Working in a parole office, there are moments to suspend belief. Or perhaps there are rarer moments to actually engage belief. It depends upon which side of belief you start on.
Life stories stretch and relax with no logical explanation. You pick up some and discard others.
Last week, two new students who are on parole began the interminable paperwork required for each new student to enroll in my literacy class: name, address, social security number, parole agent’s name, birthdate…
Wait. What? Birthdate?
One student’s birthdate was January 13, 1979.
I reviewed the other student’s data. And his birthday, amazingly, was also January 13. Even more astoundingly, the year was also 1979.
Two students registered for my class at the same time, on the same day, who were also born on the same day, the same month and the same year.
What are the chances?
How many of us have experienced similar weird circumstantial encounters in our own lives? And, perhaps, we have narrowly missed other up-to-chance events that we will never find out about. How could we know if we passed a first grade classmate, thirty years later, walking just beyond our sight on our hurried way to the post office?
Oh…one other detail. My own birthday is also January 13. So three of us sat together, joined together by a common birthday, and that was all.
Two fellows on parole and one teacher. All joined by January 13. Numerically expressed, the date becomes 1-1-3.
We held up our fingers to mark the circumstance. In some small and weird way, we bonded over something so apparently trivial as our birthdays.
I wondered how many other “one-one-threes” are waiting to be discovered in the people right around us. “Something-something-somethings”—they are the small things that can remove barriers.
In a world shredded by criminal backgrounds, race, religion and social class, we may find ourselves repeating the seemingly inane quote by the late Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get along?”
By discovering more 1-1-3s in the weaving of our lives, perhaps we can.