Combined with the sound and meaning of certain key words and symbols, numbers are links between events. Given the time span of one year (or of centuries), dates of events – even the numbers of the pages on which they are recorded in the history books – have a curious propensity for bringing this point home. Lincoln’s body is long buried, but the sound of his name continues to reverberate throughout the English-speaking world. It is one link of many – pun intended – in this story also.
This is an account of incidents and coincidences, of pals and pen pals, of songs and song writers, and every story is a story within a larger one. It’s about fun and games, and tells of a waterfall or two and of more than one rainstorm. At times, when it attempts to present a version of the world that goes mostly unnoticed, it’s a brainstorm. In a world of supposedly random happenings, such phenomena are outright amazing. In a world of rhyme and reason, they simply make good sense. Either way, I think the story is worth telling.
It was late in the evening of May 27, 1988. I wasn’t tired at all and felt like listening to the radio. Expecting to hear one of two stations I usually listen to – one, a station playing soft rock; the other, classical music – I was surprised to hear sounds that obviously came from neither. These were sounds that seemed to soar out of a long-forgotten past, sounds that had been waiting in my mind and heart and were now set free to envelop my being all over again. Instantly, I was young, once more listening to Glenn Miller’s orchestra. It was right after World War II, and I was still in Germany, where I was born.
How had it happened? Had I – without realizing it – touched the dial so that it had moved to what turned out to be station WEVD, where Danny Stiles was on the air from eleven to five o’clock each night, seven nights a week?
I had long ceased believing that coincidences are chance happenings. More and more, my family and friends were noticing and telling me about them. We would compare notes. Some “coincidences” could not be shared without going into too many associations that had to be taken on faith by the others. Therefore, sometimes the game had to be played like solitaire. But that was fun, too. In this way, one could prove to oneself the, for me, simply astounding fact that, as far as one’s private life is concerned, there is purpose everywhere, in everything.
It seemed, however, that one had to be in a certain frame of mind to play this game, this game where coincidences are purposeful. I usually know, or feel, when this might happen. And it never fails to put me in an adventurous mood, a mood in which I know that anything can happen and in which I see different periods of time magically coalesce so that the mere sounds of words, or even syllables, and the associations they provoke, glide into each other effortlessly, almost predictably. Almost. An element of surprise remains.
Back to Danny Stiles. I have the habit of keeping a blank tape in my combination radio-tape recorder for cases like this one. As I pushed the record button, Danny Stiles was saying, “Hoert zu, listen very closely, dear hearts.” Here I perked up. “Hoert zu” appealed to my being German. “Dear hearts” went straight to my heart. That’s what my father had always called me. Danny Stiles went on: “I’m all excited – I suppose you can detect that in the sound of my vocal cords – because three weeks from now, on June 17th…” Here my thoughts and emotions turned several somersaults because June 17th happens to be my birthday. Danny continued, “…I’ll be hosting another one of our monthly big band dance parties at the holiday Inn North.” Then I recalled that my parents took me with them to the North Sea on my mother’s summer vacation from her teaching job.
In this broadcast, there were no other great revelations or special associations for me. Danny Stiles advertised the sale of two cassettes of the 44 songs of the Memory Lane package. Since my 30th wedding anniversary was coming up, I put in an order, accompanied by a letter, and mailed it on May 31st. Two days later, I heard my letter read on Danny’s show. He didn’t only mention my name; he read the whole letter!
It was just before midnight. I was so excited that I woke my husband and my two sons with my shouting; they came stumbling down the stairs. What was going on? All of a sudden, I felt foolish. But from their smiling faces, I could tell that it was okay. In my letter to Danny, I’d mentioned that I’d come to the United States in 1958, that we German teenagers had been starved for American music because it had been forbidden during the war, and that, right after the war was over, we couldn’t get enough of the kind of songs he played on his show. I told him that his program had brought those great memories back to me.
After Danny Stiles had finished reading my letter on the air, he recalled that, since listening to American music was verboten by the Wehrmacht, the United States featured the Glenn Miller orchestra in its short-wave radio broadcasts from London. Without pausing, he then went into a commercial with the words, “How would you like to visit Portugal?” – this to advertise a Portuguese restaurant – while I was staring at what was lying right in front of me on the table: Der Rundbrief, a German publication, the cover of which had written in big letters, “Bilder aus Portugal” (Pictures from Portugal).
