I was born on the Ides — that is, the 15th — of March. (I’ve been told that my grandfather, who died shortly before I was born and whose name I bear, used to say “Beware the Ides of March!” sometimes for no apparent reason, though my father does not remember this.)
Today — my birthday — my wife and I were working in our study. She was preparing for a class with a junior high school student she tutors, looking at a handout from the student’s English teacher at school. She found the following example sentences on the handout and had to show them to me:
“It’s March 16th. It was my birthday yesterday.” The fact that the handout (photocopied from a grammar textbook) just happened to use my birthday as an example would have been coincidence enough — but on top of that it was actually on my birthday that we happened to read it!
But the coincidences don’t stop there. Wanting to give her student some additional material to practice, she asked me if I had any grammar books that covered the same topic. I got out an old grammar book I’d bought some 10 years ago in America and turned to the relevant unit. Here’s what I found:
“Is it the fifteenth today? ~ No, the sixteenth.” The same two dates that had been used as an example on the other handout!
I guess the synchronicity would have been more perfect if this had all happened tomorrow rather than today — but it’s still quite striking enough to be almost creepy.
