Recently I was thinking about the days I was a newspaper delivery boy. Yes, younger readers, although I can’t speak for all worlds, there actually was a time in the history of our world when kids made money delivering newspapers. I wasn’t thinking about the newspapers, but about coincidences that occurred while I was making 4:30 a.m. deliveries to my 140 customers.
One morning when the sun was beginning to lighten the sky and the birds were singing, I was pedaling my bike down the sidewalk, tossing papers on the front porches (you’ve probably forgotten newspapers didn’t always materialize on the ends of driveways), when one of the cheerfully tweeting birdies dropped a glop of whitewash right in my eye. I hadn’t been staring up into the tree, but since I wore glasses, the stinging present was delivered right on target between my glasses and my eyeball. My measured response was to lose control, fall over and spill my sack load of rubber-banded newspapers on to the wet grass.
Now I ask you, what forces in the universe had to conspire and correctly align to dump some bad luck on me? I had to be innocently pedaling under a tree early in the morning at the exact moment when one of nature’s feathered creatures above was performing his or her morning constitutional to have the results precisely delivered behind my specs and into my right eye.
On another morning I was pedaling along in the dim light, mindlessly tossing my rolled up papers and thinking about my stock portfolio, knowing I could throw a paper with precision to have it land perfectly on top of a customer’s concrete stoop. Maybe I panicked because I thought the S&P 500 may take a drastic drop, but this time I launched my ink-and-wood-pulp missile with a little too much force. The storm door of the house opened, and an unsuspecting, bath-robed man stepped out as my heavy, tightly-banded paper log tumbled end over end through the air directly toward him. When he bent to pick up the Chicago Tribune (that delivery kid was always there ahead of me), the butt end of my tumbling projectile hit him in the middle of his back. It bounced off and continued tumbling through his brightly-lighted living room and into a flower arrangement on a small occasional table in the hallway. By the time he looked outside to figure out what had just happened, I was pedaling furiously to the next house. His view of me when I was fleeing was blocked by his neighbor’s tall hedge.
There it was, that coincidental alignment of the universe at work again. It was bad luck that I threw the paper too hard, but good luck the storm door opened so the newspaper didn’t break the glass. It was bad luck the man stepped directly into its path, but good luck he bent over at the exact moment my newspaper was coming at him so he didn’t get hit in the forehead. It was bad luck the paper landed in a bowl of phony flowers on the bottom shelf of his little table, but good luck the newspaper was conveniently delivered right into his actual living space. I wonder if he ever thought how lucky he was.
An even more amazing of amazing coincidences happened when I was in the Army. Yes, it was a coincidence that they would even take somebody like me, but that’s not the coincidence I’m referring to here. I was stationed in Seoul, Korea, making a delivery to the G-4 offices of Eighth Army Headquarters, the only time I’d ever been there. I walked upstairs to the office where I was to leave my envelope. As I entered, another fellow was leaving. A few feet apart, we both stopped and turned to each other. He was a family friend I’d known since we were kids. He lived a half mile from me. Things like that can occur when you’re in the service because you sometimes run into guys you’ve been stationed with in other places, or barfed with outside the mess hall. But this friend was a civilian.
So how did it happen that I was in the office at the exact time of day when I’d run into a civilian friend of mine in the middle of Seoul, 10,000 miles from Chicago, and who, back home, lived four blocks away from me? Spooky. If I’d arrived five minutes earlier or later, I would have fallen down the stairs. No, I’m kidding. Our paths never would have crossed. I might have fallen down the stairs anyway. The odds of that meeting happening, with 6 Billion humans in the world at that time, were probably greater than having monkeys fly out of my lower body orifice. The odds of my falling down the stairs were about two to one.
The most amazing coincidence of all is how, after all the years of penning hackneyed, but educational (?) columns, I’m still writing for The Voice. Some portion of the universe is definitely out of whack.