What Are the Odds?
By Erika Hoffman
Because I want to improve my craft, I join organizations for writers. One such group, Triangle Area Freelancers, meets monthly. Like everything else during the pandemic years of isolation, these formerly in-person meetings are now relegated to internet gatherings via Zoom. Added to the regular get-togethers were Zooms with well-known authors, organized by our TAF founder, Donald Vaughan. Recently, the featured talk was by Sean Flynn, an acclaimed journalist who’s written for Esquire and GQ; he often reports harrowing stories like that of the boys trapped in a flooding cave in Thailand.
Sean Flynn has written a non-fiction book about peacocks that is also about the meaning of life, serving as a memoir in addition to being a celebration of this enchanting bird.
I’m not one who likes to be videotaped. You won’t find my visage on YouTube. In fact, I don’t even have a camera attached to my desktop computer for Zoom meetings. I observe others’ boxed faces and listen to their comments while I remain mute, as I also haven’t hooked up a mic. I listen by way of the computer audio.
Although I’m not young, I don’t think I have hearing problems, but for the longest time the other night I thought Sean Flynn’s book was entitled White Peacocks.
Maybe the audio on my computer isn’t so good, after all. Flynn spoke about his life as a journalist and how he had learned to compartmentalize to avoid the secondary “drama” (or did he say “trauma”?) of recording stories about dead guys and other maudlin situations. He began writing his book about his pet peacocks, but the book morphed. By the time he had finished it, he learned it was about something else. “It’s not what I thought it was,” he said. In penning the story, he discovered his work isn’t only about this almost mythical creature, the peacock, and the six birds he was caring for at his farm in North Carolina, but the narrative was also about raising his kids and being a husband and keeping separate, from your family and those you love, the horrible things you are sometimes immersed in as a writer of real-life tragedies. Having animals to tend to, he explained, keeps him from dwelling on bad things that happen in the world.
As he continued to talk and occasionally refer to the book’s title, I realized he wasn’t saying “white’ peacocks, at all. My reflection and daydreaming about albino or leucitic birds was off track. The title of his memoir is Why Peacocks? It kind of reminded me how the white rhino got its name. (The label “white’ is derived from the Afrikaans word describing the animal’s mouth as “weit” or “wide.” This type of rhino has broad, square lips and an expansive muzzle. This fact as well as its size distinguishes it from the smaller, prehensile-lipped, black rhinoceros. The Brits misheard and misunderstood.)
The next day, my new friend took me to a horse farm. Cynthia said we could also feed carrots to the Sicilian donkeys and llamas. I’d wanted to tag along with her because I felt a bit in the doldrums. One of my neighbors with whom I’ve spent a lot of time during this pandemic year up and moved to Kentucky to be with her son and his family. I thought a trek to a farm to see Cynthia’s horses might cheer me up.
Before we even entered the meadow to see the horses, lo and behold, what did I see strutting in front of the barn almost as soon as we arrived? A peacock trying to impress Guinea hens. As I studied the vain, iridescent, shrill-screeching bird spreading out his rainbow fan, around the corner of the barn came— a white peacock! A pure white peacock!
Never in my life have I ever given a thought about a white peacock before that previous night.
“No coincidence, no story” is an Akha aphorism that begins Lisa See’s novel The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane. That simple declaration made me think about so many classics and best sellers that involve amazing coincidences. Remember Great Expectations? The convict that Pip helped when the protagonist was a child later turns out be his mysterious benefactor, and then we learn that this guy also turned out to be the man that left Miss Havisham at the altar. Often Dickens wove a cross-connected web of relationships in his works. Didn’t Agatha Christie say: “I’ve often noticed that once coincidences start happening, they go on happening in the most extraordinary way?” (The Secret Adversary)
Don’t we hear that truth is stranger than fiction? Who hasn’t heard of the two founding fathers and US presidents, Jefferson and Adams, who died on the same day, which was July 4, on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence? And remember Mark Twain predicting he’d die when Halley’s Comet returned, and he did, which was 74 years after the comet first came, the year he was born? What about the strange occurrence where a fellow lived in a house near the Battle of Bull Run at the beginning of the Civil War, so he moved from there and ended up living in the house where General Lee surrendered to General Grant at the end of the Civil War?
I reflected on the talk about Mr. Flynn’s new book Why Peacocks? I resolved two things: First, I need to buy the memoir and read it; and secondly, it’s funny how listening to a talk thinking you’re going to learn one thing can pinball you off into all sorts of other interesting facets of the world. I decided that Lisa See doesn’t really mean it’s just a coincidence that makes a good story but rather it is synchronicity which makes a narrative stick in one’s mind. The coincidence must cause us, the readers, to think, feel, sense, and intuit. If a series of coincidences shifts one’s thinking, that’s synchronicity. If there’s been a transition in your awareness because of the coincidence, that’s synchronicity. An inner psychic experience is required for synchronicity. What you get out of the coincidence, that is, what you perceive from the “close shave” is something more than a mere observation of the laws of probability. If you have a conscious awareness of the meaning behind the happenstance, then you have experienced synchronicity.
Long live synchronicity and any other little miracles. Without coincidences and synchronicities, stories would be boring. You might as well read an encyclopedia entry. And without some strange happenings in your writings from your creative noggin, your pages will engage your readers about as much as reading instructions in an appliance manual. Maybe less so, as there won’t be illustrations.
Erika has compiled her published stories and essays into several collections: My Sassy Life; More Sassy Stories; Erika’s Take on Writing; Erika’s Take on Writing— Take 2; Erika’s Take on Travel. All are sold on Amazon. Her mystery, Why Mama, published by Library Partners Press is available through Amazon.
Erika continues to pen essays and stories for magazines, ezines, and anthologies. She’s completing her novel, started during the early days of the pandemic. It is tentatively entitled Her Darling Secret.
Erika is a graduate of Duke University; a past high school teacher; married to her college sweetheart; a friend to many; a mother of four; a mother-in-law to three; a grandma to eight—all under the age of five; and a longtime resident of North Carolina, although raised in New Jersey.