I had come upon the Rundbrief only an hour before the broadcast while going through some of my papers. The time element is so important. That’s why the most unusual coincidence of my adventure with Danny Stiles’ program may still be the fact that, with so many spots to choose from, the radio dial had stopped at WEVD, and that, out of Danny Stiles’ six hours of air time each day, seven days a week – a total of forty-two hours each week – I had tuned into his broadcast at the precise moment he said, “Hoert zu, listen very closely, dear hearts.” Regarding Danny’s total of 42 hours of air time, 6×7=42 was the only multiplication fact that had never given me trouble as a child, while most of the others invariably did! (6a)
Almost a year and many coincidences later, early in the morning of May 17th, 1989, I couldn’t wait to get started on this story while pleasantly soothing rain sounds accompanied my fingers’ frantic tap-dance on the typewriter keys. Rain had been falling all night and the whole day before that. I can honestly say that a waterfall has been in on this story from the start and was now giving it a great send-off. But then, we have the Waterfalls Restaurant right here at the corner of Greenmount Ave. and Bergen Blvd. (Berg is mount in German, by the way.) The letter that triggered this article, has written on it in green ink “Greenpeace Whale Campaign”. Besides, whales do live in water, which can sometimes be green and sometimes blue.
An important letter on an important day, I had thought when it arrived five days before on the 12th of May, 1989 — the 31st anniversary of my coming to the United States in 1958. The numbers 31 and 58 are part of a most curious personal number scenario that I became fully aware of only during the writing of this article. Not only had this special letter arrived on this, for me, so special day, it had been the only one in the mail. An only letter cannot be overlooked. Here it was: The Greenpeace Whale Campaign Letter. Its timely arrival made my head spin.
For, only the previous evening, our friend Wayne Thiel, an excellent guitarist, had surprised us with his visit and was, in turn, himself surprised when, on a tape I had made for myself of some of my favorite songs, he heard me play his song, a song of whales and men entitled “Always One,” which he had dedicated to me. Between each of the pieces of music on the tape, and as a prelude to the first one, I had used a recording of rain sounds made during a rainstorm in the summer of 1988.
As soon as Wayne heard my rainstorm introduction to “Always One,” he exclaimed, “Great, Ute, you’re doing justice to the song. Wait till I tell Adam.” I must have given him a strange look, for he asked me if I’d been listening to the words. Embarrassed, I had to admit that I hum a lot but rarely listen to the words of songs. So Wayne wrote down the words to “Always One” that his friend Adam Fleischman had written for it:
So desperately a raindrop falls,
then lost in a puddle.
On the ground a second – and a ripple –
and then it can’t be found.
So many raindrops end this way –
merging together –and never as one;
but always in a rainstorm
there is but one.
One rainstorm prefacing another one? Coincidence? I hadn’t even been aware of it!
No wonder Wayne couldn’t wait to tell Adam!
But this was not the only coincidence. The pencil drawing on te piece of paper Wayne used to write down the words to the song provided the link to a whole string of coincidences and to the rest of my account. A year earlier, Wayne had presented me with a tape of his songs and had attached to it a folder with drawings and color-coded messages. He had written the title “Always One” with a yellow magic marker and had drawn a yellow banana as part of an assortment of fruit for his song “Mixed Fruit.” These were the only yellow touches in a kaleidoscope of colors. A year later, the drawing which Wayne picked out of a stack of drawings to use for the words of “Always One” was of a banana!
Wayne’s tape also contained the song “Egypt.” Was it merely a coincidence that, right after he had given me the initial tape, my pen-pal and friend, Peter Danison, who knew nothing of this tape, suggested in his letter of February 10, 1988, that we play a game of coincidences and start it off with the word Egypt? Was it then a further coincidence that, on hearing about this first coincidence, Peter followed it up with yet another one when he wrote, “I, too, am a musician, and I wrote a piece of music ‘From Egypt’ – which I’ll send when I get it recorded properly one day”? What are we to make of coincidences such as these?
The physical reality which we see around us in our ordinary waking lives, Seth calls “Framework 1.” The inner creative source of the events that take place in Framework 1 is “Framework 2.” (Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, a Seth book by Jane Roberts, Chap. 2, Session 814) Coincidences, then, are the direct product of Framework 2.
Peter wrote, “I’ve been playing with the idea that ‘coincidences’ are like symbolic echoes of one’s beliefs at work in Framework 2. There would be a central issue of focus in Framework 1, then ‘little coincidences – like seeing something going on in your life portrayed the same day on a TV show… But the more I learn to look at things this way, the more the events of life begin to look like 3D hieroglyphs, played out, or ‘spoken’ by the actions of friends and strangers and nature. I’d say that all of your Framework 1 friends are also friends in Framework 2.”
In line with this remark, I can say that I don’t believe there is such a thing as a true stranger. On the subliminal level, we have knowledge of seeming strangers who come into our lives, even if we are consciously unaware that we know them. A case in point is my meeting with Angela Cerio at the New York Seth Conference in the fall of 1986.
I had not seen her approach me, but when I looked up, all of a sudden , there she was standing in front of me, apparently a complete stranger. However, although I realized that I had never set eyes on her in my life, I was also certain that I knew her. Dumbfounded, I stared into very familiar eyes. What was it she had said? “As soon as I spotted you, I knew I had to come over and meet you.” So the recognition had been mutual! After the conference, we shared coincidences over coffee. Thus began our friendship. Time and distance do not allow for much physical contact, but there is constant communication by letter and phone.
It was Angela who suggested that I write to Peter Danison and Sue Watkins and thus helped us to discover our common links. One such link was quite extraordinary. A letter from Peter to Angela – mailed, as usual, from Dundee, New York, to Staten Island, New York – went astray, first traveling all the way to Buffalo, being cancelled there, and, finally and belatedly, arriving at its destination. After Angela told me of this incident, I took awhile to make the association, and did so only through the coincidence of happening to open my husband’s and my honeymoon album a short while later. Sure enough, all these many years ago, in 1958, the only recorded coincidence of our honeymoon had taken place in Buffalo and with two strangers!
Driving into the city, we had to stop for a light, so asked two men sitting in the car next to ours if they could recommend a hotel. They did. The following day, we met them again, strangers no longer. However, the most unusual feature of the case was that the two men had decided to eat in the same place and at the same time as my husband and I. The four of us could hardly believe our eyes. The Elmwood Lounge was far from both the center of town and the hotel the men had recommended. My husband and I had been passing by the restaurant when something told us to stop. “Coincidence?” I wrote in my diary.
The third coincidence involving Buffalo occurred in 1988 in connection with a Color-Me-Beautiful cosmetics ad. When I looked at the address label of the brochure advertising the cosmetics, I found an additional label to the right of it. This label was addressed to someone whose last name was cut off after the first three letters ad who lived in Buffalo. Like Peter’s letter to Angela, the brochure could just as easily have gone to Buffalo.
The time had come to ask myself, “Why Buffalo?” What kind of emotional link did I have with that word? Finally, I remembered that, even before I came to the United States and English still had the added attraction any foreign language has for someone who is at last starting to master it, I kept singing, “Give me a home where the buffaloes roam.” I never expected that I would one day make my home in the land where the buffaloes roam and that I would find the only recorded coincidence of my honeymoon in a city by that name.
A further note: in 1985, a few friends and I would get together at each other’s houses for coffee klatsch. Invariably, someone would hum a tune and the others would join in. Edee Grippo’s favorite was “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.” Life can, indeed, be stranger than fiction – and often funnier. The song “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” contains the line “and away we go,” which is reminiscent of the famous one-liner with which Jackie Gleason, the actor who played Ralph Kramden, opened his show. Edee’s husband’s name is Ralph. I know, I’m on a tangent here, but I can’t resist it. Besides, the name of the show with Ralph Kramden is “The Honeymooners.” And let me just add here that Gleason’s flamboyant orchestra leader, Sammy Spear, happened to be our tenant at one time. His wife showed me the bevy of glittering suits that Gleason teased him about at every show.
Are you still with me? On a slightly more serious note, I asked myself, once again, what coincidences are really all about. It is interesting that the word “coincidence” is generally considered a random happening in a world of random happenings. It thus takes on a meaning contrary to what the word itself implies – “co-occurrence” – unless that little imp lies. The next coincidence involved our old friend, the banana. On March 11, 1988, I wrote Peter Danison: “My daughter received her Banana Republic spring update in today’s mail. Title page? Egypt! In my last letter to you, I underlined 31 twice. It’s my birth year, and a lot has happened in connection with that number lately. Page 31 in this catalog sports the Traveler’s Eye T-shirt, and is a special rendition of the cover.”
On March 15, in a banana-yellow letter, Peter answered: “Dear Ute, it was March 11 when I put on my ‘Banana Republic’ vest for the first time this year – the same date as your letter.”
Yes, dates are important. So is archetypal material when it announces certain events, like Peter’s telling me that, every time he heard from me by letter or phone, he had come across a reference to Lincoln in a book or on a TV show a day or two before. Sue Watkins added, “My son Sean used to dream the school stories about Lincoln carrying mail in his hat … As the venerable Star Trek also pointed out (albeit clumsily), Lincoln now belongs to the archetypes.”
