Dominoes

Here’s another story from Max Action, the guy now famous for the Magic Teapots story. Max also contributed Chicago Breakfast Bums, and The Little Prince.

This synchronicity occurred a couple of weeks after the teapot incident. In the couple of weeks after Max discovered the second teapot, he says that all his friends were immersed in minor coincidences constantly.

“Sadly, I can recall little of the details now. This was well before I decided I wanted to try to remember and even write down coincidences when they occurred. But thanks to tangible traces left behind, though, I do remember one instance:

Six of us were sitting around playing Pictionary. During the course of the first two games, it became clear that Rebekah and I, on opposing teams, were both getting very good at cutting to quick abstractions when drawing. Some comments were made about how when she and I were teamed up we’d be unstoppable (we were rotating partners each round and in the final round she and I would be partnered up.)

Shortly into the third game, I was drawing, Rebeckah was guessing, and the word was “dominoes.” I hastily sketched a pair of dominoes, knowing she’d have to get it very quickly to beat the other teams to the punch. Almost immediately she had a curious reaction – her face flushed bright red and she had a hard time getting the word “dominoes” blurted out.

Flushed and flustered, she grabbed the notebook from me and paged backward a few pages – to show us the one thing that she had doodled aimlessly, minutes before – dominoes, in two places – (see the photo at the top).

Later – maybe that same day, maybe the next day, we went to the thrift store – for the first time since the time I’d bought the teapot. It was a large store – I think it was the Sun Ray mall one on 94 – and we all got separated. I wandered alone for what seemed to me a surprising amount of time without seeing any of my friends.

Finally, I looked up and discovered that Rebekah had come down the aisle from the other side. She also had been alone the entire time since we’d arrived, and I was the first of our party she’d run into since. In the spot where we met, we both looked up and saw that there was a plastic bag of dominoes hanging in the aisle between us – and burst into laughter.

Our laughter took on a somewhat different tone when the exact same thing happened the next two times we went to thrift stores, over the rest of that winter – wherever she and I met up in the store, there would be dominoes right there with us.
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But there’s a postscript to this story. Apparently when Max was digging through old emails, working on an upcoming post for his blog, he came across an email from 2006 in which he had written about the dominoes synchronicity.
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“This one continued for awhile. Three times in thrift stores over the rest of the winter, we bumped into each other randomly after having split up to wander about. At the point where we met, each time when we looked up there was a bag of dominoes in the aisle immediately next to us. I still wasn’t sure, though, so I just sent Rebekah a text message asking her abut this and she confirmed it had actually happened three times.”

Check out Max’s synchronicity on the albino squirrel: