Have you noticed, as I have, that once you encounter an item or a word, that same thing crops up again and again?
Sometimes a Bible verse enters my mind, and the next thing I know the preacher mentions it in the sermon, or I see it displayed on a church marquee.
Why does that happen?
Lately, I have pondered terms common in today’s world that my grandparents never heard: email; bandwidth; bytes; unlimited talk, text, and data, etc.
If Grandma had ever heard me say dot com, she would have feared I had developed a speech impediment.
I wondered about new terms added to my grandparents’ vocabularies when electricity and telephones entered their lives.
For certain, they were quickly introduced to the terms electric bill and telephone bill.
Electricity brought to light (notice the pun) words like socket, light switch, meter reading, shock, outage, and plug and unplug.
Telephones made common such phrases as busy signal, party line, person-to-person, hang up, and please hold.
Such thoughts spiraled through my brain for several days as I vacuumed, pulled weeds, folded laundry, and waited for traffic lights to turn green.
Then, wouldn’t you know it? While reading a novel set in the 1920s, I found the following paragraph.
Life has all at once grown exponentially larger than I could have ever dreamed. Electricity, the automobile and now the telephone have made it clear that possibility is endless for an enterprising mind. I can only imagine what it must have felt like to navigate a flat earth only to discover its roundness. (Call Your Daughter Home by Deb Spera)
How is it that I happened to read a book that dealt with the exact thoughts I had been having?
My thinking about electricity and telephone terminology could not have inspired me to head to the library and check out a book that featured the introduction of electricity and telephones into American life.
Could it?
I mean, the title, Call Your Daughter Home, does not scream, “Electricity and telephones!”
I borrowed that library book because my sister Pam recommended it to me.
Pam and I are linked, genetically, of course, but also by a preference for the same kinds of books. And our minds do tend to run along the same paths.
For example, I can be thinking about Aunt Betty, and Pam will call me and say, “I talked to Aunt Betty this morning.”
Maybe Pam had been thinking about electricity and telephones, then read Call Your Daughter Home, figured I too had been thinking about electricity and telephones, and gave me a call to recommend that book.
I don’t know.
How do these things work?