Purple Sunsets, Screwdrivers, and other Synchronicities

Purple Sunsets, Screwdrivers, and other Synchronicities

I would like to say right from the start that I see the world through the same lens as any other educated child of modernity. I believe in Evolution and the importance of the scientific method to obtain truth. I am skeptical of kooky New Age beliefs. I don't believe in nutty conspiracy theories, be they from the far right or far left. I think I am generally well grounded in reality. The only difference between me and many of my friends, who are materialists, is that I have become convinced through my family, study and my own experience of the four phenomena of parapsychology: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and telekinesis. Of course, that opens up for me a whole range of possibilities, because if these phenomena exist, then they can account for supernatural healing, answered prayer, apparent communication with the dead, haunting phenomena, dreams that come true, and a wide range of possibilities that people, who do not accept these phenomena, do not believe in.

Deeply rooted in my belief system is the concept of synchronicity or "meaningful coincidence," with which Carl Jung is most closely associated. "Meaningful coincidences" have been happening to me all my life. Often they are interesting little coincidences that are probably just that. Almost as often, however, they are "coincidences" so compelling and with such powerful emotional resonance that I am convinced something is at work besides mere chance.

For me, a synchronicities resonate at a deep emotional level, and they keep on recurring around a discernible theme. Jung gives the classic example of a woman who orders a blue dress from a catalog. The company makes a mistake, and she gets a black dress in the mail on the same day that she finds out her favorite uncle died. Here's where my mother finally comes into the story. There have been more of these signs from my mother since her death than I can catalog for myself, and such coincidences should be multiplied by about at least four. My siblings, Robin, Sherry and Mark, have all experienced them. So have my nieces and nephews, although not to the extent that my siblings have. I think I have gotten the most, but they have all gotten repeated "signs," as well. I simply do not believe these are statistical oddities. Sometimes I think it's really my mother, and sometimes I think it's synchronicity, but I never think it's just chance.

Mom died early in the morning on December 21, and she wasted no time in making her presence known. Indeed, by the end of that day, two very dramatic synchronicities would take place, and such synchroncities would continue for a couple of years after her death.

Late that afternoon, I was driving over to Sherry's to work on Mom's obituary. The sky that late afternoon was quite dramatic. Black billowing storm clouds were scattered all over the horizon. No matter where you looked, the view was surreally striking. Just a few minutes before I got to Sherry's, the setting sun had reached a point at which the entire sky was bathed in every conceivable shade of purple, my mother's favorite color. Suddenly, I noticed it, shook my head, and said, "My God! It's all purple!" I started laughing and crying at the same time. I blurted out, "Jeez, Mom! I knew you were going to have some clout up there, but I had no idea that you would have that much clout that you'd be able to paint the whole sky purple for me!" It was the most beautiful, dramatic sunset I'd ever seen in my life. Since that time, I have only seen one other that was like it, with various shades of purple and pink, but the one on December 21 was all purple and, because of those clouds, which also took on purple hues, far more dramatic. As lovely as the image is, of course, I do not think that my mother painted the sky her favorite color just for me. But...had I left for Sherry's just a few minutes earlier or later, I would have probably missed the entire sunset. It reached this particular peak when I was less than five minutes from Sherry's house. By the time I got there, it was all over.

At Sherry's, we put together Mom's obituary. Early in it, I mentioned her work with the PTA, how she got involved in it when her children began enrolling in school, how she achieved office on the local, county and state level, how she spent many years of her life as an advocate for children through her work with the PTA. It was something Mom and I hadn't discussed forever, because, of course, long ago she had moved onto other interests.

