- Davey and Randal at Meal’s End
Our houseguests leave today. Randal and Davey are heading south where they have gigs over the next ten days in Ashland, Sebastopol, Redwood City and Salinas. Nan and Jack also head south, visiting family on their way home, but back in Healdsburg in time to catch Randal and Davey in concert at Studio E in Sebastopol.
I’m always pleased when guests in our home form connections that go beyond our four walls here in Oysterville. It makes me feel that, somehow, Oysterville is exerting some kind of influence on the immediate universe and, being an inveterate Oysterville promoter, I love to be involved, even if minimally.
Connections often occur in this house. On Sunday, for instance, a woman who had come to the concert with a friend introduced herself to me and said that she understood that I had once lived in Marin County in California.
“Yes,” I said, “I was graduated from San Rafael High School.”
“So did I,” was her reply.
I immediately introduced her to my friend Nan and there we were – three of ‘San Rafael Bulldogs’ out of thirty-eight people in the room right here in Oysterville. Also that day, a concert guest had a long chat with Randal about a man she had met years ago in Ireland and, as it turned out, Randal knew him, too.
Nan refers to those kinds of connections as “synchronicity.” I usually think of them as “serendipity.” However they are described, they seem to happen more and more frequently as the years go by, no doubt the result of the many experiences of a lifetime that are bound to bump into one another eventually.
In any case, by noon today life here will return to some semblance of normal. The women of Oysterville will go for their walk. Fred will arrive to work in our garden. I’ll begin roughing out the next story in my jail series for the Observer. Nyel will probably clean out the chicken coop and re-lay the fire unless, of course, he gets called to work for the school district. And, in the backs of our minds will be the lilt of Irish music and remnants of all the good conversations of the past few days.
I think that it is just possible that Oysterville is the center of the Universe! Sorry I missed your house party, but it sounds as though it was as special as the others I’ve been fortunate enough to attend.