kismet

During the summer of 1964, a professor from Drake University came into Logan, Utah on a quick trip to visit his mother. On his way into town he stopped at his cousin, Josie’s house and, finding no one home, left a note on the door, “I’m in town looking for a wife.” Josie’s husband, Sam, a professor at Utah State University, knew just the match for him, one of his star students, a single mother of three. They had a whirlwind courtship and were married and back in Iowa in time for classes that fall. My mother has that framed note hanging on her bedroom wall.

Some would say it is a miracle that their paths ever crossed. Some would call it fate, others coincidence. But there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of stories just like that, stories of brief, chance encounters that change two lives forever. I like to think that it isn’t chance at all, but that God has a hand in it, that those who seem destined to find each other eventually will, with divine help. I like to think of it as a tender mercy.

“This is why I’m here on this planet, at this time, Francesca. Not to travel or make pictures, but to love you. I know that now. I have been falling from the rim of a great, high place, somewhere back in time, for many more years than I have lived in this life. And through all of those years, I have been falling toward you.”
Robert James Waller The Bridges of Madison County