Omphalos Eve

My old friend Jeff Bertolucci is a freelance writer these days, living, I think, somewhere out there between Los Angeles and Thousand Oaks. Every now and then we swap e-mails, but I haven't actually seen him in more than 20 years.

We used to be roommates, J.B. and I. (We got into the habit, back there in the mid-1980s, of addressing each other by our initials, and we still do.) Roommates, and partners in hardship.

We were two members, circa 1984-85, of a three-member news department at radio station KUIC, 95.3 FM, in Solano County, California. (Solano County, if anyone cares, lies between the Sacramento Valley and the San Francisco Bay area. Its southwestern boundary abuts the Strait of Carquinez, where the little city of Benicia looks across the water at Martinez, in Contra Costa County, the birthplace of Joe DiMaggio.)

J.B. and I got along just fine, but it wasn't friendship that had thrown us together. We were so poorly paid that we had to double up and share an apartment in Vacaville, where the station's studio was. We weren't alone: a succession of disc jockeys and newscasters had shared that same apartment, in succession: we passed it along like a family heirloom as the names changed at Quick-95, the air staff's perenially miserable pay being a guarantee of high turnover. The two-bedroom apartment came to be known as "The Quick-95 Refugee Camp."

Since we never had any money, we seldom went out in the evenings, which left plenty of time for philosophical discussion (when we weren't watching reruns of Barney Miller, lampooning egotistical disc jockeys with the use of a tape recorder, or writing scurrilous little songs about station management.) One such philosophical discussion concerned the premise that "Everything happens for a reason," something you often hear optimists say. J.B. had no use for optimists, and would dismiss the notion with a snort. He preferred to believe in something he called "The random crapshoot:" if you come up seven, you win. If you come up snake-eyes, you lose. It's all chance and probability; no teleology involved.

I suspect that, every year from now on, about this time of year, I'll be wondering about that.

For nearly 18 years, the duration-on-paper of my first marriage, December 30 was my wedding anniversary. My first wife, Chris, and I were married in Vienna on Dec. 30, 1987. It had been just over two years since J.B. and I had said our farewells and parted paths in Vacaville--I'd decided to give up radio and join the foreign service, where I remained for 13 years. I met Chris in Frankfurt, Germany, my first overseas post.

These days my wedding anniversary is October 29--I remarried just this past fall. But December 30 will remain as much an "anniversary" for my second marriage as it was for my first.

My current wife, Valerie, was not only present at that first wedding in Vienna, but she was one of two specially-invited friends who had come along to witness the event. The other was a co-worker of mine from the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt named Peter, whom Valerie was seeing at the time. In effect, the woman who would become my second wife was maid of honor at my wedding to my first. That's a bit unusual, but I suppose it's not unheard-of.

What sets me wondering about the random-crapshoot versus the everything-happens-for-a-reason argument is what happened last December 30.

Following my wedding to Chris, the four of us went back to Frankfurt and promptly scattered. Valerie was an official with the Immigration and Naturalization Service; I was a State Department employee. Chris and I, newly-married, promptly went off to my second overseas tour, which turned out to be in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. We were there for three years, then went on to Ivory Coast. From Frankfurt, Valerie was sent back to Washington, D.C. and eventually got posted at an INS training center in New Mexico. I heard that she and Peter had gotten married, but that was the last Chris or I ever heard of either of them. For the next 17 years, nary a word was exchanged between any of us.

I don't know about Chris, but after one perfunctory, unsuccessful attempt, early in our marriage, to get an update on Valerie and Pete, I more or less forgot about both of them. Chris and I eventually went our separate ways. But way leads on to way, as Robert Frost wrote, and I don't recall giving either Valerie or Pete another thought as the 1990s spun out and the 2000s came on. After playing their respective bit parts in our lives, they vanished into the past.

Then, on the night of Dec. 30, 2004, an odd thing happened. Chris and I had been separated for more than ten years at that point. We hadn't bothered getting a divorce because it didn't seem that pressing--neither of us had remarriage prospects and we had no children either. The fact that December 30 was Chris' and my anniversary remained in the background, so to speak: when that date would come around each year, I'd usually recall the fact but give it no more thought than that.

But that night, 12/30/04, I was minding my own business, sound asleep in California. And after not having given Valerie a thought that I could recall in more than 17 years, I dreamed about her. All night. I could no longer even remember her last name, but I dreamed about her. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that it was my wedding anniversary--the subconscious often messes with us--but I had had 16 previous anniversaries, and had never dreamt about Valerie on any of them. What was going on here?

The next day, New Year's Eve, I was intrigued enough by the dreams to jump on the Internet and "google" Valerie. She appeared immediately; seemed she had left INS, had divorced Peter years earlier, and was now a Washington, D.C. realtor. I e-mailed her. She was preparing to go out for New Year's Eve, but she e-mailed me right back. Late that night, she came home from her party and read my blog. The next day the e-mails continued. They started flying thick and fast. Then there was a phone call.

Then, on October 29 of this year, there was another wedding.

Friends have offered me all manner of explanations for this, including the intervention from beyond of my late younger sister, who died three months before Valerie and I "found" each other again. Perhaps it was just the right time for such a thing to happen. Perhaps it was just J.B.'s random crapshoot, in the form of my fevered neurons playing with history on the night of my 17th anniversary (old style.) But whatever the explanation, the date of Dec. 30th has been a fateful one for me, one upon which, when it comes around each year, I now have food for serious late night thoughts.

At least now I have someone to share those late night thoughts with. And she knows about this particular daisy chain of dates. She's here now, and she was there when it started.

Cue the music from The Twilight Zone, somebody. And Happy New Year.