Serendipity

On the day it happened I was 11. Mom had dropped me off at Dad’s office because she had to run an errand, and the plan was for me to ride home with Dad. It was always fun to be at Dad’s office. It was a very masculine place, and the employees treated me well, mostly out of deference to Dad, who was their boss. I would sit in his office on a comfortable chair and read a book, and if I needed a scene change, I would go exploring in the warehouse and hit up the Coke machine.

Dad’s office was only 10 minutes from our house if you took the most direct route, but on the way home that day, we turned right at Warsaw Grocery, leaving the highway we would normally take and instead went down Strickland Road—a viable path, for sure, but one that would add another 10 minutes to the trip.

I was confused. “Why are we going this way?”

“No reason, “Dad said.

“But it’s longer.”

Dad looked at me, and then back at the road. He sighed.

“Not everything has to be faster, Son. It’s just a change of pace. Seeing something different. And besides—it opens doors.”

I told him that this made no sense to me.

“Look at it this way: If we go the same way we always do, we are exposed to the things we normally see, the people we normally see, the routine we always do. But if you go a different route, you just opened another door for things to happen to you that wasn’t there before. You made room for luck, or serendipity, or providence, whatever you want to call it, to happen. Or, you can stay in your rut and complain that nothing good ever happens.”

* * *

I had occasion to go to the post office today.

That’s the thing about selling books-people expect you to mail them out. This leads to all sorts of side quests, like buying packing tape, shipping envelopes, and shipping labels. These are all things nobody tells you that you are going to need as a writer, but here we are.

People say they become writers because they love writing, but I don’t think that is necessarily so, because any time you get three or more writers together, what they talk about is how their books sell, or how they do not. It is not, after all, called the New York Times Best Writers list.  

So, I had sold some books (yay!) and I packed them and bought postage and printed labels and taped them firmly and took them to the post office. Because they are prepaid and metered, I can drop them in the lobby box if I want to, but I don’t—I went inside and stood in line and chatted with the people next to me in the queue and then handed them to the clerk.

By now, some months into going there several times a week, she knows me. I don’t mean we hang out, but she recognizes me, and we have a small chat about the weather, and on Fridays she will tell me to be safe over the weekend. All of this is unnecessary—after all, I can drop them in the box in the lobby, remember?—but community is made up of thousands of small conversations, jokes, and pleasantries just like this.

The clerk is not anonymous to me, despite my not knowing her name. She smiles when I come in, and she comments on the number of books I have sold, and whether the orders are increasing or decreasing. She matters to me, in the sense that if she was not there, I would notice it. She is part of the world I have built here, one tiny piece of this community I call home.

It might indeed be faster to just put them in the box in the lobby, but I won’t know that, because I have no desire to replace her and the interactions we have with a speedier visit. And from a purely pragmatic point of view, one day, something is going to go wrong at the post office. I will need help to figure out directions, or my package might be a half an inch too large. And when that happens, I will have months and months of small deposits in my account with her. It is a lubricant to prevent future disasters.

But the main reason I go inside instead of dropping them in the box is the lesson I learned all those years ago on Strickland Road: when you get a chance, try to open doors and give serendipity a place to land.