Talk About Karmic Connections, How I Met Sonja

Well, we could, I suppose, think back on how we meet any person who ends up being important in our lives and step back in awe at how amazingly the universe arranges things. I am going with the idea of karma, but call it what you may, life is just remarkable.

I understand the karma which brings us together with a college class or a gang at summer camp or meeting kindred spirits on the Camino. There is a logic there. We choose, apply, show up and are bound to have things in common. But the seemingly random encounters that turn into big friendships, how random are they really?

I met the Packards in Battleground, Indiana when Patrick and I walked by a funky little house that had a sculpture of a foot in the yard. It actually was a foot stool. Get it? It was a carving and a chair shaped like a foot. And when we met them Joan served us cold blueberry soup. A great encounter. But we kind of had to meet because we were the only normal people in that town at that time. Almost everyone else was some kind of weird Christian Republican throw back to the post war (WW11) years. I mean Watergate was going on in the rest of the country but in Indiana, oh man.

I just can't imagine not having met Sonja. It couldn't have been random but it happened like this. I was in Granada, Nicaragua and I was having a lot of dentistry done. A ton (refer to early blogs for grim details). I had met this lovely man from Seattle, WA.  I actually can't recall how I met Doug. I think someone introduced us. Doug was walking his way back to health. He had been hit by a truck in Brazil and nursed back to health by the family of the people who found him injured on the street. He was in very good shape when I met him. He is one of those kind souls who checked up on friends. Several times he offered to come to the dentist with me when I was having big stuff done.

We ended up taking walks together or going for coffee. One day we were walking down the street near the big second hand store when a woman came running out of a house yelling for help. We couldn't quite catch the full story but we did understand that she needed a taxi and it had to be very fast because her dog was choking? dying? something. Doug ran to Xalteva to flag down a cab and I went along with the hysterical woman to get the dog. We had some complications getting to the vet because of one way streets and not knowing the name of any of them. The dog got saved and we got out of the cab and continued our walk. Now I can't remember whether we stopped in on Sonja when we ate at the Mexican restaurant that was next door at that time, or whether we just ran into her after that.

But Sonja became a very important person in my life. I think the good gods organized that moment in the street. Sonja is a person who is up for doing things. We ended up taking a lot of outings together and then another year when I was terribly ill, nearly dying, and having my house situation explode because of Suzanne Prior's drinking or drugging or all around psycho life, I called Sonja who was just about to embark on her venture of renting out rooms and she invited me to move in that day. My healing started when Gretchen and I fled to her house. Thank you, Sonja.

We are the most unlikely friends. I am an old hippie, radical anarchist. I don't worry much about how I look. I am an intellectual and a Buddhist with Catholic leanings. Sonja is a Texas Tea Party, born again Christian who plays online poker and has a house full of dogs. She always looks perfect and designs her own clothes. We love the heck out of each other.

Now Sonja is dying. I am not there to be with her but I am so grateful for our unlikely friendship. It has meant so much to each of us. I don't think it was an accident that Doug and I were on that street at that moment.