Life's a Gamble Blog

Life's a Gamble Blog
LIfe in the small town of Port Gamble, Washington. Events, businesses, and quirky small town humor through the eyes of photographer and blogger Jerry Cornell

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Coincidences

I sometimes wonder if strange coincidences happen to me more than to others. I have one thing that happens to me so often that I sometimes get nervous that there is really something behind it ... oh, I hope not. It goes like this.

When I owned my auto parts store, quite frequently, and for no reason at all, somebody's name would pop into my head as someone who I simply had not seen for awhile. There is nothing special about that.  I bet everyone reading this has at sometime suddenly had a name of someone they knew well come up.

So why is this so strange? Because in just about every case that person walked into my store either that day or the next day at the latest.What was the link? Did they know I had thought about them? It happened so often that I finally began keeping track. For the last ten years I owned that store, I saw 92% of those people I thought about come in the store the next day. Port Gamble is known for its ghosts. Is there some connection there? Once again, oh, I hope not.

Why am I telling all of you about this? Because recently something happened to me so much like this that once again I am wondering what on earth is going on.

The incident went like this:
In the last four or five years, since about the  time 4 years ago when we moved to Port Gamble, I have been getting deeper and deeper into photography .... I've been selling some, hanging some in stores, generally having a lot  of fun with it. But some of the fun is taken away with the prices of some of the  frames and mats I have to buy, especially when the size is 13 x 19 rather than 5 x 7 or even 8 x 10.

But I finally found an art supply store, complete with VERY helpful employees, who were always good natured, serious when I needed help, willing to go that extra mile everyone talks about. High on my list was a girl  working there who could answer any question I had except one, "Why is all the art that's on the walls here paintings, with not a single photograph?" She suggested I bring in some photos and let her boss see them, and maybe he would hang them.



So, a couple weeks later, there I was, photos in hand, and there she was, with no boss in the store. So she wanted me to show her what I had, and promised to get him to let me hang and sell some.  I started through the small collection I had brought, the bright colors of the fruit display at Pike Place Market, the subtle tones of the fog with a boat emerging,   on and on it went until I reached one of a church. Suddenly her body stiffened, like she had just seen a gh...  no, I won't say it. But I continued.   "This is one of those New England style churches that seems like a good breeze would knock it over," she was still so stiff that nothing would knock her over, "but I wanted to show it's strength as a church, that anything that was consecrated there would last for a lifetime."

At last I was rewarded with an exhale and a smile. "I know that church," she said, "it is St. Paul's in Port Gamble. I was married there two weeks ago, and I love what you just said about it."

Here we go again with my coincidences.