The Coincidence of Sweatshirts

Until yesterday, I thought the Publix store was part of the phenomenon, sort of the field on which these odd incidents played out.  It was either simple coincidence or synchronicity (Merriam-Webster defines synchronicity this way:  "the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality—used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung."  Sweatshirts were and are always involved.  As I examine the events in my memory, I cannot claim these events posses synchronicity.  For the moment, I can only call them coincidences.    Perhaps, at some point I will be able to discern the other half of these events, the psychic one.  Until then, they can only be termed coincidence.  

Five times in the past several years, this coincidence of sweatshirts had arisen, and I had only recently noticed the connection to Publix.  You see, two of my sweatshirts have, on a total of five different occasions in the Publix parking lot, evoked unsolicited remarks and conversations with perfect strangers.   In each case, the stranger, noting what was embroidered on the sweatshirt I was wearing, asked to know where I was from and shared similar facts about themselves.  It had happened multiple times with only these two sweatshirts that I wear occasionally.  Nearly every sweatshirt I own has a location inscribed or embroidered on it.  Most prompt no particular notice or comment from passersby.  Those passing may nod their heads in greeting or simply make no contact, eye or otherwise, and walk past.  

But not with these two particular sweatshirts.  In each case, the locations referred to were nearly one thousand miles away.  In each case, the stranger initiating the conversation had either grown up, lived or  regularly visited the place featured on the shirt.  None of these conversations turned into anything remarkable, except to note that our paths were crossing nearly one thousand miles away from the location involved and we were aware of it.  It might not seem so strange if the pattern hadn't repeated itself so often.  I had noticed on the fifth occasion, that it only seemed to happen in the parking lot of the Publix grocery.   I had no explanation for it, except perhaps for the friendliness of people from the American Midwest.  That, and the fact that I live in an area visited by tourists and vacationers on a regular basis.  Perhaps that was enough to explain it.  

Then, yesterday came along.  We left early in the morning to visit my son.  He works for a University a couple of hours away.  As I surveyed the remaining clean sweatshirts in my dresser drawer, I noticed my college alumni sweatshirt from the university I attended more than a thousand miles away, and decided to wear it.  I decided I'd be making a statement in the college town we'd be visiting.  

The statement?  My alma mater, unknown in these parts, was worth noticing in this college town whose university population of more than thirty thousand students and employees eclipsed the population of the rest of the town itself.  I had attended a university which was about three one-hundredths of a percent of the population of the city in which it was situated.  The university I would be visiting, made up more than fifty percent of the town, and was more than twenty times the size of my alma mater.  I was making a statement all right, mostly to myself.  Then, it happened.  As we stood in line at the local Wal-Mart, the person in front of me in line turned and asked when I had attended my University (I graduated forty years ago), and explained her father had attended the school at roughly the same time, graduating two years later.  That was the end of it, as I did not know his name, I had been a dorm student, and he had been a day-student.  But still, another coincidence of sweatshirts.  It's spreading, I tell you, this is yet another sweatshirt and a different town and not at the Publix.  My advice--be sure you think about the sweatshirts you don as you venture out into the day.  Coincidences are everywhere, and sweatshirts are in the middle of it..