The Bread Maker Coincidence
And Sharon’s Comeuppance
In our house, we call her Sharon.
She’s Murphy’s sister. As I joked with our neighbors one day when they walked
over for a glass of wine on our front deck, “If you think Murphy’s bad, wait
until you meet his sister Sharon. She’s ten times worse than her brother.”
Murphy’s Law states that if anything can go wrong, it will; and to make
the point with our neighbors that our life seemed to have been thrown off
kilter the past few weeks, starting with my vehicle accident that I explored in
my spiritual musing “The Old Trickster,” I had to kick Murphy’s Law up a notch;
that’s how his sister Sharon came into being.
Well, Sharon struck again this
past week, starting with the leak in Goober’s new tank. Goober is our goldfish,
which we brought with us when Penny and I moved to our new home in Georgian Bay
fourteen years ago, so Goober’s very old as goldfish go; and Penny got Goober a
new tank a few months ago at Walmart in Wasaga Beach, regretting that she did
not get the larger tank which was only a few dollars more, and then our bread maker
died the other day when I put on dough for pizza, and the following morning our
coffee maker sputtered in that familiar way coffee makers do when they’re about
to give up the ghost; so, we had to replace all three items, and Penny and I
went shopping Sunday in Midland after we treated ourselves to breakfast at Captain
Ken’s in Penetanguishene.
Penny had gone on Amazon to check
out bread makers, so she had a good idea of what she wanted; but there wasn’t
much selection at Canadian Tire in Midland, and what they did have were too
pricey for our budget; so, we went to Walmart and came home with a larger tank
for Goober and new coffee maker but no bread maker, and Penny decided to order
one from Amazon. But when we got home, Sharon struck again when the garage door
wouldn’t open when I pressed the remote control affixed to the sun visor of the
car. I tried several times, and when I went in to check I saw that the screws
holding the bracket attached to the automatic door-opening track had ripped
loose and had to be re-screwed, which I had done twice already, and this final indignity
was like a slap in the face; but strangely enough, this set into motion the
merciful law of divine synchronicity and Sharon’s comeuppance…
I love coincidences. I look
forward to them every day, and I’m always tickled with joy when they happen
because you cannot plan a coincidence. Like Murphy’s Law and his nastier sister
Sharon’s Revenge, coincidences have a mind of their own, and they only happen
for a reason; and that’s what I’d like to explore in today’s spiritual musing.
Because I’ve been engaged with
the synchronicity principle most of my life, which was fully realized when
serendipity introduced me to a street in Tiny Township, Georgian Bay, named
after me (STOCCO
CIRCLE) where
Penny and I built our new home fourteen years ago, I’m not surprised when the
dots for a new spiritual musing begin to connect, because that’s how the
synchronicity principle works in the service of soul, and something that Zen
poet Jane Hirshfield said about her relationship to poetry in Bill Moyers book Fooling with Words, A Celebration of Poets
and Their Craft, caught my attention the other morning when I felt “nudged”
to read Bill Moyers book; and as I
always do when something speaks to me, I highlighted the passage: “Sometime
I think that poems use us in order to think, to do their own work,” said
Jane Hirshfield. “You know, most of the time I feel as if I am in the service of the
poem—a poem isn’t something I make, it’s something I serve.”
And herein lies the mystery of
the synchronicity principle that Hirshfield failed to see, that not only is she
in the service of her poetry, but that the spirit of poetry, what I call “it”
in the poem I wrote that she inspired, serves her no less than she serves the
spirit of poetry, the omniscient guiding
principle of life that serves every soul in their journey through life—
She
almost has “it” but does not quite
know
it; another experience, another
poem,
another nanometer closer to “it.”
Something
she said gave her away:
“Most
of the time I feel as if I am
in
service of the poem,” but not until
she
sees that “it” is in equal service
to
her will she have “it” and be
whole
and complete.
Being a writer compelled to
write, I know what Jane Hirshfield
meant by saying that sometimes she feels like she is in the service of her
poems, because when I’m called to write a poem I often do not know what the
poem wants to say, thus affirming Hirshfield’s insight that our poems do our
thinking for us (as do my spiritual musings); but what is the poet serving if
not one’s own destined purpose to wholeness and completeness?
