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I’m a fan of cosmic coincidences, the moments you almost can’t believe are actually happening, because had you arrived or left a minute earlier or later, you’d have missed the whole thing.
Two happened to me back to back on Sunday morning.
I had driven from Claremont to Los Angeles to walk the picturesque loop around the Hollywood Reservoir. I recommend it: You have good views of the Hollywood sign and can walk over the scenic, William Mulholland-designed Hollywood Dam of 1924. And through a fence I saw deer, munching on grass just feet away.
Trudging uphill back to my car afterward along the Lake Hollywood Drive sidewalk, suddenly the woman jogging downhill in my direction exclaimed “Hey!”
It was one of my best friends, Adriana Chavira, a former newsroom colleague in Ontario who now lives in North Hollywood. She’d just finished a hike up the Wisdom Tree trail in Griffith Park and was heading back to her own car, a block from mine.
What were the odds? L.A. suddenly seemed like a small town, where you might routinely bump into people you know, even though in my case I can’t know more than a dozen.
Even stranger, Adriana and I had each been on the opposite sidewalk before crossing over, she because her car was parked on this side, me because of slow walkers ahead of me. If just one of us hadn’t made that switch, we’d never have seen each other despite being in the same place at the same time.
It made me wonder how often I’ve missed people simply by being on the wrong side of the street.
The amazement hadn’t worn off a half-hour later as I walked toward a patio seat at a frequent weekend hangout of mine, Silverlake Coffee.
Just as I was about to sit down, the man at the next table, who had a confident voice, was saying to his coffee date, “I live in Claremont. It’s a pretty easy drive out here.”
So startled was I that, abandoning my usual reserve, I interjected: “I live in Claremont!” We determined we live a few blocks apart. (We will probably never meet again.)
Come to think of it, that reminds me of a similar encounter from a couple of years back.
I was on the same coffeehouse patio in Silver Lake on a weekend morning (it’s a pretty easy drive out there), reading the newspaper. A passerby on the sidewalk did a double-take and said hello. It was my friend David Saw, who lives in Diamond Bar.
As if anticipating this item, reader Mary Cox of Corona emailed last week to share a coincidence. She’d been discussing my column about books with a friend, who’d also read it, before the topic turned to weekend plans.
He was going to Bridges Auditorium in Claremont to see his grandsons in “The Wizard of Oz,” showing Cox a photo of the unfamiliar venue on his phone.
This was on a Thursday.
“Imagine my surprise,” Cox relates, “when I opened the paper on Friday and saw your article on Bridges Auditorium.”
If Cox was hiking Griffith Park on Sunday, I don’t want to know about it. It’d be too much.
The New York Times’ popular feature about three houses listed at the same price, “What You Get,” on Jan. 15 had three in California: Mendocino (“a 1976 cottage”), Idyllwild (“a 1991 chalet-style retreat”) and Riverside (“a midcentury-modern house” from 1962), each priced at $1.1 million. Two out of three in the IE might be a record.
Then on Jan. 22, “What You Get” had a trio of $2 million homes in California: a Tudor Revival in Berkeley, a condo in L.A. and “a 10-acre retreat in Murrieta.”
As befits the IE at any price point, the Murrieta estate was said to be “a 20-minute drive from supermarkets and big-box stores.”
In her speech at the State of the City gala in Riverside Jan. 25, Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson was reminding us that one year ago, she had challenged all of us “to design a better Riverside.”
Meanwhile, the closed-captioning on the video screen was saying the mayor had challenged all of us “to design a better Oweredide.”
Even at its own State of the City, Riverside may not get its due. I can’t speak for Oweredide.
David Allen types with his fingers on the right keys Friday, Sunday and Wednesday. Email [email protected], phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.
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