Eyes of a Blue Dog: A Tale of Triple Synchronicity

Yesterday I read my monthly horoscope on Susan Miller’s Astrology Zone and perked up when I read that friends from the past would contact me this month. In fact, just a couple of hours earlier I’d received an e-mail from an old college roommate, who had been out of touch – or maybe it was me—for about 20 years.

That sort of simple synchronicity doesn’t impress novelist Tony Vigorito. For Tony, the WOW factor enters when the synchronicities pile one on top of another. The following story is one such example with a BIG wow factor. It was posted last September on the website Reality Sandwich. Tony gave us permission to reprint it. –

This is not a story about the wow and holy cow of seeing your initials on someone’s license plate, or hearing a word you just learned on the radio, or running into a friend at the grocery store. Without offending the marvel of others, these do not entirely impress me, and seem more like artifacts of attention than bona fide synchronicities. (Although, it did give me pause when one reader wrote me amazed to report that when she was reading Just a Couple of Days, just as the main character looked at his watch and saw that it was 5:55 and wished for peace on Earth, she glanced at her bedside alarm clock and saw that it was, yes indeed, 5:55. So perhaps it counts if peace on Earth is at stake…)
In any event, along with sex and tornadoes, my second novel, Nine Kinds of Naked, is about synchronicity. What follows is the story of the evening that precipitated an ongoing cascade of synchronicity in my life that I remain helpless to fathom, save humming one of my favorite lines from the Beatles’ I Am the Walrus:
Don’t you think the Joker laughs at you?
Ho Ho Ho Hee Hee Hee Ha Ha Ha…
So, it was the evening of November 4, 2004, a Thursday, just a couple of days after George W. Bush was apparently reelected president, and a great gloom had settled over the land. It was an accidental gathering of friends at my house, everyone stopping by uninvited, and soon there were six of us, men and women alike, and someone had brought wine, and another a guitar, and cupboards were opened and more wine was seized and the refrigerator was ransacked and a great and nourishing feast was prepared by three as another played guitar and I harped my harmonica and another found a rhythm atop some stray pots and pans. And dishes were washed and a fire was built and we gathered around the fireplace on an old Oriental rug and ate, drank, and made merry as if there was nothing else to do in life.
A bookshelf stood sentry next to the fireplace, and throughout the evening various volumes were pulled out, random passages read aloud, always bearing insight on whatever was at hand, and at one point a friend of mine, a phenomenal visual artist in her own right, pulled a book out of her bag entitled, Blue Dog Man. It was the collected artwork of George Rodrigue, whose signature motif is the inclusion of a blue dog in all of his pieces, a terribly cute terrier/spaniel with eyes yearning for love and approval, apparently inspired by his deceased dog, Tiffany. The Blue Dog book was passed around and soon all of us were taking turns attempting to emulate Tiffany’s sad and hopeful eyes, though even the most determined among us were unable to hold the expression for more than a few seconds before succumbing once again to smiles and ha ha.
And the evening wore on and the men fetched more logs for the fire and conversation grew more trusting as wine and fire warmed our hearts, songs were shared and massages were traded and cuddles were puddled and the heartbreaking political landscape of late America became distant and forgotten, for life is where you are and who you are with, and on this evening neither corruption nor deceit could distract these souls from the obvious joy of existence.
At some point late in the evening I wandered over to my computer (I know I always seem to be online from the light on my profile, but I assure you I have a full and varied existence, and I’m just really lazy about turning my computer off…). Skimming through my inbox, the subject line of one email—sent a couple of hours ago, right around the time the six of us were making Tiffany’s blue dog eyes at one another—caught my attention. It read, very simply,
Eyes of a Blue Dog.
Intrigued, I open the e-mail and it’s from a reader in Toronto and there’s not a breath of explanation anywhere as to why she chose the phrase as her subject line. That’s curious, I’m thinking, but then I scroll down and notice that the name of the woman who sent the email is the same as Rodrigue’s dog,
Tiffany.
My credulity stretched, I call out to the others hey come look at this I’m serious. And everyone gathers around my computer as I show them the Eyes of a Blue Dog subject line and that the sender’s name is also Tiffany and we are impressed and even astonished by this curiouser and curiouser turn of events, but then someone else notices the signature line of her email, which read, in inexplicable summation of our evening,
good atmosphere, good friends, good conversation,
good wine, good books, and the space between.
If there was astonishment before there was now a bedlam of whoa dude and what the fuck amazement. I was charged with replying to her email immediately to demand an explanation, which I did, sharing a more pebbled version of the above story and the next day I find out that she’s never heard of George Rodrigue or his dog Tiffany, but she had recently read the short story, Eyes of a Blue Dog, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and was likening it to the phrase, Just a Couple of Days. Moreover—and this may make this a quadruple synchronicity—she had only learned of the concept of synchronicity a month before in one of her psychology courses, and had yesterday arrived at her parents’ house to find the word SYNCHRONICITY written in all-caps across the dry-erase board in her parents’ kitchen. Her father, it seems, had heard about it on a radio show and wanted to remind himself to read more about it.
So what does this all mean? I originally intended this closing paragraph to be a philosophic summation of what synchronicity implies, but I deleted it. The prose was stilted anyway, and as I sat here writing the summary in my favorite coffeehouse, should it really surprise anyone that I Am the Walrus came on the stereo?
Don’t you think the Joker laughs at you?
Ho Ho Ho Hee Hee Hee Ha Ha Ha…
***
Tony Vigoito’s latest novel, Nine Kinds of Naked, explores the theme of synchronicity. If you’d like to read a fascinating essay on how that novel came into being and more of Tony’s thoughts on synchronicity, go to:

https://www.tonyvigorito.com/
https://www.realitysandwich.com/chaos_collapse_and_synchronicity