I don’t find anything especially remarkable about coincidences, except that they seem to happen all the time. Mostly, they occur, are briefly noted, and then forgotten. Others linger in the mind and instill a sense that the universe (if not some supernatural agency) is telling itself jokes.
Several years ago, my wife Sue and I attended a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore just down the road in Rome, New York. A British woman happened to be sitting next us. In the play, when Sir Despard Murgatroyd had to calm Mad Margaret’s tendency to lapse into hysterics, he used the code word “Basingstoke.” The woman next to us said, “I’m from Basingstoke!” She had never seen Ruddigore before and did not know her home town was name-checked in the second act. And my wife admitted that, until that moment, she did not realize it was a real place.
It is decidedly somewhat less of a coincidence that we have been fortunate to hear Mike Davis, the subject of our cover article, on three occasions within the past month. These were all events we were determined to attend, and one which we had booked a year in advance. So that was hardly coincidental—but getting Mike on page one during that time was serendipitous.
On September 24, we drove t
