COINCIDENTAL COINS, CONNECTING THE UNIVERSE'S DOTS, AND THE CONTINUING GALACTIC SUPREMACY OF RALPH MACCHIO

Why does the universe and all its minions so often to conspire to unleash harmless, weird, freaky-deaky coincidences on us? We wail (with justification) at the senseless fury of volcanoes and earthquakes and tsunamis; we shake our heads (in perplexion) at the galactical equivalent of Grade 6 practical jokes. Are they flip sides of the same coincidental coin?

For instance:

1) Last week, I got an e-mail from the Khmer dude who teaches at the orphanage I used to teach at. He wants me to help him out, see if I can get him a job, that sort of thing. He called my housemate (as I don't have a phone -- long story), and I was reminded of the call Sunday night. Monday morning, I'm running down by the river in the crisp and total darkness that 5:30 a.m. provides, and what do I hear?

"Scott? Scott Spencer?"

I stop, turn around, and there he is, Petro, just the guy I had been thinking about the night before. Hadn't seen him in over a year. And then bang, there he is.

2) The actress Rosario Dawson seems to have been in every movie I've seen in the last few months. Just as I was telling somebody this, I slipped the movie Shattered Glass into the DVD player, and the credits roll, and, guess what, there's her name.

3) The Karate Kid III was on TV the other week. I watched the first Karate Kid back in that long-ago summer of 1984, the summer of the Los Angeles Olympics, in a theater in Niagara Falls (about fifteen minutes from my hometown of St.Catharines.)

I remember that weekend very clearly, because my family moved from the house I grew up in all the way, get ready for it, to the new house we were building on the edge of Lake Ontario, at the end of Geneva Street, on Evangelista Court. (Supermodel Linda Evangelista is from St.Catharines, and some of her relatives were the first ones to build on this court. True story. I'm sure you're thrilled.) I was devastated. Distraught. You see, this house was, literally, a five minute walk from my old house. Do you know how long a five minute walk is when you're eight years old? I've moved from St.Catharines to Toronto and St.Catharines to Ottawa and from Canada to Japan and from Japan to Cambodia, but those distances absolutely pale in comparison to the distance I tread back then. I was leaving everything -- my buddies, my home, my world. My parents, being rational, decided that Scotty wasn't quite ready to handle the move. So they shipped me off to our friends in Fort Erie, and I happily missed all of the heavy lifting. Instead, I was introduced to that wonderful world of Daniel LaRusso and Mr.Miyagi.

I saw the first sequel at the Town Cinemas two years later. I saw The Karate Kid III at that same theatre in 1989, and if you wonder how I can remember all of these minute details, I can only ask: How could you ever forget? This is the Karate Kid movies we're talking, here. I loved the second film and I loved the third film, too, even though, in retrospect, it's clear that the first one is the best. (And it's clear that they're all derivative of Rocky, even sharing the same director, John Avildsen, but so be it; we're all derivative of something or someone, right? If the worth and value of something were judged based only on originality, we'd all be on sale at Wal-Mart. Or, for you St.Catharines readers, Bargain Harold's. Or Bi-Way. Take your pick.)

The sequels are forced and strained (as all sequels, by definition, are) but there's a wonderful continuity at work; there's a marvellous steadiness that I responded to, latched on to. When you're a child, everything is changing, shifting, growing. Every year a new grade, notebook, friends. Your voice lowers. Hair starts to sprout in unlikely places. (I'm still going though that, actually.) Nothing is certain. But three years can pass and I can step into a theatre and lo and behold, there's Daneil LaRusso, and he's still seventeen, and he's still facing and fighting the same old demons, and though I've grown five whole years since the first film he's aged not at all, and his world still exists, and I can be a part of it, and when you're a kid, it's wonderful to have that all-access pass. More than that -- it's rejuvenating.

But I digress...

The point is, I was just talking to someone via e-mail the other day about the wretchedness of The Next Karate Kid, the fourth film in the series, the one starring current Academy Award Nominee Hilary Swank. It had (the great) Noriyuki 'Pat' Morita, yes, but no Macchio, and I jokingly said that a 'Karate Kid' world without Ralph Macchio is not a world that I want to be a part of.

And then today, on www.cnn.com, there it is, an interview with Macchio about the new DVD box set of the films that's recently been released.

Weird.

That's all I'm saying.

It's weird.

You can go weeks, months, even years without talking to someone or even thinking of someone and then bam, for two, three days in a row they are brought back into your life for some reason or another. I hadn't really thought about The Karate Kid much at all in the past few years, and then, over the course of a week, it suddenly returns full-force into my life.

We always look for the presence of the divine in large-scale, world-changing events, but what about the smaller stuff, the inconsequential stuff, the stuff that forms our lives? Is there a pattern to all these trivial coincidences?

Einstein said that God doesn't play dice with the universe, true, but maybe He's playing another game with us, a sillier one made up of chance encounters and long-forgotten loves. Maybe it's a game we'll someday, if not win, at least get to know the rules of.

Until then, all we can do is sit back and try to connect the dots.