When I spoke to Peter on June 30, 1990, though, he didn’t mention Lincoln. Instead, he told me he’d been dreaming and thinking about whales the whole week. But I should have known.
That same night, my girl friend Basha Schwartz and I were watching the Star Trek IV movie The Voyage Home on my TV. This movie is the one in which, in order to avert the destruction of earth in the 23re century, Captain Kirk and members of his crew travel back in time to San Francisco of 1986 to secure two whales to bring back to his own period, in which they had become extinct. He thereby not only preserves the species, but ensures the continuation of all life on earth.
While Basha and I were watching the movie, a summer storm raged outside. Immediately above the TV screen is a stained-glass window. We were immersed in a close-up of one of the whales as, with great force, he breathed out a huge fountain of white spray. To our amazement, when the spray reached the top of the screen, it was picked up by a bolt of lightning visible in the window above the TV set and in split-second synchronicity, was taken out of the screen into the sky. Basha and I turned to each other, stunned. “Who would believe it if we told them?” Basha asked. She was right. It had been one of those unforgettable moments of a lifetime.
In May of 1989, while I was working on this account, rain was falling once again. It had become a joke around my house: “Mom is sitting at her typewriter, and it’s raining.” Listening to Paul McCartney’s song “We’re So Sorry, Uncle Albert,” I returned in thought to 1958. I had accompanied my mother on her visit to her sister in New York, fully expecting to return to Berlin with her once our visitor’s visas had expired. What happened instead was that I remained here as a married woman. My mother flew back to Germany alone, armed with enough wedding cake to barely appease my father and our German relatives and friends who had been cheated out of the wedding festivities. We’d had a small house wedding, the best arrangement due to the fact that my mother’s visa was about to expire. Oh, how we wished we had not left my father behind! He wasn’t able to attend his only child’s wedding or to give her away. We missed him. Our American relatives felt “so sorry for Uncle Albert.” The song says it all.
How do song writers know about such things even before they take place, unless all of us – writers and listeners alike – are tuned into the universal mind, where every event is potentially present to be played out in physical reality by certain parties?
I had listened to the song often but had never noticed what now came as the biggest surprise yet.
Paul McCartney had done the same thing my son Richard and I had done: he had incorporated the recording of a rainstorm right into his song, thunderbolt and all! I’ll be darned, I thought as I added the song to the tape of favorites that Richard and I had made; our rainstorm is the overture to yet another one!
If we do have a hand in creating our reality in accordance with what is important to us, then maybe anniversaries and other dates in our lives stress their importance in a way that can’t be overlooked. They also show us how we as individuals are connected to the greater experience of the universe.
Now I will describe the number scenario, which I became aware of during the writing of this account, especially as it relates to the year 1989. Even if it can’t be understood in mathematical terms, it can at least be appreciated as a curiosity of sorts.
When my husband and I were married in 1958, I was 27 years old. On July 15, 1989, we celebrated our 31st wedding anniversary. I was born in 1931. My husband has a 31 in his Social Security number. I have a 58 in mine. In 1958, he was 54, twice my age. As he tells it, first he had to wait 27 years for me to be born, then another 27 years before he was able to meet and marry me.
In 1958 our ages added up to 9 (27=9 and 5+4=9); in 1989 our ages were reversed. My husband was 85, I 58, which is the year I came to this country, got married and started a new life. In 1989, both our ages totaled 13. The reverse of 13 is 31, the year I was born. In some ways we seemed to have come full circle, although that didn’t mean life didn’t still hold surprises!
The more coincidences I collect, the more I see life as the stage on which they coincide. I see my fellow humans as co-actors on that stage. I suspect that we are writing the script as we go along, moment to moment. I also suspect that there is continuity across time barriers, shown to us clearly and consistently in numbers – like a thread in a pattern. Here you see it, there you don’t, but it’s there all the time.
Art as a medium is a veritable treasure trove of coincidences. I have made a few very personal, surreal associations with some of the paintings of the Surrealist painter Rene Magritte. On February 23, 1989, I wrote in my diary that, a few days before, my sons’ friend, John Celidonio, had brought over the book Magritte by A.M. Hammacher. Magritte’s painting The Pleasure Principle threw me for a loop. He had painted it in 1937 to depict Edward James, author of The Gardener Who Saw God. The book was also written 1937, the very year in which I had an experience that was synchronistic with the painting.
