Saturday, April 29, 2006

Afternoon walks and ER visits: not what you're expecting

So this afternoon I was walking to the library taking my sweet time and slightly out of it. I stopped at the one crosswalk on my route and saw an older lady with a dusty pink coat on across the road from me, also waiting for the traffic to change. We passed each other in the middle of Southern Parkway and I went on to the library where I sat for an hour or so looking through books and magazines. Walking back I was just as slightly foggy in the brain, taking slow steps and thinking my own little thoughts. I get to the intersection again, press the crosswalk button, and look up to see a dusty pink coat standing across the road from me once again. Who knows if I've seen this lady ten times before, walking out in the neighborhood or whatever, but that coincidence was hard to ignore.

It reminds me of about a month ago when I found myself waiting in the ER with one of my housemates (due to an allergic reaction to antibiotics - don't worry - everything turned out well). We were discovering how un-urgent the ER actually seems to be. We joined the other patients in the waiting room who we soon presumed had been there for hours on account of how few (actually none) were called up to see a doctor. Stuck between the sound waves of some celebrity entertainment show and WWF, I picked up the bright blue book on the table next to me - Psalms and the New Testament - provided by the Gideons. I flipped through it enjoying the King James script, reading aloud verses to Andrea. And then I stumbled across a shalt in italics which seemed to break any sort of grammar rule I had ever learned about italics. It seemed the editor just decided to insert italics whenever he/she pleased. It was the strangest thing - I can't even come up with an example. Just think of the least likely word you'd stress in a sentence and italicize it. Added with the King James speech, it was pretty humorous to read aloud as well as totally disorienting.

What are coincidences then? Italicized moments strangely and absurdly inserted into our lives? Or something more - a new way to view the ordinary "hath"s and "the"s that walk through our lives?

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