When it comes to the people that enter my life, for however long a period, I don't believe in coincidences. Some carry lessons, others perhaps unresolved business, and there are some where I think it has nothing to do with me and everything to do with what I can offer them. Other times, though, it's completely different. These are the times where, when meeting someone for the first time, I've had a flash of instant recognition and I think that these people are in my life because they're absolutely supposed to be - I already know them.

I. is one of the latter. He and I were friends before we even met and I knew him before I actually knew him. I remember the mornings in the coffee shop, before our first conversation, wondering about this elderly, gentle looking man with his shock of white hair and friendly blue eyes. I knew he was someone.

Now that we've become friends, its strange just how alike we are. Separated by several decades, generational influences, gender, and where we are in our lives it's amazing what a kindred spirit I've found in him. This is why, despite the occasional comment that makes me uncomfortable, I'm glad to have him in my life.

We missed each other last Saturday for our usual coffee catch up. I was early and he was late. On Thursday I received a letter attached to a page from Saturday's newspaper. The newspaper was complete save for a ragged hole where the Capricorn horoscope had once been. It was my paper, left behind on the coffee shop table. I. must have arrived after me, nabbed the paper and, when he got to the horoscope page realized who the original owner of the paper was. Me.

My first reaction was discomfort that someone was able to reconstruct my Saturday morning with such accuracy, that someone would know me so well. It felt intrusive. Then I read the story I. had written about the experience and attached to the newspaper and I had to laugh. Here's his story:

On Saturday morning he picks up the Weekend Review section of the Globe and Mail laying on one of the tables. Later, casually leafing through it to the Horoscope page he comes up on a hole in the paper and smiles, he can picture what has happened and why that hole is there...

She came up the stairs wearing her black coat, carrying her soy latte with the Globe and Mail clutched to her chest. She picks out a sunny table with a soft chair that she can comfortably fold herself into, legs crossed beneath her. She sets down her latte, takes off her coat and is wearing a light blue turtle neck sweater; she pauses - thinks the place is a bit cold but can't read in her coat - and sits down, sliding off her heavy boots and folding herself into the chair. Sitting very upright, head held high, feet crossed under her, she lays out the paper on her lap to read. With a deep, silent intensity she turns the pages, pausing occasionally to read something that catches her attention. Something on one page catches her attention; the horoscope for that day seems to awaken in her mind some way of bringing order to the clutter in her days. Some way of creating a path through: yoga, India, work day clutter, what about the job?, the masters essay due very soon, should I do the PhD?, family to see in Burlington...

She reaches over with her left hand and rips the newspaper page across the grain, leaving an uneven hole where her horoscope for January 22, 2006 had been. She reaches over and tucks it into her writing book before shrugging on her black coat and preparing to go, leaving the paper behind on the table.

Later in the day, an old guy picks up the newspaper but doesn't get a chance to read it for a couple of days. When he does, he sees the hole in the horoscope. With a warm smile, he thinks about a young woman he knows, about how she looks curled up in her chair, and how she ripped that hole in the newspaper. How nice, how very, very nice. Thanks from I.


I laughed first, because it reminded me of something I would have written in the same circumstances and, second, because he was absolutely right - blue turtleneck and all.