This is an opinion column by AL.com’s Mike Oliver. See another version of this AL.com.
All this time I never noticed the ‘coincidence’ about the date. The MikeMadness charity basketball tournament date on July 21. We picked it because it was approximately the same Saturday date in mid-July as last year’s tournament to raise money and awareness for Lewy body dementia – which I have.
I never knew it was also Robin Williams birthday. Until yesterday.
The birthday is an interesting coincidence, because Williams’s wife blamed un-diagnosed Lewy body dementia for his suicide.
When was that? His death date, I wondered.
It was on Aug. 11, 2014, Robin died.
My autonomic system came to life, a tingle, goosebumps.
On Aug. 11 (2016) was the first time I was diagnosed with a degenerative brain disease. It was a Parkinson’s diagnosis, later switched to its lesser known cousin, Lewy.
Coincidences? How many coincidences do you have to have before they are not coincidences?
Some folks, including my wife, the Rev. Catherine Oliver, associate pastor of First Presbyterian Church Birmingham, say that they don’t believe in coincidences.
So what does that leave us with? God? Messages from the universe? Robin Williams?
Albert Einstein said: “A coincidence is a small miracle when God chooses to remain anonymous.”
Writer Simon Van Boov said: “Coincidences mean you’re on the right path.”
But that leads you to the question why is God leaving breadcrumbs, parceling out hints like we are all playing a Milton Bradley board game?
Some may be thinking right now, that a couple of dates lining up with Robin Williams and me and our tournament isn’t off the charts coincidental.
But let’s put it in context with other coincidences surrounding my disease.
The Numbers
If you all remember I’ve had other strange connections. One involved the famous scientific nun study which studied dementia in hundreds of nuns over their lifetimes.
One of the promising things about the study and the one I wrote about was that some nuns, upon autopsy, had Alzheimer’s, the leading type of dementia. But a small subset of those whose brains showed the ravages of Alzheimer’s did not present symptoms while they were living. This suggested there may be a self-made work-around that the brain is using in some cases. I wrote a story.
Months went by and I picked up a New York Times story on study again and started reading. Then saw the number. It said the study consisted of 678 nun participants.
What? That’s the exact number of albums I am reviewing. I did the counting myself right before I started my MyVinylCountdown.com blog last year. Now that kind of blew me away, I always start thinking about what are the odds of those two random things being the same number? A lottery-like long shot, you would think?
Some say either nothing is a coincidence or everything is a coincidence. Perhaps a coincidence is just an event that has much lower odds of occurring than something else.
So maybe it’s all about the odds. The numbers. After all, conception itself is a game of odds. Life is a game of odds – which trees get the best sunlight, which rabbits are the fastest.
M.I.T.. professor Max Tegmark, author of our Mathematical Universe said in Scientific American that our universe isn’t just described by math, but that “it is math in the sense that we’re all parts of a giant mathematical object.”
Tegmark recalls Douglas Adams spoof “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” that the answer to the ultimate question qbout existence and the creation of the universe is 42.
That’s a little physics humor there.
Who Am I
This next coincidence that has occurred regarding me and my disease seems like you could figure some odds on. But this one shook me more than the others because it was very palpable. It was a weekend day and I set out to do a little cleaning of my room, vacuum, dust, pick up clothes etc. I brought my IPod player and put it in a stand because music is my work partner. I put the whole 120G IPod (the Classic model) on random play. There were 7,500 songs being shuffled.
At one point while I was cleaning, I got inspiration for a blog post, basically about existence, who we are in the world. Are we our brains? (A good question from one whose brain is under attack.) The title would be ‘Who Am I.
I ran downstairs and began typing away on my laptop. I don’t know how much time went by — but more than an hour. I came back upstairs, walked into my room where the music was still playing on random play. It took me a while to process this one.
The Who were on my IPod playing “Who Are You’ — you know the song with the recurring chorus that goes ‘who are you? who who, who who’? This is an IPod that could play 20 days straight 24 hours a day, theoretically, never playing the same song from the 7,500.
I actually felt afraid for a minute, wondering if someone else was in the house pranking me? But how would they know what I was writing?
Coincidence?
Lastly, as I was thinking last night of writing about all this, I was casually running through some records. . On one shelf there was a big box set of some classical music. It was covered up with albums so I knew it hadn’t been pulled off the shelf in a while. I picked the box up and underneath it was sheet music with words and notes and cords for a song.
The song? “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen.
When I saw it, I remembered I had seen it before like 10 or 20 years ago.. I had forgotten about it. And I have no idea why we even had it in the first place as nobody in our house really plays music and that frat boy Animal House anthem from the 60s would be an unlikely choice for anyone.
Coincidence? I don’t know so.
Mike Oliver writes on many topics but often about Lewy body dementia. See his blog at www.myvinylcountdown.com See how you can help by going to www.mikemadness.org . Happy Birthday Robin.