corner view~serendipity

Serendipity has been good to me.  I'll take any serendipity that wants to come my way.
No questions asked.
***
Perhaps the greatest experience of serendipity in my life happened when I found my husband.
Once I hit my twenties I was living in DC, working as an art therapist.  I was well aware of wanting to find my soul mate.  I was looking.  I was dating.  I was meeting all sorts of men.  I even went out with someone named Ernie.  But there was no one who came close.

But then serendipity paid me a visit, even though I didn't see it that way at the time.  I was given a graduate internship at a psychiatric hospital where I made two good co-worker friends -- Megan and Kerry.  They barely knew each other, they worked in different parts of the hospital, but they were in fact both angels working in my life.  Megan was a drug and alcohol counselor on another unit.  She and I connected because we were a couple of the only young people working there full time.  Kerry, a psychologist, came in to work on our unit.  We did group therapy together, in which I assisted him.

After a year, Megan moved out west.  I helped her pack and then she was off.  We stayed in touch through letters and an occasional phone call.  Around the same time Kerry gave me a tape of one of his friend's original music.  I liked it very much.  A year after Megan was living out west she invited me to visit.  I went for a week, to stay with her, in Berkeley.  She took me all over the northern California Bay Area, to beaches, biking, and to grocery stores.  It was a new world, a world I felt very at home in.  The eucalyptus tinged air was perfect for me.  That year Kerry had encouraged me to call his friend, the musician guy.  I never did.  A year later I went back to see Megan again.  Again I had such a wonderful visit to northern California, it was springtime.  Kerry had again suggested I call the musician guy, and this time for some reason, I did.

The moment Gary and I met there was a connection.  Ours was an almost instant love affair.  He loves to tell the story.  He says he knew within thirty minutes of meeting me that he wanted to marry me.  He had to tell himself, "Don't ask her to marry you now, she'll think you're crazy."    

I remember that we talked about the San Francisco Bay Area and also about a book he was writing about creativity.  "What an interesting, kind, refreshing man," I thought.  After a while I was thinking that it was a bit uncanny how comfortable I felt with this relative stranger.  He felt very familiar, like an old friend.  Like family.  I thought, maybe it's because we have a mutual best friend.  Maybe it's because I know so many of his songs by heart.  Whatever it was, I had found my destiny.  He just knew it sooner than me.