It doesn’t take much to bring to mind a sharply-focused memory from the long-ago past. Recently, hearing Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man” in my iTunes shuffle triggered a poignant image to percolate to the surface of my thoughts. It was the image of my 13-year-old self lying in the rear-facing, third seat of our family’s Chevy station wagon, as Daddy and my brother Keith and I were traveling home late one school night from a basketball game on the coast.

In my last post, I wrote about what my friend, Paul Laughlin, calls the most surprising coincidence that he’s ever personally experienced. It was something that he and I experienced together, and I tend to agree, it was quite amazing when you come to think about it. It concerned a question Paul had regarding a brief passage in John Grisham’s third novel, The Pelican Brief, and how I was able to quickly supply the answer to that question by consulting my copy of Grisham’s pre-publication manuscript of the book. What Paul found so surprising was that he just happened to mention this obscure, over-30-year-old bit of trivia to me, the one person in the world who had in his possession the definitive resource to resolve the question and that I was then able to do so in a matter of minutes. Now, the question that many of you have been asking, just how did I come to possess that manuscript? The story here may not be based on a surprising coincidence; however, it has some pretty surprising elements to it. I think it’s even more amazing.

My friend, Paul Laughlin, asked if I was familiar with the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash that our mutual friend, and fellow church member, Clark Hicks, had recently written about in the local newspaper. That crash, which killed several members of the Lynyrd Skynyrd rock band, happened here in South Mississippi, about 85 miles west of where Paul and I were sitting in the fellowship hall of University Baptist Church in Hattiesburg. I told him that while I didn’t know many of the details of the crash, I had actually known one the band’s backup singers, and, coincidentally, she was the only band member who happened to not be on that fateful flight. That vocalist was the sister of one of the first friends Gena and I made after we moved to Senatobia in 1976. Paul commented that this was, indeed, an interesting and surprising set of coincidences, but it still didn’t top the strangeness of the John Grisham/Pelican Brief/bagel-beignet coincidence that he and I together experienced a few years earlier.