Sometimes our mysterious moments make sense. They lead us somewhere, provide comfort or send some kind of signal. But not always right away. Sometimes they don’t make any sense at all, and we only have the vaguest intuition that something might be afoot.
I think I might be living out this latter case.
A couple of weeks ago, I was riding the subway to work. There were delays, as always, and we were packed in. Usually I notice that this creates a sense of implicit solidarity among passengers. It’s not our fault that we’re bumping and jostling each other, it’s the MTA’s. But there are always some crazies. That day, a man turned to me and said, “Stop coughing on me.”
I was so taken aback, I just said—trying to convey my complete incredulity–“I didn’t even cough.”
“Well, you’re breathing on me,” he grumbled. I rolled my eyes and turned away. A couple of stops later, he got off, but not without first addressing me. “Hey man, I’m sorry about that.”
An apology? Now that was a shock! I was barely able to say, “it’s okay,” before he left the train. At the next stop, an Orthodox rabbi stood up to leave and said to me, “Well handled, son.”
Weird. Just weird.
That same week, I went to a soup shop near the office for lunch. A girl behind the counter asked for my order, and I asked for the corn chowder. “Sorry?” she said. “The corn chowder,” I said. She just stared at me, puzzled. “The corn chowder,” I repeated. Again, she looked confused. “Sorry, what would you like?” she asked, and it hit me, English wasn’t her first language. She had a thick accent, Russian or Eastern European. I had probably poorly enunciated my words. Another employee intervened, and I gave her my order, but the first one served it to me.
“Thanks, enjoy your food,” she said, now with absolutely no foreign accent at all. I was befuddled. Either an elaborate joke had been played on me, or I’d had some sort of temporary brain malfunction, and it was me who hadn’t been able to communicate. It brought to mind a quote from one of my favorite short stories: “And so I prepared my phrase and opened my mouth, believing I would hear it, but I only heard a sort of wheeze, unintelligible even for me who knew my intentions.”
That weekend, a friend from France visited me. We went to a coffee shop, where we met a French girl who’d moved here. She invited us to hang out at her apartment. There, I met two girls who work in my building in Manhattan, but whom I’d never seen before. Then a neighbor heard the French accents being spoken and dropped in—it turned out he works with two of my friends from college. How was it possible, in a city of 8 million people, to discover all of these strange connections?
Finally–unrelated to these other instances, as far as I know–that night my co-editor Diana appeared in a dream. I was at the New York Sports Club, doing pushups, and she walked by and said, “Hey, Dan!” Then I woke up.
I’ll have to ask our dream expert, Dr. Judith Orloff, about that last one. I don’t think I’ve ever had a week with so much weirdness going on. Maybe I’m just noticing this stuff more because of my job with Mysterious Ways. If it adds up to something, I’ll be sure to let you know.
Have you ever experienced a series of mysterious happenings that at first didn’t make any sense, but soon became clear? Share your stories here.
