats of acrobatics, puppetry and cirque soleil style action. There was so much going on you didn’t know where to look first. I LOVED it! I’m not sure if a person who didn’t already know the storyline would be able to follow it. That part was a little sketchy, I thought, but the 20-something girls sitting next to me had not read the book nor seen the movie and one of them said she liked the production better than she thought she would. She, by the way, was on a very obvious gay date—but unlike me fifty years ago, she knew it. 

I recently came across a quote by an American photographer, Sally Mann, that nailed what I feel about storytelling.  “The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don't have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.” 

And sometimes, life hands you a story so full of serendipity, all you have to do is write it down. © 

 

Hot Book Club Discussion: Serendipity or Divine Intervention?

I have a love-hate relationship with my book club down at the senior hall. I like that I get a monthly opportunity to read and discuss books I otherwise would not pick for myself to read. It’s like taking a college class without having to pay tuition. We need to challenge our thinking from time to time---if for no other reason than to confirm that our biases are based on something other than our imaginations. A book discussion can open up our minds to new ways of thinking about any given topic but the problem with my twelve member book club is I’m often the only odd man out, so I have to decide if I want to defend my point of view or put a zipper on my mouth. It’s an adrenaline rush either way.

At our June meeting we discussed My Mrs. Brown. (I wrote about a passage in the book in an earlier blog, about how the main character takes a framed photo out of her bedside table drawer every night and displays it, then every morning she puts it back in the drawer.) As the club facilitator went around the room asking everyone how we liked the book, ladies said things like, “it was a sweet book” or “it was a feel good book” but when it was my turn I said I thought it was mostly a boring book to which someone commented, “We can always count on Jean to have a different opinion.” When the laughter ended and it was time for the next woman to give her opinion she gushed about how the book was full of divine interventions. “It was so inspirational!” Say what? I couldn’t help it, I had to ask for an example of a divine intervention in the book. She said it was a divine intervention that the main character took a job helping to pack up the house of a wealthy woman who died. Finding a dress in the closet that Mrs. Brown loved was a “divine intervention.” Someone giving Mrs. Brown a book to read about fashion was a “divine intervention.” I had to say what I was thinking: “I’d call all those things serendipity. How do you define a divine intervention?” I asked.

She was a little---okay, a lot---defensive and miffed when she replied, “I don’t believe in serendipity, everything is divine intervention!” I took that to mean only non-believers use the word ‘serendipity’ and since it’s one of my favorite words and I call myself an agnostic I would have let it drop before the whole thing turned into a discussion of religion. But it happened anyway when someone else asked me if I thought serendipity was always happy little events. She threw me a life-line and I took it. “Yes,” I answered, “I just don’t think God has time to intervene to help someone find a dress when there are more important things in the world to attend to.” “So you’re saying that divine interventions are more like miracles,” the woman holding the life-line said, clarifying my words. Bingo.

When you use the word ‘God’ in that group we can count on one member to get into sermon mode. And so she went on and on about how there’s no difference between divine intervention, coincidence and serendipity or between wishes and prayers. Ya, I know, you’re thinking that I challenged that ‘wishes and prayers’ idea, too. Trust me, I wanted to say that wishing I had a bowl of ice cream isn’t the same as praying for world peace but I zipped up my lips. She’s got a Doctor of Divinity degree so I know better than to question her. But when she came up for air, words slipped out of my mouth with no forethought. Oops. “And with that sermon,” I said, “we don’t have to go to church next Sunday.” Everyone laughed including the divinity school grad. I’m just glad the parting of the Red Sea didn’t come up in her sermon because I probably would have suggested---for the sake of argument---that some would call it serendipity that a temporary land bridge from an underwater earthquake made it possible for Moses to cross the Red Sea. It wouldn’t have been much of a debate, though, because if I believed in divine intervention this easily-explained-by-science thing happening just when Moses and the Israelites needed it would qualify as a miracle---or serendipity on steroids if the word ‘miracle’ isn’t part of your vocabulary. When you go looking for reasons to believe or to not believe in a Supreme Being, you will find exactly what you want to find. 

