The random not-randomness of life, chapter gajillion and 473.
So, in the last two days I’ve been in this “let’s do it, fall is coming, things have been sitting around too long” mode of getting rid of some items (some mine, some my mother’s) by way of my local Buy Nothing group. So, here I am listing a bunch of things to give away — clumps of books (by subject and theme), various small house items and an occasional bigger item (such as a slightly lopsided 6-ft ladder) — when I come across a small box containing three National Geographic magazines: one from 1982, one from 1984 and one from 2009. None seem particularly amazing or save-worthy, and my mother had already (and easily) sent them to the give-away pile.
Now, I come from — as in spent my formative childhood and early young adulthood years — in a land and a world where National Geographic reigned supreme: supreme in exploration and reaching edges beyond edges, supreme in photography and print, supreme in story-telling and particularly supreme in photo caption-writing, the last supremeness being among their highest-paid content-writer jobs … or so I heard back in the day, and rightly believed.
Having already listed a good dozen-plus items, I think to myself, “Three random Nat Geos? Who collects, needs or wants these anymore?”
But as I remember a time when they reigned supreme and were found in many — and certainly our family’s — bathroom reading-material spots, I couldn’t find it in myself to toss these treasures into the recycling bin. Plus, who knows? … Maybe some crafter or vision-board-leaning person might want them.
So I listz them a second time on Buy Nothing: the first time I listed them being when in a flurry of moving IN with my mother a couple months ago, in late June, I did a big round of Buy-Nothing-ing and moving items out of the home and along to new purpose.
But, to hedge my bets and give these magazines (along with the clumps of book and some other items I’d listed before but hadn’t been able to give away back in June) I decided to cross-post some of these items on the Howard County MD Freecyclers’ Facebook page.
Right away, someone responded and said they wanted the three Nat Geos but couldn’t get them for two more days. Thinks me, Wow. Cool. Yay. Someone wants them.
I go to the original listing of these magazines back over on the Buy Nothing group and notice a comment: someone would like just one magazine, the one with the ostrich on the cover.
I look at the image of the cover. I see an ostrich bending its neck to the ground below. It doesn’t seem to be The Most Epic Issue Ever the publisher put out, but whatever. Tells her, I do, that someone else will take all three magazinese (a boon when posting several items in a Buy Nothing listing), but, tells her, I do, if the magazines aren’t picked up in time, the ostrich-cover Nat Geo is hers.
She responds right away and tells me she sketched an image of that magazine cover in high school. Thinks I, OK, nice, sure, ok.
But she wasn’t done. Sends me, she does, a scan of that sketch. Legit, she did.
Tellz her, did I, I’d work on it for her, then askz I of the person who was wanting all three issues if they minded giving up the ostrich-cover one which, apparently, was quite desired by someone else with high-school art-project memories and feelings. They were, as expected, quite gracious.
The result, quite clearly, is the ostrich-cover-seeking person had a desire. A long-held one, perhaps, as the issue she sought was from 1982, and it was 42 years hence.
And in that little bit of this and that — my mom getting random Nat Geos and keeping them, but then deciding she didn’t want to keep them; me knowing about and using Buy Nothing; Facebook existing; someone else being in the same Buy Nothing group, seeing my post — one of thousands, I’m sure, over the course of a year. All this seemingly random thought, action, choice, moment … none of which is.
Ah, how the Universe weaves, adjusts and moves. And we with it, of it, in it … it.
