WHAT ARE THE CHANCES? Onions and Clocks
About four years ago, I read Birth House by Canadian author Ami McKay, which was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, among other accolades. In it two midwives in an isolated village in rural WWI Nova Scotia offered onion juice as a tonic to their expectant and new mothers.
Not unheard of, but surely not the most common treatment either.
The very next book I read was a children’s chapter book and a Newbery Award winner: Holes by Louis Sachar. In it, the peddler Sam went through town shouting “Onions, onions”, because he sold them as medicinal remedies for a variety of ailments. He fed them to his donkey, Mary Lou, who seemed to never age.
So, as our eight-year-old grandson would say when confronted by something that seems a major coincidence – WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?
What are the chances that two so very different books would come into my reading sphere at the same time and include the same minor detail?
I was reminded of onions this week when I read Canadian author Lisa Moore’s Flannery, a YA novel set in Newfoundland. In it, Flannery says:
I have one of those antique clocks in my room with the numerals on little plastic tabs that flick over every minute. The tabs make a shish-click every time they drop down.
But, wait, I said to myself – I just read that. And I had – in the book I was reading on my Kindle at the same time.
In Ocean City Lowdown by Kim Kash, twenty-something reporter Jamie August works part-time in her uncle’s vacation rental business. In his office,
(she) dropped her smiley face and checked the time on the plastic pre-digital clock, the kind with flaps that drop each minute.
Do you remember these clocks (shown here stripped to its inner workings)? My aunt gave me one as a wedding gift in 1972 but I haven’t seen one in decades. I mean, really, what are the chances?
Have you run into similar reading coincidences?
Onions! Nothing comes to mind right now, but similar things happen to me constantly in my reading. Like we would be talking about something with my husband in the morning, a very specific event or topic, or place, and then when I keep reading the book I’m in, in the evening, here come that word or topic, or place. And not obvious common things either
That’s exactly the thing, isn’t it, Emma? They’re not at all common.
I just ran across another last evening after this post was up: On my ereader, in Beginning French by “Les Americains”, Marty tells how the phrase ce n’est pas ma faute (it’s not my fault) is widely used in France as an excuse. The physical book I was reading is Stuck by Stacey D. Atkinson, set in an Acadian village in New Brunswick. On page 8, barely started, little sister protests to her mother “Mais, c’est pas ma faute!” (a slightly different construction) while the family communicates mainly in English.
In the last few weeks I keep finding painters in the books I have read: The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, The Ecliptic, The Kill Artist.
Judy, it’s funny, isn’t it, how the themes of the books we’re reading can cluster around one in particular (eg painters), even when we didn’t choose them for that.
I find that when I’m working on something academic, everything I read (no matter how unrelated!) contains something I can use in the paper. My favorite was footnoting a Glamour magazine article in one of my grad school papers.
And I do remember those clocks. Specifically, looking at the clock and realizing I had only 4 ticks left until it was time to get up. You could actually hear time passing!
I guess it must be like learning a new word, Jane: suddenly you hear it everywhere.
That’s the sound of our lives ticking away – brrrrr!
I suppose that is just proof that the world is very small!
As the Internet has proved us to us, Betty. 🙂