Today as I sorted my change, I put sixty cents in my jeans' watch pocket, just in case I didn't have enough money on my stored value card for the bus. When I got to the bus stop I pulled out my wallet to get the card. It wasn't there!
I searched among all the card in my wallet. I searched my shirt and jacket pockets. Nada! There was not enough time go back home to search other jackets. What great power was looking over me to make sure I had the correct fare ready?
The short story is that my wife had used it last week and had forgotten to give it back to me.
As I was dressing at the fitness center, one fellow said "Okey, dokey" to another as he left. I asked the second fellow if "Okey dokey" was the name of a family in John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath".
When I went out to catch the bus on the way home, I decided to listen to the remainder of a BBC World Tech Podcast. The last piece was "Google Lit Trips"; a high school teacher was putting trips taken in literature on Google Maps. The first book? "The Grapes of Wrath"! For the podcast, click here. For more info about the podcast, see Podcast 239 in http://blogs.discovery.com/news_etherized/2009/04/index.html.
Coincidence? Premonition? Or had I forgotten that I heard the beginning of the section before I even returned to the locker room? I think it was the last.
Last week when my wife was in Japan and I had already gone to bed, I thought I heard her call my name. I wondered if it was an intruder and went downstairs to check that the doors were locked. Either the same night or a couple nights later, I thought I heard my son's voice. He was in Taipei.
Ghosts? I don't think so. Either the voices were a complete figment of my imagination or they were how I interpreted voices outside, for example, the students next door returning home.
When we lived in Plymouth sometimes when I sat home alone in a corner of the living room, I was sure I heard very subdued voices in the diagonally opposite corner of the room. It was like a radio broadcast turned low.
Ghosts? I don't think so. It was probably a combination of sounds that echoed from that corner. Could it have been sounds from some nearby highways? Possibly. I-494 was about a mile away and in our back yard we could hear an almost steady drone from it. That drone could then have been reverberating through our walls. The type of sound may have been such that it could be heard only when there was no other sound in the house.
Rational thinking is so easy in the light of day. It's too bad most of our thinking must be done in the murkiness of insufficient or ignored information.
