Uncommon In A Common World

 

Christ Episcopal Church on St. Simons Island, Georgia. It is the most peaceful place in the state. Photo by me, April 2015.

 

Oscar Wilde wrote an essay in 1889 about art and life and their relationship to each other. He wrote, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”

I am sorry to say that Wilde may have been correct.

This week I went back through my notes for earlier this month. I wanted to see what I was doing on a particular day. I was motivated by the recent death of a childhood best friend. I try my best to be rational in an irrational world. Coincidences, like their cousin conspiracies, are random connections of patterns the human mind uses to attempt to explain what we do not understand, or so, I would like to believe. Coincidences are easy filler for gaps in our knowledge, or are they?

Believe is an important word. Merriam-Webster defines it as, “to consider to be true or honest.” It is the kind of word that the foundation of our daily life sits upon. Humans believe in all kinds of things, such as that the sun will come out tomorrow or that when I turn this door knob and pull the door it will open.

Coincidences like “signs” are something I can go along with more than full-blown conspiracies, but I am a skeptic in my heart. I am the type of person who believes in himself more than anything that exists outside of me. I have been this way since I was a little boy running through the New Hope woods in the 1970s. Then the last week happened.

When I was told my old best friend had died two weeks after his birthday, I knew instantly something else was awry. It worried me. Days later and I cannot shake this feeling. It has me spooked. It is like like living in an episode of In Search Of.

For the last year I have been writing a book that is one hundred percent fiction. I began writing this book in January 2025 and the idea originated in the fall of 2024. One of the primary plot lines in this book is the death of the main character's childhood best friend just after his birthday and the aftermath. That plot line drives everything in the book and it serves as the scaffolding from which it rises. 

 

Those were the first coincidences.  

Like every writer or artist, I draw upon experiences from my life, either consciously or subconsciously. Something I spend a lot of thought on is character names. Sometimes the names have a hidden meaning, but more importantly I want the names to match the images I have in my head. The names for this book were easy to pluck as I had strong images formed in my mind of what they looked like and their personalities.

One of the main characters is named Evan and the book is written from his perspective. The name was also the middle name of that old childhood best friend of mine, the one who had just died. I recognized the connection when I named that character and it gave me pause at the time in 2025, but the character was not intentionally named after him. I liked the name. I saw the character looking like a young Andrew McCarthy in Mannequin and my old friend did not look like that.

The name Evan was an old piece of information stuck in my head. Since he was someone I was close with, I knew his middle name. He knew mine too. It may sound strange that two teenage boys would have conversations about middle names but we did. I told him my first and middle names came from a television commercial. I did not care much for my middle name as I thought it was too common in my age group. On the contrary, he was proud of his. He thought it was uncommon like his first name and he was all about being uncommon in a common world. He was an only child and a small part of his natural disposition was his belief that he was exceptional.

 

That was the next coincidence. 

In my notes I found that on January 14th, I worked on two scenes in two chapters. Both scenes were emotionally heavy and I relied on an old trick of mine that I have mentioned before. In order to manipulate myself to write these emotional types of scenes, I listen to music that suits that mood. This is a trick I use on myself to get into the needed emotional frame of mind. I listen to the music before I write as I cannot write to music with lyrics because I am afraid I will steal lines without knowing it. A song popped into my head that morning that worked for me and I put it on repeat. I probably listened to it fifty or sixty times until I was down to where I needed to be. I had not heard or listened to the song since the early nineties, when that band and style of music went out of fashion. 

I wrote a scene that I had been putting off. It was a funeral scene on St. Simons Island in which the childhood best friend has died. I also rewrote a scene in which two characters discuss faith in society as Evan is going through an existential crisis. The other character asks if Evan is going on "some weird spiritual journey." It is intended to be humorous. Evan mentions a song (the same song I had listened to before I began writing that morning) and uses it as an example of something from the past he kept hidden. He explains that he believed his childhood best friend would have made fun of him and how he saw the meaning of the song differently in his early fifties. He recognizes the absurdity of what he is saying, but he is not convinced if it really is absurd. As I was writing that scene, I did have my old best friend in my head and was using his mocking reactions to some of the music I liked as a teenager as inspiration.

After I worked on those two chapters, I set them aside and have not touched them since.

Nine days later, I was told my old childhood best friend with the middle name of Evan had died. I read his obituary. He died January 14.

 

I have lost track of the amount of coincidences in what I wrote and what happened.

This was the song.

There was also what I wrote on December 23, 2025 and it now has an extra level of meaning.