What are the Odds?

El Coco…………CO mmunity of CO incidence?

While assisting the carpenter who was building a small porch enclosure two years ago at our home in Asheville, I happened to mention we wanted to go away for the approaching winter. Some place warm, with a shoreline and tropical breezes.  He said it was really nice in this little fishing village down in Costa Rica where his brother, Lyn, owned a condo.  Lyn’s primary residence was in Fort Myers just an hour south of our “home town” and he only visited his condo occasionally.   A few phone calls to Lyn down in Florida and we had arranged to rent his condo for a portion of that winter in this country we’d never been to, in this tiny town we’d never heard of: Playas del Coco or simply, El Coco to the natives.

During the early part of that first trip while grilling a slab of snook we’d picked up from a fish vendor who caught it earlier that same day, Geri was approached by two ladies on their evening walk.  They wanted to know what she was cooking.  Explaining to them that it was snook, one of the ladies, her name was Linda, said, “Wow, I used to go to a dumpy, remote restaurant out in the boonies down in Florida called Snook Haven, but they never actually had snook on the menu”.  It seems Linda had lived close to us in Sarasota County and the restaurant she referenced was on the Myakka River about 2 miles from our former home there.

As ladies meeting each other for the first time normally do, these three volleyed the usual “where do you live?” type of greetings and Linda volunteered that she only knew one person in our current hometown: Asheville, North Carolina.  It turns out the lady Linda knew there was our good friend and neighbor, Louise, who lives on the same mountain that we do, just up the road from our house.

Linda’s walking companion, Diane, turned out to be the wife of our new friend Kenny who owns a condo in the small complex where we were renting that first winter.  Ken and Diane live in Boseman, Montana, a medium sized town in a big, wide open state that is all sky.  They ended up meeting a nice younger couple here in El Coco who also owned a condo in their same building of 4 units, almost directly below them.  A fast friendship was forged with their neighbors, Tammy and Monte, who to their mutual surprise, were also from the town of Boseman, Montana but had never met Ken and Diane until they ended up being neighbors in the condo complex of Valle Grande here in the sea-side village of El Coco, Costa Rica.

It was pure coincidence that Kenny turned out to be in just the right spot down in Tamarindo last year and put into motion the actions which prevented Geri’s drowning and premature departure from this earth.

As we were unpacking and settling into the condo we rented for our three month stay in El Coco this winter, I discovered to my utter amazement, napkins from the Venice Yacht Club, in the teeny, tiny town of Venice, FL we’d called home for almost 20 years.  Because we made all of our arrangements to rent this condo through the owner’s rental agent here in Costa Rica, we never had any idea who the owner was until we discovered his business card in a kitchen drawer and learned he lives in Venice, Florida.  Two itty, bitty towns most people have never heard of, Venice Florida and Playas del Coco, Costa Rica connected by the invisible chain of coincidence. 

Friendships formed between people who were unknowingly neighbors back home but never met before coming to El Coco…..  Relationships developed because people from vastly different parts of North America happened to cross paths and connect in a micro-community in Central America….  Do these diverse threads of happenstance really weave a fabric that is the creation of coincidence?  Or, is there really no such thing as coincidence?  Is it true that nothing meaningful happens by chance?

I can only assert that someone more qualified than I would have to answer those questions.  Maybe it’s you. You are, after all, one of only thirty people who will receive this email “blog”.  Is it just a coincidence you’re on my list of “A Few Friends and Family”???