A poem shines a light upon one’s
path, making one’s way easier because it brings one’s outer journey into harmony
with one’s destined purpose to wholeness and completeness, and coincidences
are life’s way of confirming the natural harmonization process of inevitable self-reconciliation; but what does this have to do with
Murphy’s Law and Sharon’s Revenge?
Aye, there’s the rub that makes
calamity of so great a fortune, because life has a way of throwing a monkey
wrench into the gears of our life; but how can we expect our life to run
smoothly all the time when there are built-in faults and obsolescence?
If something can go wrong, it
will; and our bread maker had to wear out eventually, as did our coffee maker,
so why be surprised when they do? We didn’t expect our fish tank to spring a
leak so soon after our purchase, though; but the fatigue-factor built into
everything eventually catches up to us, and our tank sprung a leak because the
fault was in the assembly, thus affirming Murphy’s Law that if anything can go
wrong, it will. And our bread and coffee makers had a limited life span, so
there shouldn’t have been any surprise there either. But because these items
gave up their ghost in such close temporal proximity to each other (the superstition
of three “bad” things happening in a row), we attach some kind of nefarious
meaning to their occurrence. But there’s nothing sinister about built-in
defects and obsolescence; that’s just the way it is.
And as to our garage door, the
final indignity, I should have seen it coming because I knew that the metal of
the door was too thin for the screws to hold indefinitely (a manufacturing
fault), which was why I decided that this time I would fasten a ¾ 6 x 12 inch
piece of plywood to the door to fasten the screws that held the bracket
attached to the automatic track; but I didn’t have a piece of plywood, and I
was going to walk over to my neighbor Tony’s place later because I knew he would
have it, as well as the screws; and that’s when the remarkable coincidence with
the bread maker happened…
Penny went for a walk around STOCCO CIRCLE after we brought our new fish
tank and coffee maker and other sundries into the house and I sat on the front
deck to read my Sunday Star just to
pause and catch my breath, but when Penny came back from her walk she said to
me: “Tony’s home. He’s out in his garage.”
“I’ll go over and see if he has a
piece of plywood and some screws,” I said, and Penny went into the house. But
unbeknown to me, while I was talking with Tony in his garage Penny had gone
online to select and order a new bread maker from Amazon.
I rode my bike to Tony’s and saw
him standing by his work bench studying something that was making a funny but
familiar sound. I greeted Tony and asked what he was doing, and he told me he was
trying to figure out what that unit was.
“That’s a bread maker,” I said, “and
it’s supposed to work like that.” Tony had the unit plugged in but thought that
it was malfunctioning because the little paddle that kneaded the bread dough
wasn’t revolving as he thought it should; it revolved interruptedly.
Tony was cleaning out his garage
and back shed and old chairs and stuff from under his back deck that had been
there for years and loading everything onto his trailer and then he was going
to make a trip to the dump, that’s why he was checking out that appliance which
just happened to be a perfectly good bread maker that an Italian lady for whom
he had done a small job had given to him fifteen years ago, and he was going to
throw it away.
“It works just fine, Tony,” I
said. “Maybe Maria can use it?”
A widow also, Maria was his life
companion after his wife died; but Maria was old fashioned and kneaded her
dough by hand, so Tony offered it to me and I was strongly “nudged” to leave my
bike and quickly carry the bread maker over to our house after explaining to
Tony why I had come over. He did have a piece of plywood and screws, but I
wanted to surprise Penny with the remarkable coincidence of the bread maker
first.
Penny was in her office upstairs,
and as soon as I walked into the house I shouted up to her: “Have you ordered
the break maker yet?”
“I’m just about to,” she said.
“Well don’t,” I said. “Come on
down here. I got a bread maker from Tony.”
Penny couldn’t believe the
coincidence. She had just taken her Master card out and was about to order the
new bread maker when I shouted up to her not to, and after giving the unused bread
maker (which in its day was a higher end model called Bread Chef) a thorough cleaning she put on a batch of dough to make
fresh buns for dinner; and while she was doing that, I went back to Tony’s and
explained my garage door problem and, of course Tony being Tony, he walked over
with me and sized up the problem and together we got the garage door opener
working properly (plus another nagging little job), and then we sat on the
front deck and had a nice cold beer. And that’s how Sharon got her comeuppance.
———
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