Serendipity Blogalong

BaxterKnits clued me in to a different idea of a meme sort of thing. There's a Blogalong, and you can check it out at the link below. BK herself has an incredible series of coincidences relating to a particular volume of an unusual knitting book, well worth reading.

The topic for this month's blogalong at Blogger's Paradise is "Serendipity"

My own stories are much less extraordinary. I can cite several examples of meeting people I had known many years and many miles away: a Missouri grade-school friend met in Yellowstone Park while I was in college; a Wyoming high-school classmate met in Kauai, Hawaii 30+ years later, and so on.

My favorite happenstance relates to my DH and our mutual love of books. Twenty or so years ago, DH and I did a fair bit of tent camping, sometimes with a group of people here in the LA area. But one September we went on a tour of the Grand Canyon and the areas around it. While we were visiting a museum in Flagstaff, we came across some of the mystery novels of Tony Hillerman, with his lovely stories about the Native American police force on the Navajo reservation. DH and I both eagerly worked our way through the backlist, and snatched up the new ones as they were published.

After I retired early, I did a lot of aimless shopping, and sometimes found little gems of shops. One of these was a small bookshop, carrying old and rare books, particularly about history and California. Along with some of the more-valuable books were often somewhat unusual modern fiction and nonfiction volumes. The owner was a wonderfully knowledgeable man, and I went back frequently, often at a slow period of his day, when we would chat about books and enjoy tossing puns back and forth.

I was looking one day and came across a couple of first editions of Tony Hillerman's early books. Great idea for DH's birthday and Christmas, I thought! The kicker was that they were autographed and inscribed to someone who had the Spanish version of my DH's name, a happy coincidence! The bookshop owner found a couple more of these books over the course of the next year or two, and they now reside in the CBM Private Library. Sadly, the owner died and his widow sold out the inventory. I still miss him.