Today’s calendar page, January 26, plays Ping Pong with my emotions—tears doink-plunk! smile doink-plunk! heartbreak doink–plunk! joy.
Indeed, this date, more than any other of the year, in my family holds a story seemingly written in the stars and typed by the fingers of Fate. Coincidence alone seems overmatched in explaining it.
Coincidence, defined as “the occurrence of events that happen at the same time by accident but seem to have some connection,” is my sharing a birth date with my wife’s grandfather or my son and my daughter’s youngest daughter sharing their birthday. The odds are only 1-in-366 against these horoscopic connections.
Coincidence, mixed with healing serendipity, was my first grandchild being born on the one-year anniversary of the night, nearly the very hour, that the Thomas Fire razed my childhood home. For my father especially, who had still lived in the house, a date of gloom was turned into one of bloom in celebrating the birth of his newest great-granddaughter.
Multiple memorable events and coincidental anniversaries happen every day of the year, of course, which is why The Star and most newspapers run daily “On This Date In History” summaries. A January 26th coincidence, for example, is Michigan becoming a state (1837), Louisiana seceding from the Union (1861), and Virginia rejoining the Union (1870).
January 26, however, has surpassed coincidence for my loved ones and me.
Shuffling the chronological order, let me begin with “On This Date” in 2003 when a drunk driver speeding down a city street at 70 mph rear-ended me as I was stopped at a red light. My life, fast as a finger snap, was forever changed as I suffered a ruptured disc in my neck causing permanent nerve damage in my left arm, hand and fingers.
Still, it was not fully a tragedy. Fate, after cruelly cursing me, then smiled sympathetically and let me somehow walk away from a hunk of twisted steel and shattered glass that had seconds earlier been a Honda Civic. Indeed, two police officers at the scene told me they could not believe I survived.
The 26th of January 2015 offered no such blessed fortune for one of my daughter’s dearest friends. In India for a wedding, Celiné and her younger brother were passengers in a taxi when it was broadsided by a city bus. The brother walked away, the big sister did not, her 26-year-old life extinguished in a blink’s instant.
Two crashes on the same date can be brushed off as tearful coincidence. But there are three smiles, too. On January 26, five years before my car crash, my lovely niece Arianna was born; ten years ago, exactly one year before Celiné’s deathly accident, my daughter met her husband; and five years ago, another January 26th love story, when Holly, a college roommate and third “sister” with my daughter and Celiné, received a marriage proposal.
Holly’s fiancé, now her husband for she enthusiastically said “yes!” when he got down on bended knee, says he did not purposely choose the date for its significance in an effort to magically metamorphose an anniversary of sorrow into one with a measure of joy.
And yet it is possible that Justin’s subconscious helped guide him to the fateful date. Or, perhaps, January 26 magically chose the couple that is now a happy family of three.
I like to think the latter. As Mr. Hemingway wrote in the closing line of dialogue in his novel “The Sun Also Rises,” spoken in—oh, Celiné—a taxi:
“ ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’ ”
Yes, it is.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
With apologies to Disneyland, it seems to me “The Happiest Place on Earth” is a wedding. Any wedding and every wedding, extravagant or simple, grand or intimately small. Attending a wedding always puts helium in your heart.
