The Good Year Blimp Synchro

 This evening, we re-connected with Jeri and Steve, a couple we knew when our kids were young. They lived in our former neighborhood and Megan and their oldest son, Kevin, used to play together. They thought we had moved to Asheville, and didn’t realize that for the last 17 years, Jeri has been in our area a couple of times a week to buy hay and feed for the three horses she and Steve now own.

Their kids, like Megan, are adults now, and they are dealing with aging parents. There are some eerie parallels here. Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s have figured prominently into their parents’ lives, just as they did in the lives of my parents. Steve’s mother and Jeri’s father passed away recently and whenever these kinds of big transitions happen in our lives, synchronicity is in there somewhere. And that’s how it was for them.

Steve’s mother, Jeri, and her kids always had this thing about the Good Year blimp. They would see it, exclaimed  about how cool it was, talked about riding on it. The blimp was one of those connections in the family. Like an inside joke.

The Good Year blimp is a staple in the South Florida skies. It hums along the coast and sometimes drifts inland over the Everglades. Anyone who has lived here for five seconds, has seen it. You invariably wonder how something this huge is airborne, think of the Hindenburg, and wonder how you can hop on board for a ride.

When Steve’s mother was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s,  in an assisted living facility, they all took turns visiting her.  Steve and Jeri left their home one morning with their daughter, Nicki, to drive her to the facility for a visit with her grandmother.  Jeri noticed that the Good Year blimp seemed to be  following them. “It followed us from our neighborhood, to a Chinese restaurant, and then to the facility.”

The blimp was still behind them when they dropped Nicki at the facility, and then Jeri and Steve  headed out to run some errands. The blimp was still following them. At some point in this errand run,  Jeri got a call from the facility that Steve’s mother had just died. Jeri got off the phone. “We need to turn around,” she said. “Your mom has just passed on.”

As Steve made a quick U-turn, so did the blimp. And that was when Jeri clearly saw the message on the other side of the huge dirigible: www.alzheimersassociation.com,  the very disease Steve’s mother had. “And because the blimp was such a big deal for all of us, I knew, I just knew, it was Steve’s mother saying good-bye.”

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Synchros like this one are so powerful they leave an indelible impression. I wonder at the orchestration of all it. Are there invisible gnomes who move  pieces around on some  cosmic chessboard? How’s this kind of stuff happen, anyway?

Jeri says the blimp followed them – but perhaps it was simply following the road they were on.  Even so, why did it make that U-turn at the precise moment they did, just after they’d heard Steve’s mother had passed on, enabling Jeri to see the message on the other side? Alzheimer’s.  It could just as easily have read breast cancer or diabetes or, for that matter, google. But it didn’t read any of those things.

Our loved ones who have passed on use anything they can to communicate with us.