Land of Amazing Coincidences

Since we began planning the move to New Paltz, we've been the beneficiaries of several amazing coincidences.

Most amazing of all was that the boy right down the road was born the same day as our son in the same hospital, just down the hall from where we were 7 years ago. Considering that there were only a handful of kids born right there and then, I'd have to rate that as one of the all-time unlikely events of our lives, probably on the order of 1 in a million, give or take. Naturally this other little guy takes the same daily bus to the same school, so that gave them quite a cool story for their
friends and teachers!

My little guy, Emmett, was featured alongside me in a photo published in the August 5, 2006 (Sunday) edition of the Poughkeepsie Journal. The accompanying article was about my unicycling and came out days before my unicycle demo at Mohonk Preserve. I'm glad that I agreed to do the demo, because one of the article readers was my long- lost best-friend Ben. We were pretty inseparable from the time we met in pre-nursery until high school, when we began to drift apart at about age 16. It turns out that Ben and his wife decided to settle in New Paltz 7 years ago, just as they were planning to start their family. Like our neighbors, they also have two kids (both boys), and their eldest is also in 2nd grade at the same school! Oh, and Ben lives 5 minutes from our house.

Another lovely coincindence was that our kids' godparents, independent of our decisions, planned to move out of NYC in order to start a family. They decided, like us, to stay close to Manhattan (they're both actors) and settle on Plattekill, 18 minutes door-to-door from us. They close on their house next week. As they love to point out, we couldn't have planned this if we'd tried.