My odd friend

I’m happy my friend, let’s call her Mugs, is home from her sister’s. Of course it was a result of the strangest of circumstances. Mugs’s sister was deathly ill – pancreatic cancer and a host of other things. She was having serious radiation treatments and getting sicker and sicker. But after three treatments somehow it was discovered that the oncology center had confused her records with another person’s. Person number two had an almost identical name – only the middle letter of the last name was different – and the same birth month and year. But was decidedly a different person. Here are two big lawsuits in the making. Person number one treated for something she doesn’t have and person number two not treated or even told about something she does have. Yikes.

But the odd thing is Mugs’s connection here. She seems to always be located not at the center, but continually at the periphery of the most peculiar occurrences. This is a person who believes anything, very literally anything, is possible. And somehow as the world spins around her odd thing after odd thing happens. When she saw a child with deeply blue eyes and asked what constellation he’d come from, the mother said his name was Orion. Sometimes the odd things aren’t so great. She often makes connections among what I take to be completely non-relevant events and sometimes I think she’s a stranger here. In the world of odd events, she’s a carrier.