Fate Don’t Fail Me Now

Good thing I’m not superstitious or have OCD, otherwise I’d be a nervous wreck.

For whatever the reason, people like things to happen in groups of three. So when a day like June 25, 2009 rolls around (both Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died on that day), everybody says something like "I wonder who the third one will be?” Even I’m sometimes guilty of that, though there’s no logical reason for that sort of nonsensical thinking.

But just this summer, I’ve already experienced something twice and maybe there’s a third one lurking around the corner somewhere. (But then again, maybe not.) That something is the person I haven’t seen nor heard from in over twenty years; yet suddenly they're standing right in front of you. But not like a high school reunion, where the whole point is to run into people you haven’t seen in a long time.

The first one happened last month in line at CVS right here in town. It had been a long day out of the house, all I’m thinking about is seeing the wife and kids and the lump crab cake salad we’ll be eating on the deck. I’m buying only one thing – a boring, OTC item that we’ve apparently run out of, when suddenly a woman comes up to me and says “Chris Capelle??!?”

I must have given her the “who the heck are you?” look or something, because she had to tell me who she was and then I remembered. Nobody major in the grand scheme of things, no great stories to share, just somebody I knew for a couple of years in the late 1980s/early 1990s before she left the northeast. We spent a few minutes catching up and then she told me why she was back in Connecticut.

And then I remembered, despite outward appearances, her life was no cocktail party back then and things didn’t seem to change for the better afterwards. When I heard of her current plight, a Grateful Dead lyric (and I loathe hippie music, so work with me!) popped into my head; trouble ahead, trouble behind.

I suppose the one thing that made it awkward was there was no common ground. It’s one thing when running into somebody from your past when you’re both dragging earachy toddlers into a pediatric ENT office and you say things like “Do you have to get tubes put in?” and other banal parent talk, quite another when somebody’s life has gone down a far different (and harder) road than yours. But what bothered me the most was the fact that NOBODY ever suddenly reappears in my life after two decades, and the one time it happens, it’s somebody I don’t particularly want (or need) to see. Why can’t it be something more like, “Wow, I’ve been reading your Wilton Patch posts, and my company wants you to work for us!” or something like that?

The second encounter (which came via email) was just as unexpected but far more welcomed. It was from the drummer in my first band (more details on my music career will be outlined in a future blog post). He came across my name on a pitch letter to his company and emailed to ask if I was the same guy he used to play with. We went back and forth and it was really good to hear from someone I haven’t seen since Ronald Reagan was in the White House.

I can still vividly remember meeting him for the first time, next to the bulletin board at school in 1982, where one of us (I don’t recall if it was him or me) posted an ad to jam with other musicians. I always liked him and he was my “go to” guy on drums every time I got a chance to play with other guitarists. We all ended up going to different colleges and playing with other people, so the fact that I hadn’t seen or heard from him since then was no surprise. But simply knowing that he remembered me and wanted to communicate was pretty cool.

So far, this season, I’m batting .500 with random encounters from the past. Now it’s got me thinking about who could possibly be next – and would they be good, bad or indifferent? And the other day, my wife found a large supply of the very OTC product I was buying on that fateful day at CVS. Which meant, had our cabinets at home been more organized, that first random encounter would never had occurred, and right now you would be reading somebody else’s blog post.

But that wouldn’t be much fun, would it?