One summer my mother was not doing well, she was in the hospital in Albuquerque and I was driving vans to the Santa Fe opera and my boss was very nice he set me up with a gig where I could drive from Albuquerque so I could go see my mom in the hospital every day. So one day I was picking up a bunch of people for the opera and this lady gets in the van and we sort of start flirting, I am flirting with her. She looks at me and says “oh come on now, I’m old enough to be your mother” which I felt for sure was not true but anyway we’re kind of joking around and I get up to Santa Fe to pick up more people to take to the opera. We come out of that parking lot and there’s this big white bus with a red stripe down the side. And I’m trying to decide whether I should take a right. take the highway, the scenic route or take a left and go through town. So I take a right and the bus takes a left and this lady that I’ve been flirting with starts bitching and bitching and bitching. She’s like I want to get there early why did you take a right? I said lady don’t worry it’s like the same distance, same amount of time and she’s like no this takes so much longer and she goes on and on but we take the bypass all the way across and she bitches the whole way and everyone is getting annoyed with her you know. And then as were doing the entrance ramp to enter the highway going north to the opera that bus, that white bus with the red stripe is right there as we enter. I looked down and we are bumper to bumper exactly side-by-side so exact and so precise that it struck me as odd. I said oh look lady there’s that bus that took the left and here we are at exactly the same time. That’s about all I said about it. And everybody sort of laughed I could see.
About a week later I was cleaning out the van with a friend of mine and my friend picked up this beautiful silver necklace. He says “do you know who’s this is?” No I’m not really sure, but let me hold onto it I might run into whoever it belongs to. If they call let me know. And I take it and stick it in the cupholder of my van. About a week or so later my sister calls early on Saturday morning. She says mom‘s not doing very well we better get down to the hospital the doctor called this morning he said to get down there. So I hopped in the van I’m driving down to the hospital I look in the cupholder I see that necklace. I think, it’s a cool necklace, I’m going to put it on, so I hook it around my neck go up to see my mom. She was in the ICU in the heart unit and we had to wait about five minutes before they would let us in the room. You call on the phone they say “not now, just a minute” after about five minutes we walk in the door. And that lady from the van is walking out as we are walking in and we kind of lock eyes it’s like we know each other we’re familiar but she can’t quite figure where she knows me from and I realize I was like oh I took you to the opera two or three weeks ago. She was like “I was you know I was wondering you didn’t happen to find a necklace in your van did you?” I was like yeah sure it’s right here and I reached up around my neck unhooked it and handed it to her. She burst into tears. And my brother-in-law said he got chills down his spine. I said “what are you doing here, why are you in the ICU? “
She said “well you know my mother she’s right over there in room number three, she’s dying of heart disease, what are you doing in the ICU?” I said “ well my mothers over there in room number four, she’s dying of heart disease. And you know what, actually remember in the van you said you were old enough to be my mother well come here and let me introduce you to my mother, I knew you weren’t that old.” So I went in and introduced her to my mother and she introduced me to her mother and we parted ways. My sister ended up talking to her quite a bit getting her name and her moms name and stuff.
My mom ended up passing away a few weeks later, we had to write the obituary and put it in the paper, you know you look at the obituary see if it came out all right and my sister noticed that that lady‘s mothers obituary was on the same page.
You know the one thing that I thought was kind of strange was as I was doing that loop to enter onto the highway I looked down as those bumpers came perfectly side-by-side and in that moment I thought to myself this is cosmic timing. This is too perfect. And I knew there was something strange about the timing. I got chills. And that was before any of those other things happened. And I was happy that I noticed before hand.
That necklace, she told me that her husband had passed away and he had given her that necklace they had gotten it at the Hurd Museum. And it had really extreme sentimental value.
It’s kind of perfect, things like that happen and they’re kind of a mystery.