Editor’s Note: This column appears every other Monday.
While I sometimes claim to be from New Orleans (who wouldn’t, if they could) I only lived there for 25 years, having moved there by accident a few months after I graduated from college. My first years all took place in Charlotte, North Carolina, where much of my family still lives.
My brother’s wife, Kim, is a real estate agent in Charlotte and she frequently posts videos of homes she’s lined up for open houses. Last Friday’s video featured a house on Yale Place. I was tired, so didn’t watch the video, just wrote back, “Yale Place – is that the house our aunt and uncle used to live in?” Turned out my brother had noted the street name, but didn’t make the connection. He hadn’t been to visit our now-long-gone aunt and uncle since he was little. (That’s what you get when everyone else runs off to Heaven and you become the oldest: the suddenly important job as archiver of all the family memories!)
The house in the video was blue, my aunt and uncle’s house had been white, and enough work had been done on it since my aunt last lived there in 2002 that I didn’t recognize it at all until I watched the video and was suddenly transported back to about 1975, the last time I remember really spending time there. My aunt was a woman who continually re-wrote and aggrandized the past, present and future up to a point where my grounded-in-reality-hippie-intellectual parents saw her more as an interesting character than an interactive aunt.
I recently read an article by some spoilsport saying “There is no such thing as coincidence.” He tried using math to convince us that so many instances line up anyway, that co-incidence is the boring norm instead of a head-smacking, religious experience out-stander. I ain’t going for it. Out of all the houses in Charlotte (population 860,000) and with 51 real estate agencies in town, each one vaunting let’s say five agents, that’s a weird freaking coincidence!
That’s why I don’t like math. It always tries to jump in there, knock everybody having fun out of the way and give you a D in Algebra.
So after the whole family jumped around through emails all morning, marveling at the co-incidence of the house-selling event, I set back to my real work of going through every single item left by my parents when my dad passed a year ago, sorting out what to keep, what to pass on and what goes to the dump. As well as hippie-intellectual, my dad was also an artist, and our house was decorated with works by him, Peter Max and other artistic luminaries. Just about everything my parents collected stood out artistically so when, that afternoon I found a clay platter that looked as though it had been painted by one of us at about the age of 12 as a bless-her-heart gift to them, I took a photo of it and sent it out to my siblings asking, “Does anyone remember this?” No one did and they, too, wondered why it had not only been kept, but transported all the way to Ashfield in my parents’ last move.
I put it beside the back door to take, I guessed, to the dump, and accepted an invitation to a friend’s house for the next morning for tea and interesting discussion.
When I got there, my friend served me a cider doughnut on a small plate that was the absolute twin descendant of my platter. Same yellow flower with heavy green stem and leaves, painted in an amateurish manner with the same squiggly yellow border.
“Where did you get this?” I yelped, and she pulled out three tall volumes illustrating the history of Blue Ridge Pottery, mountains of which had been collected for years. Whipping out my phone, I showed her this little plate’s great aunt, and we jumped figuratively around marveling at the coincidence. My parents were also travelers and, my siblings and I now figure, must have bought the platter on one of their adventures and liked it enough to keep it. So, now my platter has a round niece to keep it company, as my friend gave me her plate to add to my brand new collection that I, last week, didn’t even know existed.
What ard the chances of that all happening in one single weekend, Mr. Math Guy? I think my life is a lot more fun than his is.
Nan Parati hails from North Carolina, New Orleans and nowadays, Ashfield.