“WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?”

Okay, one last thing before I go. As you now know, I have the craziest luck in the world. If I had a catchphrase, it would be, “What are the chances?” It started on the day I was born, with the town’s beloved doctor dying immediately after delivering me. As a kid I had chicken pox twice, even though you are only supposed to be able to get it once. I was struck by lightning, not once but twice; not a direct hit either time, but instead hitting a nearby tree. Both times, I felt electricity pulse through my body and the metal fillings in my teeth buzzed for days afterward. When I moved to California and I got my new driver’s license, the number was the exact same number as our telephone number when I was a kid growing up in Maryland. What are the chances of that? I played left field for three innings in the Hollywood All-Star Game at Dodger Stadium and, as one of nine fielders, did not get one ball hit to me. But when I stayed to see the game, wouldn’t you know it, a foul ball came right to me while I was sitting in a crowd of forty thousand people. I am still pissed that it hit my hands and I missed it, but still, what are the chances?

But the craziest life-changing coincidence involves the house at 64 Plochmann Lane in Woodstock, New York. This was the house that Laure and I had put escrow money down on back in 1986, when we had sold our first little co-op apartment and were going to move there. At the last minute, we decided to move to LA and got the escrow money out, even though we loved that house and the possibility of the life it would have given us and our kids. Cut to fifteen years later. During this time, my brother had withdrawn from the family. He had no contact with any of us, except once in a while he would email my mom. In this time, he had gotten married and had a kid. It was a painful wound in our family to not have David in the mix, although we came to discover that this kind of break is common in a lot of families. One day my mom told me she got an email from David saying he and his wife, who were living in New York, had been on vacation in Woodstock and, even though it was their first time there, on a whim, they bought a house and moved there.

“Woodstock? Dave moved to Woodstock? Where is his house?”

“64 Plochmann Lane,” she read from his email, and my jaw hit the floor. That was the same house we bought!

“Am I remembering the address of that house correctly?” I wondered. I ran it by Laure and she thought it was the same house. Was Dave fucking with me? How would he know that that was our house? He was twenty years old at the time, and our families never knew the address anyway. David bought 64 Plochmann Lane? I had to see for myself. When I went back to New York for a wedding, I rented a car and drove up to Woodstock. Any chance that I was misremembering the address was dismissed when I saw the mailbox, pulled down the beautiful long, driveway through the woods, and came upon the house we had fallen in love with all those years ago. I knocked on the front door. No answer. I knocked again. Still no answer. I tried the front door, and it was unlocked, so I opened it. There was mail on the floor and addressed to my brother. Holy shit, it was true! Dave bought the same house I did! All of a sudden I heard, “Hello?” and my brother appeared on the balcony overlooking the entranceway. I will never forget the look on the poor guy’s face, seeing the one person in the world he did not want to see, standing uninvited in his house, the one he had moved to to get away from it all. I apologized profusely and told him why I was there. He was blown away by this almost biblical coincidence and before long, Dave was back in the fold of the family, his deep connection to all of us undeniably presented to him in the weirdest coincidence of all time. Talk about God moving in mysterious ways. As with most of my life, I am left asking the question, “What are the chances?”