Visited by the Sea Monster of Serendipity

(Remember Serendipity?)

A happier thing happened yesterday.

(I've just noticed that "A happier thing happened" contains two words of divergent meaning derived from Middle English "hap", meaning fortune.)

Annnyway.

Once a week on Tuesday afternoons, I meet up with the other instructor of Indigenous Literatures. We debrief the class, talk about the readings, and generally conspire to try to improve the world very slightly.

I usually get to the coffee shop first, and then (as with all meetups) I have five minutes of internal struggle wherein even though I actively want to have this conversation, even though the experience will be exciting and satisfying and I genuinely like this person -- I kind of hope they won't show up.

Is this familiar to you?

He always does show up and it's always good.

Anyway, today I was there and he had gotten to be about -- seven minutes late? Usually he's right on time.

As I was waiting, I overheard another customer talking to the barista and recognized C., a high school teacher I know. We knew each other better way back in activist days. We've met maybe only three times since then, but she's always been -- very present? Both acute and warm, if you can imagine that combination.

I was fresh from the curriculum meeting at the university, where all the post-secondary English instructors got updates on changes to the high school curriculum (well, all the post-secondary English instructors who turned up). C. and I had talked a bit once before about the disjuncts between high school and college for students, so I hailed her and asked what she thought of the changes.

We ended up talking for an hour about creating better communication between the college and the high schools, and about teaching (man, she sounds like a fantastic teacher), and a constellation of related subjects.

We ended up exchanging numbers and emails and I think we're going to start a -- I don't know, a conversation group? -- to foster better communication between secondary and post-secondary? It seems like we're doing that.

Thus I feel, in the end, that I had the meeting I was meant to have. M. never did show up (his I'm-sick email went astray, as we determined later by text), but I was able to be perfectly sanguine about it, because it was clear destiny had been at work.

(Destiny: Also Middle English. Oxford has it from Latin via Old French from destinare, "make firm, establish".)


{rf}