On the way home, I was in some kind of state of dissociation. You can imagine that I got home that night on autopilot. I was caught up in my grief and wondering how she would have liked the obituary, especially the part about the PTA. Public Radio was on in the background, although it may just as well have not been on at all for all the attention I was paying to it. It was a program called "Crazy College." The DJ is a professor at the University of Delaware, and plays all these novelty songs dating back to the turn of the last century. It was the "Crazy College" Christmas Show. Suddenly, I was jolted out of my trance-like reverie by the refrain, "The PTA, The PTA, The PTA" over and over again. It simply demanded that I pay attention to it, and I finally did. He was playing a 1956 novelty song about a guy who plays Santa Clause for a PTA Christmas party! I started shaking my head in sheer disbelief and crying. It was so clear that Mom was telling me just how pleased she was with the obituary. I found it as remarkable as the sunset which I had experienced just a few hours earlier. The only song I knew about the PTA is the one every other American knows, The Harper Valley PTA, and that, of course, is a negative song about it. Leave it to Mom to pick a little known novelty song to let me know that she liked her obituary.

I looked "Crazy College" up on line, and I wrote the guy telling him about the experience. He wrote back that he was touched and that he would send me a tape of the show. He did, and, of course, I have saved it. I will always have it.

Those were the first two of many meaningful coincidences, some more mundane, some just as remarkable, that continued for a good two years after my mother's death. They even followed me in my travels- from Germany to Singapore and Turkey. Indeed, my mother, who could never travel with me in life, in death, seems to accompany me on just about every trip I take now. Robin, Sherry and Mark also have had similarly dramatic synchronicities. Robin even had one which seems to have suspended natural law.

A few years ago, I was beginning to feel the beginning stages of burn out. The then twenty-eight years at Gateway working with teenagers was beginning to feel like more than enough. At a fall in-service, I met the chairperson of the foreign language department at Rowan. She told me that there was a possibility, "down the line," not only of a German adjunct position but also perhaps of a position in Russian. Well, a year and a half later, the position opened in German. In the fall of 2003, one opened in Russian, as well. I still enjoy working at Gateway, but I am also looking to semi-retire. Just when I was feeling my first yearnings to do so, I met someone "by chance" who provided me with a ticket out. With the extra courses at Rowan, semi-retirement is a real possibility. Whether my mother had a hand in all this or whether something else was at work, who knows? However, I don't think it was pure serendipity that these things came together just when I emotionally needed them to. When I went down to Rowan in January of 2004 to fill out some paper work for the spring semester and to see my room, a lone screwdriver directly in front of the door to the building where my room was led me to believe my mother had a hand in the whole thing. Let me explain.

A few months after her death, she seemed to manifest herself in a most intriguing way by leaving a Phillips screw driver behind. I know it sounds very odd, but to appreciate the synchronicity of the screw driver at Rowan, the reader has to know about the first two incidents.

In March of 2003, I went downstairs to leave for school and found that I couldn't open the door. I was locked in the apartment. The dead bolt lock somehow had broken. I noticed for the first time ever that it was held in by two screws which required a Phillips screwdriver to undo. I was so pissed that I didn't have one! I yelled at myself, "For Christ's sake, Kipp, you're really a piece of work! You don't even have a friggin' Phillips screwdriver in the house! Who the hell doesn't have a Phillips screw driver in the house!?" I had to call maintenance, and they took forty minutes, because they got the wrong apartment at first. I called school and said I would be late. Anyway, the guy climbed onto the balcony with a ladder, and within a few minutes, I was on my way to work.

I vowed that I would drive to Sears as soon as school got out and get the smallest box of tools they sell. Of course, I did no such thing!! That afternoon, I drove straight home. Shortly after I got home, I went out again to run some errands, and I noticed a Philips screw driver lying there on the pavement right next to the front tire on the driver's side. I don't think I had ever seen a screw driver on the ground in my life. I guess it could have been the maintenance guy's, but he put his screwdriver back into his tool case before he left the apartment. I don't think my mother put it there. It is just a meaningful coincidence, a synchronicity, that however it got there, it got there within hours after I needed one, and it seemed like a gift from above. Needless to say, I picked it up with the intention of keeping it.

The story continues... I tossed the screw driver onto my front seat. A couple of weeks before that happened, the light in my hall had gone out. I assumed the bulb had blown out and didn't put a new one in, because, well, I can live without that light in the hall, and I procrastinate like hell. I always have, and I suppose I always will. Anyway, after the screw driver had lain on the passenger's seat for about a week, I picked it up. As I was carrying it up the stairs, that hall light flickered on and off just once. I can't explain it other than to say that simultaneous with the flickering of the light, I felt some kind of energy transfer, right from my solar plexus. It might have been that I was just startled by the sudden flickering of the light, but it seemed stronger and more intense a feeling than that. I tried but couldn't get the light to flicker again when I played and played with the light switch. Later that night, I took off the fixture and saw that the bulb had not blown out. I screwed it in more tightly, and it started working again. It had done that before, but it had been ages and ages. Perhaps the vibrations from my walking up the stairs were enough to make it flicker. What is interesting is that it hadn't even once flickered during the three weeks before when I trudged up the stairs, just when I was carrying the screw driver that my mother "gave" me.

My mother always used to say spirit manifests itself through electricity. I have always kept my options open. I like to think of these things as interesting coincidences, examples of synchronicity, but Sherry, told me: "What does mom have to do, hit you over the head with a brick? She knows out of the four of us it was the hardest for you to give up all hope and let her go, so she's giving you all these signs!" The screwdriver was one of several synchroniciities that had already happened. The first two were also quite remarkable and happened already on the very day of her death. My mother, well versed in all the metaphysical arts, wasted no time whatsoever in letting me know that she had survived death.

That summer on a bike trip to Sherry's, I noticed a regular screw driver on the road. I was on Break Neck Road. While we were growing up, we must have driven down Break Neck Road a thousand of times at least. It connects to Sewell Road, where my grandparents lived. Once we turned onto Break Neck Road, we always got excited as kids, because we knew we were only a few minutes from Nanny's and Ada's. Of course, I stopped riding and picked the screw driver up. It has lain on a bookshelf next to the Phillips since that day.

The night before I went down to Rowan, I picked up both screwdrivers and held them for a few minutes to connect with my mother. I knew she would be thrilled at this new opportunity. I wondered if finding screw drivers might become a leitmotif in my life, whether my mother might someday strike again. The second anniversary of her death, December 21, was not as difficult as the first one was, but it had just recently passed and was still hard.

The next day, I drove over to Rowan to pick up my parking decal, keys, and the text I'd be using when I started teaching. I had been procrastinating about doing it for over a week, and I almost didn't do it that day, because it was raining, but I finally got my rear in gear and drove down there. I met with the secretary and the chair of the Foreign Language Department in the building that houses the department and where most of the language courses are taught. After filling out some paper work, the department chair, Sonja Johnson, told me that although they try to schedule most classes in Bunce Hall, I would be in the smaller building, Bozart, next door. She asked me if I would like to see my classroom, and, of course, I said that I would, and she accompanied me to the building. Three doors lead into the building, and as we approached the center door of the building where I would be teaching, I noticed a screw driver lying right in front of the third door.

When I noticed the screw driver, my eyes began to well up with tears, but I had to quickly check all that emotion because of the situation. I couldn't bend over and pick the screw driver up either. I had often wondered if my mother had a hand in the chain of events which lead to my getting the adjunct position at Rowan. I went back to Bunce with Sonja, said good-bye and left. I practically ran back to Bozart and prayed the whole way that the screw driver would still be there. It was. I picked up, and there are now three screwdrivers lying in a bookcase I bought to house my mother's library. Three times now, screwdrivers have appeared in meaningful ways connected to specific events in my life. The funniest part about it is that if my mother and I had talked forever about what kind of a sign she would leave behind for me, neither one of us would have ever in a million years come up with something as prosaic and as far removed from what she was, or I am, all about as a screwdriver!

I don't think that my mother materialized those screw drivers, although she well may have, nor do I think that she impressed upon whoever dropped them there to drop them and leave them behind, although she well may have. But I don't think it was pure coincidence either. Something beyond our ken is going on there. Since that third incident, I think that there will be other occasions in my life when I will find a screw driver, as a greeting from my mother. But these things don't happen when you expect them. After I visited a high school friend, who owns an antique shop right across the street from where I grew up, I drove very slowly past my old house in Hollywood Gardens looking for a screwdriver on the sidewalk or street in front of the house. It was the first time I'd driven through there in a couple of decades. Nada. All over the many ruins on a trip to Turkey, I looked for screwdrivers, sometimes even going off the beaten track. Nothing. I guess synchronicities just don't work when you're looking for them. In Ephesus, I saw a whole wheelbarrow full of some archeologist's tools. Everything was there but a screwdriver! Of course, it wouldn't have been very "meaningful," even if there had been one there.

Mom seemed to manifest herself in several other very impressive synchronicities, that I intend to write about in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

An addendum:

It has been a long time since the synchronicities or signs from my mother stopped.  That, of course, is fitting.  If it is indeed Mom, who is responsible for these signs, then she has better things to do with her time than to hover around me trying to convince me that she is indeed there.  If you have read the my earlier note, then you already know that, although I find these synchronicities beyond remarkable and compelling, I am still not exactly sure what their source is.  It is comforting, of course, to believe that they are signs from my mother, but who knows, really?  I like the idea of meaningful coincidences or synchronicities, as I have already discussed in the beginning of this note.

Still, I would like to think that at this important transition in my life, my retirement, my Mother has perhaps taken a break from her important work in paradise and is once again nearby my family and me.  She will be with me tomorrow night at my retirement dinner, right along with my Father and my siblings.  She'll be there, of course, in memory, and she will be there in the card she sent me when I got the position, a card, which is now my profile picture and one, which I intend to bring with me to the event and to talk about.

Readers of this note already know about the importance of the screwdriver iin these signs from my Mother.  When I wrote this note, I had found three of them under circumstances which were meaningful, emotionally resonant, and convinced me that my Mother might have been trying to get my attention with a lowly screwdriver.  The idea that my Mother would leave me behind a screwdriver as a sign of her presence seems laughable to me.  Nether one of us would have guessed a screwdriver would be her sign in a million years.  Her brother's sign, my Uncle Bubby's, yes. He's a wonderful carpenter!  But my Mother?   No way!  Somehow, though, and for some reason, the humble screwdriver it is.

I am surprised and happy to report that the screwdriver is back!  Two days ago, staff from maintenance came in the apartment to install new blinds in the picture window in my living room.  I came home from work, pulled the curtains back, looked at the blinds and decided that they were fine.  A good job had been done. Just a couple of hours ago, I went outside onto the porch to leave a couple of pieces of stale bread for the birds.  I put them on the brick ledge in front of the window.  I looked down and saw a screwdriver!  Someone had left a screwdriver behind the blinds on the inside windowsill!  In the two days since the work was done, they did not return to the apartment to pick it up and I did not get a call asking me to return it.  I just think it's fascinating.  If my Mother is still there somewhere, then I know she is with me now.  As if to drive the point home, I once again discover a screwdriver, the first screwdriver I've happened upon in several years.  As I said earlier in this note, I am not exactly sure what is going on.  I do not believe my mother impressed upon the guy from maintenance to forget a screwdriver.  I certainly do not believe she materialized it.  But I am convinced that the appearance of a yet another screwdriver is indeed a synchronicity or meaningful coincidence.  It is emotionally comforting to me that my mother seems repeatedly to leave behind this most mundane of objects to let me know that she is with me still, that she is proud of me, and that her love endures even from beyond the shadow of death.


My mother's last official act as President of the Mannington Parent Teachers Association. What a classic 1950's picture this is!I bought the bookcase to shelve my mother's library. The three screwdrivers lie there in front of my favorite pictures of my mother, a card with her Mom's favorite flower, lilacs, also a synchronicity, and a picture taken of me when I left the hospital after stents were put in an artery. I think the picture is meant to go in the same frame as the pictures of my mother. I first noticed symptoms in early April. It just happened, by coincidence, that the stents were put in on May 15, my mother's birthday. It also just happened that, as my sisters and I were talking about the procedure and Mom, the light in the waiting room kept flickering.My mother's PTA pins and her things connected to her installation as President of Salem County PTA. I had them framed in purple. What else?