Esther 3

Nick Hornby’s novel Slam has now joined the pile of finished and a new book is open and being read. Slam was good, well written, funny, had a nice message but still left me with the feeling that the writer should have written this a few years back, before his later and ultimately (slightly)more mature works.
The new book is a joy to read, crafted and supported by excellent and evocative sketches of San Francisco. I have just read a short piece that is a rich and loving description of the author’s eccentric mother. Strange thing is I had just posted to this blog a second piece about my own mother.
This morning I started the day unexplainably humming Leonard Cohen’s song Marianne and I spent a few frustrating moments searching for my cd version so that I could listen to it. This evening having completely forgotten the morning search I sat in the car I rarely use and there was Leonard’s cd on the seat.
Years ago someone tried to explain to me that the word coincidence is often misunderstood and hence misused. I’m not sure that I remember their argument accurately but I think their point was that the word should really be seen as co – incidence and thus what we think of usually as unrelated events are in fact two incidences that go together. Does that make sense? It did at the time.
Anyhow it would have been a nice co-incidence if the writer’s mother’s name was Marianne.
It wasn’t.
But in the last line of his piece I did learn that it was Esther.