A Ghost of a Chance

"Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?"
-Charles de Lint

My uncle travelled to New York a few years ago to take part in a parade that honoured his fellow police officers. When it was complete he paid a visit to neighbouring New Jersey and stepped into a bar for some refreshment.
After a while he struck up a conversation with an elderly man. It transpired that the latter was from Ireland too though he had been living in America for a long time.
It turned out after some small talk that the man was also from my uncle's side of Ireland, from the same county, which boasts a reasonable population of about 160,000.
My uncle chanced to mention the tiny village he grew up in and asked if his new acquaintance had heard of it. The village in question has about 600 people living within its boundaries.
Sure enough, the fellow declared with a slow dawning expression of incredulity, that he was familiar with the village- very much so. As a matter of fact he had visited his own relative there every summer of his childhood long ago, far before my uncle's time.
My relative, wise to every house in the diminutive locale of his youth, enquired as to what the family name might have been.
Between the two of them they at last established that the house one of them visited as a boy was the same house the other had grown up in. I grew up there too. Mater still lives there.
The house is more than a hundred years old and we were all aware of the name of the man who lived in the house ever before my family did. We knew nothing of him but his name and that his era had long since passed.
At the age of eleven I wrote a poem about him- or rather, about his spirit, which I whimsically imagined to be hovering in the atmosphere of the cottage I am sure he passed away in.
My uncle travelled four thousand miles for a work-related purpose, wandered as a tourist from the focal point of his visit, and in a randomly chosen bar on an inauspicious Autumn afternoon met a man who knew a particular house as well as he did.
Certain things in this world can be planned, accounted for, arranged, aligned and constructed in a nice orderly fashion to keep the world ticking over soundly. When we step into an area of uncategorisable and unresolvable matters, however, and come face to face with highly improbable coincidences, it shakes our nerve and leaves us wondering how much we really know about anything.
I would like to think that the pair, upon recovering from their curious encounter, raised their glasses and offered a toast to the departed old man who linked their lives.