Converging Into Synchronicity

So about a year ago, I finished about half of Roger Ebert's Life Itself (2011). Then I left it at an auto mechanic's shop and someone walked off with it. Then I got another copy at Half Price Books and set it aside for completion. That was a few months ago.

This past weekend, a DVD copy of The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War (1984) arrived in the mail, but I figured it might be a bit depressing so laid it aside for "later." I did read the cover and noted that Studs Terkel was the narrator. 

On Sunday, word was out that Nobel Prize-winning writer Doris Lessing had died. In conversations that day, Lessing came up. Not surprising. Then Studs Terkel came up. The Spanish Civil War came up. And that evening, Ebert came up -- remembering that he died this year, too, back in April.

Okay, by that evening I had also decided to give The Good Fight a shot, depressing or not. (It isn't -- quite the opposite). Then, having recently finished a Béatrix Beck novel, I grabbed the nearest next book on a stack of them which turned out to be none other than Roger Ebert's Life Itself. Trying to figure out where exactly I'd left off, I looked at the table of contents and noticed the chapter 52 title header, "Studs."  Coincidence? Knowing that both Ebert and Studs Terkel were all things Chicago, it had to be the same Studs, right? Indeed, it was, and on the first page of the chapter (page 397 of my hardback copy), Ebert recounts being asked to drive Studs and a visitor around Chicago. And the visitor was . . . Doris Lessing. I got a shiver. That's just too strange, all the day's major people of discussion converging into synchronicity verbally and in Ebert's book on the very day we first learn of Doris Lessing's death. What are the chances they'd appear on the same page, together, on that same red letter date? 

Whatever it means, there it is.