Coinky-dink

or, more dully, serendipity

Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash

I have a friend whose little one pronounced“coincidence” “coinkydink.” I always liked that word. And I always liked the word “serendipity,” too. Here’s something that speaks to both words.

Last night was another tough one. I know I am in good company when I have trouble sleeping these days. I have told people that I feel like I am sitting Shiva, trying to respectfully process and get through my sorrow at what was for many of us a very tough loss at the polls. That’s during the day. At night, when I try to sleep, my subconscious says, “Nope. Not yet. You’ve got more work to do,” and I wake up and can’t go back to sleep. Last night I woke up at 4am and lay there. Finally, at 4:45, I crept out of bed and went downstairs and started coffee. And I sat in my yellow meditation chair and clanged the little singing bowl to greet the day and I read a few poems. Soul food. Then I looked out the window and watched the dawn come, and there has never been a time in my life when that has not been immensely satisfying to me, seeing the darkness lift, it’s truly like a miracle every time. I got the morning paper off the front porch and watched a solitary man across the street briskly walking his little dog. It was such a perfect picture, like an illustration you might have seen in the children’s books of old accompanying this text: See the man. See him walk the dog. See the dawn come.

I put the paper on the kitchen table and I read it while I ate a bagel and lox and cream cheese and capers and red onions. Another kind of soul food. Such thin newspapers these days, and full of stories that are hard to bear. But. One does go on, does one not?

I went to work on finishing the edits of what will be my next novel. In between parsing words, I regarded the green and growing plant on my desk, and the deep pink roses I got at Trader Joe’s yesterday. Yet ANOTHER kind of soul food. Then I took an hour-long nap.

When I came back down to my office to work, I opened my computer and found something I had started writing once about aging and never finished. I was curious about what it said. I opened the file and read something that was JUST what I needed to read. Coinkydink? Or cosmic care? You judge. Here it is: