Karma, kismet, luck, timing, six degrees of separation, or all of the above?
For the past four days, I was at a business conference in National Harbor, Maryland. Here’s some of what has happened during this trip:
- I took a shuttle from Dulles airport to the hotel. Who sat next to me on the shuttle? A reporter from a magazine. So I pitched her.
- At the conference, two women recognized me. We had seen each other at another conference in March. It turned out that my company uses the business they were representing. So they gave me an iPad.
- I wound up in three different online videos representing my company, all put together by exhibitors. Most attendees didn’t get into one.
- I got interviewed twice more for the magazine.
- In a sea of 1000 people at a cocktail reception, I wound up standing right next to the reporter from the shuttle again.
- On Friday morning I was in the elevator on the ballroom floor (second floor) when a woman got on and rode up in the elevator with me. She asked me where the ballrooms were. I told her she just left the ballroom floor and now she’ll have to go back down. She gets off at the next floor. At six o’clock I head down to the seafood restaurant in the atrium to eat a quick dinner before going to see a play. I sit down — and that woman is seated at the table next to mine. In a hotel and conference center with thousands of people, there she is again. She and her husband and I start to talk. They are there for a different conference than I am. It turns out that her son is a playwright. I am a playwright. At the end of dinner, they decide to pay for my check. I try to beg off, but they insist. “You’ve been so helpful,” they say, and I honestly have no idea what they’re talking about.
- After the play, before she leaves, a woman who had overheard me talking turns to me and says, “Hey, California. We didn’t meet, but you’re really cute.” I think this last happened in… 1995.
- I go to the cast party with two of my friends. I meet an older gentleman and we start to talk. He tells me about a woman he knew, and as he gets about two sentences into the story something about it makes me stop him to say, “I know her. Peggy Miley, right?” And he looks at me astonished. The two of us have never met, and this gentleman has nothing to do with the theatre — he’s just at this party tonight — and we seemingly have nothing else in common, except we both know this woman. “How do you know her?” he says. I answer: “She was in my workshop.” My workshop has only nine people at a time in it, and openings are rare. And this was in Alexandria, Virginia, and my workshop is in LA.
- The next night I’m buying a cigar at the hotel steakhouse. The young man who stocks the humidor is very knowledgeable and proud of his work and I tell him I’m impressed. I select a cigar and pay for it and then ruminate aloud of whether I should buy one for my friend who’s going to join me later that night. He goes back to the humidor and gives me a cigar, free, in case my friend needs one.
- I’m heading from Maryland on the interstate up to New Jersey to spend a night with my family when I start to think back to Roy Rogers fast-food restaurants, and how I liked them. It turns out there’s one left — and there’s a sign for it directly in front of me. So of course we stop there and eat.
- As we near my mother’s house, I start to think what a shame it will be that my brother Michael won’t be there. If he were there, then all my siblings and I and our mother would be together. We pull up — and I see his car out front. It turns out that Lufthansa has lost his luggage, so he’s had to stay here overnight.
I could go on, because I feel that there was even more. Somehow I ran into a spate of kismet or something; strange, coincidental, good things kept happening. With some advance notice, I would have headed for the nearest casino.