On the way home I thought about how the book club discussion clarified that I don’t believe in divine intervention any more than my nemesis believes in serendipity. God controls everything, according to people in her camp of belief, like a puppet master, where I don’t see the world that way. We were pecking around the very foundations of world religions. Once I came to that conclusion it was easier to understand why she got her hackles up over the word, ‘serendipity.’ Her fatalistic view of a Supreme Being controlling our lives is polar opposite of my world view where I define God as the combined goodness of mankind aka when we come together in love and good intentions, we ARE God. Literally. But there are places where I do not dare speak those words of “heresy” out loud. ©

 

Serendipitous Inspiration

Saturday morning I couldn’t decide if I needed a shower or not before taking myself out to lunch on a dark, raining day. Dermatologists don’t recommend daily showers for old people if you’re not doing stuff to get sweaty and dirty. Our thinning skin apparently is chronically too dry which exposes us to all kinds of nasty skin ailments, the least of which is wrinkles. I don’t care about wrinkles but I’d like to avoid cracking skin and eczema, thank you very much, so I listen to my doctor. I hadn’t been doing much but sitting at the computer so I stuffed my iPod buds in my ears and made a decision to get sweaty with music and exercise so I’d have a good reason to hit the shower. 

It felt good to listen to my old 'power walking' playlist. In my world that meant it was time to strut around inside my house, arms swinging and knees pumping high. I stop at certain places where I have something to hold on to to do a few leg lifts, squats or old-people dance moves---anything to get my heart rate up and my muscles working. My 'power walking' playlist includes: Stayin’ Alive, The 5^th of Beethoven, The William Tell Overture, Night Fever, Gangham Style, Hooked on Tchaikovsky and All These Things That I’ve Done. As you might guess I don’t have any ‘50s music on my iPod and I dread the day when I’m in a nursing home and the activity director thinks she’s doing a good thing by flooding the place with Elvis, Pat Boone and Bobby Darin. That’s what they do---match the music to the era in which the majority of their residents came of age. Actually, I should have ended that sentence with, “I dread the day when I’m in a nursing home.” Well, I’m not there yet and I’d better not forget it!

Exercise is supposed to be good for your mental health, too, a perk that I could use right now. I haven’t been doing much since last spring which is one of the reasons why I dug out my iPod and put it on the charger a few days before resurrecting my old power walking routine. According to HelpGuide.com exercise “promotes all kinds of changes in the brain, including neural growth, reduced inflammation, and new activity patterns that promote feelings of calm and well-being. It also releases endorphins, powerful chemicals in your brain that energize your spirits and make you feel good. Finally, exercise can also serve as a distraction, allowing you to find some quiet time to break out of the cycle of negative thoughts that feed depression.” I’ve always hated exercise but I’m willing to get out that big ugly gun to ward off the winter blues that I’ve somehow managed to acquire in August.

As I do my power walking around my house the dog thinks I’m the Pied Piper and there’s a good reason for that. I leave a trail of dog treats as I move through the house so Levi will stay behind me instead of getting in front of me the way he does when we do “doggie dancing.” (And why I don’t play more music in the house is a mystery I need to solve. It does lift my spirits.) The only song Levi gets to hear is, Stand by Me. I used to play it on my computer every night as a way of entertaining my husband and exercising the dog with obedience commands disguised as dance moves---leg weaves, circles, standing up on two legs, walking backward and forward. We’re not good at it like you'd see in dog dancing competitions---I shouldn't even call what we do dancing---but my goal was never perfection but rather to have fun and giving the dog five minutes of undivided attention. Since last winter we’d only been doing it three-four times a month and I need to give that activity back to him more often, if only because he’s got a more boring life than I do. 

Do you believe that inspirational messages come into our lives when we need them in a serendipitous manner or do you believe they’re always out there like white noise, ignored until our minds and hearts are ready to accept the lessons they teach? After I wrote the first draft of this post I was on Facebook where one of my friends had just posted a video of a Chinese guy in his eighties. I scrapped the original ending so I could write about Deshun Wang, a man who took up doing an intense workout late in life. He also walks the fashion catwalk with kids a quarter of his age---his gray hair flowing down to his shoulders and looking full of life. His easy smile and kick-ass attitude earned him the nickname of the ‘hottest grandpa’ and he became an instant internet sensation.

He says in the video, “At 80 I still have something left in me. I still have dreams to achieve. Believe me, potential can be explored. When you think it’s too late, be careful you don’t let that be your excuse for giving up.” Now, that’s an inspirational message I truly needed to hear! I've spent my entire life working towards goals and dreams but since my husband died I’ve let my age limit my dreams. I don’t have enough time left to do such and such, I’ve told myself. What’s the point of trying? Watching one video, of course, can’t change the trajectory of anyone's life but Mr. Wang gives me mega much to think about. How about you? Do you let your age edit the potentials you could explore? ©