by Jonathan Zimmerman
The Chinese have an expression that I’ve always liked: “No coincidence, no story.” A story should contain some kind of strange or unexpected twist; if it doesn’t, it’s not much of a story.
Here’s mine. A month ago, I surprised my friend Pete at the hospital where he was getting his last set of infusions to treat leukemia. He had received them every six weeks for the past five years. That’s after two bone marrow transplants (the first one didn’t work), stomach troubles, weight loss, and a host of other indignities related to his cancer and chemotherapy.
We decided to celebrate at a Philadelphia restaurant called Middle Child. A little more than a week later, The New York Times ran a picture of it in a piece about sandwich shops. And there we are: Pete and me, having lunch right after his infusion. He’s the guy in the baseball cap, just to the left of the tree; I’m sitting across from him, in glasses and flip-flops.
As we all ask, whenever we experience a coincidence: What are the odds?
Higher than we think, statisticians remind us. We’re notoriously poor judges of probability, and we all think that our own coincidences are more remarkable than the other guy’s. My friend and I went to lunch, and a Times photographer happened to take our picture. What’s so odd about that?
Part of the answer has to do with the way I found out about it. My daughter and I have a long-standing inside joke about the restaurant’s name — yes, I’m a middle child — so my eye was drawn to the piece right after it came out. But I didn’t recognize Pete and me in the photo until a colleague wrote and asked, hey, is that you in the Times?
How he picked me out, I’ll never know; all you can see in the shot is my profile. But nobody else told me about it. So if my colleague doesn’t notice it, well, it didn’t happen. Like a tree falling in the forest, a coincidence doesn’t exist unless someone observes it.
After lunch, Pete and I parted ways. He took the train back to his home in the suburbs, and I walked to my daughter’s house in the city. I told her that we had been at Middle Child — our inside joke, again — and that the food was fantastic. The Times wasn’t wrong about that.
Then I told her that the entire day — not just the meal — was extraordinary, and that I would remember it for the rest of my life. I told her that Pete was genuinely shocked — open mouth, double take — when I showed up at the hospital. That we ruminated about the last time I had visited him there, near the start of his disease, when neither of us knew how long he would live. That over lunch, he said he was relieved that the treatments were over — who wouldn’t be? — but that the future was a series of question marks, as it always is for someone with his condition. That he was glad I was his friend.
I had brought him a book I had written, which I inscribed with a note thanking him for his courage and example. I told him that he taught me how to face death while still living a full life. And that if the time comes for me to do what he did, I hope I can summon even a fraction of his grace and good humor.
I can’t explain why the Times photographed us during this unforgettable exchange, any more than I can tell you why Pete has survived. But here’s what I can say: As strange as it sounds, we construct our own coincidences. It’s one of the ways we make meaning of the chaos that surrounds us.
Look again at the photo of us having lunch. To you, it’s just a picture of two old white guys at a table. Not to me. It’s a monument to friendship and to the enduring things that make us human.
And one of those things is, yes, the propensity to connect seemingly random events. I’ve heard people say there’s no such thing as a coincidence — it’s all in our heads. But it’s in our hearts, too: Pete’s and mine. I don’t believe there was any cosmic force leading the Times to take our picture, or my colleague to notice it. I’m just hugely grateful that they did.