While standing on the path in our garden in Berlin 37, Germany – I was six years old at the time – my mind suddenly merged with the universal mind in an explosion of white light. I had no awareness of my physical o non-physical body or of the world. In this timeless experience, I was one with everyone and all there is. To me, everything was simple – like turning on a light switch, just a click in the mind. Questions were inconceivable. For the first and only time in my life, it all made sense. I tried to hold on to this state for as long as I could. But, before I knew it, the familiar sun was back. There must be two suns, I thought, one white, one golden. I told no one. I may have thought that everyone already knew about this. Then I forgot about it until 1983.
Had I set myself the task of painting that experience, I could never have done justice to it the way Magritte did with his portrait of Edward James. James is shown sitting at a table with his head replaced by a ball of radiant white light. On the table lies a stone remarkably similar to one I have in my possession and which, for a reason I didn’t understand until I saw the painting, I have long cherished.
Another of Magritte’s paintings, The Fountain of Youth, contains as its center of focus a tombstone that appears to be made of marble – also known as the stone of light – with the word Coblenz etched on it in big bold letters. Protruding from the middle of the stone’s upper rim is the head of an eagle, whose profile is the stone’s only ornament.
My father, Albert Herbig was born and grew up in Koblenz, Germany. Like Magritte, he lived in Paris for well over two years. In the painting, next to the tombstone, a leaf grows out of the ground like a tree, with its little stem acting as its trunk. My father called me his Staemmche, his “little stem.” He was fond of yo-yos and spinning tops. In the background of Magritte’s painting is a hue stone yo-yo, and stones and rocks are strewn around the tombstone on the earth. Could my father have stepped into the painting, he would have tried to pick up all the stones, I’m sure. On my parents’ visit to the U.S. when my son Corky was born in 1961, Papa had to be persuaded not to cart the whole United States back to Germany. We could understand his taking a handful of soil as a souvenir – but three boxes of stones?!
Magritte painted The Fountain of Youth in the year 1975, and it was in 1957 that my mother and I were invited to come to the United States to meet my aunt. Due to the Armenian holocaust, the two sisters had not seen each other in over 60 years. My mother had been taken to an orphanage and then brought to Germany and raised by a German minister. When we arrived in New York, a big surprise awaited us. Our relatives had obtained permission to greet us right on board the M/S Italia, even before we disembarked. We felt like celebrities! Two newspaper reporters covered the event since it isn’t often that two sisters embrace each other after a lifelong separation.
As my cousin Haigaz helped us go through customs, the custom’s officer said, “Young lade, may I ask if you are married?” When I told him I wasn’t he replied, “Maybe you’ll get married here and stay in this country.” We all laughed, for who could have guessed that, exactly two months and three days later, I would, indeed, be married and that my newly found cousin Haigaz, my future husband, was standing right next to me when the officer made this quite innocent yet prophetic remark?
I had always suspected that we are all intimately connected with each other in a way that is hard to explain and almost impossible to prove. But now I can accept the idea that we, as individuals, are tuned into the universal mind, that we are part and parcel of tat mind, and that there is no difference between the universal mind and us – only when and where we happen to be focused. I therefore think it stands to reason that common interests and goals, if propelled into manifestation with the same strength of intent by all concerned, will automatically result in incidents that coincide, if not actually collide, in a fairly narrow time slot. These incidents could then, under the very best of circumstances, be corroborated by the other people who perceive them.
Without knowing it, I had been waiting for proof of this truth. How happy, how grateful I am to have found such people! My thanks go out to them and to another kind of consciousness altogether, to that of those wonderful whales.
The story of how the song “Always One” came into being is symbolic of the truth behind its own statement, namely, that one part of the whole and the whole itself are “always one.” That is the reason I took this phrase as the title for my article, which is fine with Wayne and Adam and which I have the distinct feeling the whales would also heartily approve of.
This account, then, is the story of that song. About a year ago, in the summer of 1988, Wayne and Adam had just finished their recording – even the title had been chosen – when they decided to overlay it with whale sounds. All but one of their sound tracks (guitars, vocals, synthesizer) had already been recorded, and they didn’t want to waste this last one. The two waited until the scratches at the beginning of the whale record had stopped. Then Wayne let go of the pause button of their own recording so that it could join that of the whales. This happened in such harmony that it must be heard to be believed.
The whale sounds came in at the precise moment they would have if the whales had been physically present and had been practicing with our musicians. And who knows, on some mysterious level they may have done just that! Gray Whales can be identified by the heart-shaped spray they breathe out. This recording of whales and men not only warmed my heart, it filled my whole being – with wonder!
Ute Kaboolian
Ute's Poetry and Musings 