Coincidences? From time to time we were both overwhelmed by them: as if the universe were saying to us, "Don't doubt: you ARE each other's."

He had a teacher named Rudi. My father's name was Rudy. He had a gray Russian Blue cat named Rudi. I have a partly Russian Blue cat named Rudy.

His mother was Norwegian. My father was Norwegian. His grandmother's maiden name was Wang. My grandmother's cousin's family name was Wang.

His language was Latin. So was mine.

He is an actor. I spent two undergrad years as a theatre major, was too chicken to actually try to earn my living in it (too hard to be unemployed four times a year), but always wondered what *that* was all about.

We were both meditators; he, Buddhist ~~ me, Quaker. Both of us were intimately acquainted with the nebulae, and exchanged them, and gathered there.

The night we first "saw" each other, I held up my arm with my NEVER SURRENDER bracelet for him to see. He smiled, and held his up for me to see. (There are prolly hundreds of thousands of these out there: I never saw anyone but we wearing them.)

In 1980, while I was teaching in China, there was a news story in the International Edition of Newsweek, about a rally in California for Reagan. Someone(s) had hung on the trees signs saying STOP ME BEFORE I KILL AGAIN. (Referencing Reagan's comment that trees produced more carbon monoxide than cars. . . .) I remember thinking: I could love the guy that dreamed *that* one up! A few weeks ago we were talking, and I mentioned it to him. He laughed. "Twas me!" He'd been working on John Anderson's campaign and gotten early word of where the Reagan rally would be, and got to work on making and hanging the signs. . . .

And finally. Since I was thirteen or fourteen, there has been a vision in my head of this big bearded guy, wearing blue dungarees. I had always known this man was my mate. I used him once as the prototype for the hero in my second novel. (Guy name of Devorliss Stoot.) I never met him, nor ever saw him. Yesterday, a package from his cousin in Seattle came. Among other things were pictures of him while he was there in the autumn of 2004, playing Gloucester in Lear. There, leaning onto a table, arms crossed, a white mug on the table, grinning as if he'd known all along, and wearing a navy corduroy shirt is that man. I wept.