Identical Twins

Rob and Jessie

Noah, looking for Rob

On the evening of July 4, we were all outside, tossing Frisbees for Noah. Some of Megan’s friends had dropped by to watch the fireworks next door, to hang out, to do whatever twenty somethings do these days.  They were sitting around in the driveway, on the hoods of their cars, in chairs we’d brought out of the garage. Our neighbors’ kids were in their yard, too, and as Rob and Megan tossed the Frisbee for Noah, the neighbor kids got into the act and pretty soon, it was a Frisbee toss between humans.

One of the next door kids was Zack – we call him Zackie. He learned to toss Frisbee at the park in our neighborhood, when Rob and Jessie, the Golden Retriever we had before Noah, used to go down there in the afternoons. Jessie loved her Frisbee  and she would catch it from anyone willing to toss it, even Zackie, who was four or five at the time. Zackie has a powerful spin on his Frisbee. So when he tossed one toward Noah, it whipped up toward the dusk, sailed down toward the driveway and struck one of the Dewar twins so hard that his glasses were knocked off – but his drink didn’t spill – and a lens popped out.

The Dewars are male identical twins with whom Megan went to high school, a couple of pretty good musicians who now have their own band. Even people who have known the Dewars for years sometimes can’t tell them apart. Rob said, “Hey, did that Frisbee hit Anthony or Zack?”

“Anthony,” Megan said without hesitation. “It was definitely Anthony.”

Too bad, I thought. It would’ve made a good synchro, the start of a cluster, perhaps.  Five minutes after Rob and I had retreated inside the house, Megan hurried in, laughing. “Hey, you guys,” she called. “It was Zack, not Anthony, who got hit. That’s a synchro, right?”

Bingo, I thought, then immediately started chewing away at the thing. What’s the message? Well, we live next door to identical twin sisters. Zackie hit Zack with the Frisbee and although they aren’t twins, they share the same names, and Zack and his brother, Anthony, are identical twins. Then there’s Michelle, who was also visiting, and has an identical twin. She noted:  “Noah looks so much like Jessie they could be identical twins.”

So the cluster is about twins – two dogs, two brothers, two pairs of identical twin sisters, two guys who share the same name, connected by, oh well, a Frisbee.  But what’s the deeper message? I don’t have a clue. But the intriguing thing about synchros is that once you recognize one of them, and start breaking down the components, other factors became apparent.

Initially, the synchro was superficial – two Zacks, connected by a Frisbee. But then I chewed away at it and realized it was much more layered than it appeared to be initially. Perhaps something is headed this way, in twos, identical twos?