Short Stranger Holding a Plate of Shrimp

(Blogger's Note: they're not really called crapberries.)

It started with a fortune cookie. The Monday before last, at a cheap Chinese restaurant on Rapid Road. I had just eaten my usual lunch -- number 11, broccoli beef. The check came quickly, with a fortune cookie in a small metal bowl.

The fortune read: "A short stranger will bring blessings into your life."

A cute come-on, I thought, brushing cookie crumbs off my shirt: Don't expect just any stranger, but a short stranger. One could spend all day scanning short pedestrians for a sign: a significant stare, a cabalistic hand-signal, a mysterious package just waiting to be thrust into your hands.

A nice daydream, but -- time to go back to work. I stuffed the fortune into a pocket, walked back to work down Rapid Road, and thought nothing more of it. Except for taking the fortune home and stowing it in my nightstand; it seemed unusual.

Tuesday came, and with it lunchtime. Once again I hiked down Rapid Road, this time stopping at a bakery-cafe. I stood in line for my usual sandwich (breaded chicken -- exquisite) behind a short, elderly woman with a foreign look. A thick mop of silver hair, light-brown skin, almond-shaped eyes, an ankle-length tweed coat. Not from here -- at least, not originally.

She negotiated a cup of coffee in a thick accent, and moved off to the sugar-and-cream station. I noted her as interesting and thought no more about it. I bought the sandwich and ate it.

A little later I headed back to work. It's a ten-minute walk: good exercise. But I hadn't gone a block down Rapid Road before I met two women holding an animated discussion in the middle of the sidewalk.

One of them -- a Latina -- turned to me and asked, "Sir, can you help this woman find her bus?"

"Uh, sure...."

"Thank you!" And she hurried off down the street. Which left me with -- the short, silver-haired elderly woman in the long tweed coat. She barely came up to my ribs. And she held a cardboard box in her hands.

I won't try to recreate the conversation -- her English was poor. But she had come all the way from San Jose on public transit -- an epic journey, to be sure -- to buy dried crapberries from an herb distributor on Rapid Road. The only place in the region that had them. And now she was ready to head home. But she'd lost track of the bus stop for the line that would take her back to where the intercity express bus stopped.

I knew where one was, and offered to walk her there. Sold.

Along the way, she said more about her mission: crapberries are a traditional cure for eye problems, and a friend in Europe had asked her to obtain some for her. Dried crapberries actually come from Europe, yet her friend couldn't find any. But -- the old woman shrugged -- dried crapberries were available in California. Global commerce is like that sometimes.

We found the bus stop, which was shaded by pretty trees and had a bench for her to sit on. I made to hasten away, but she said, "Here, I'll show you." And put the box down on the bench and opened it. Inside were half-a-dozen shrink-wrapped packs of wrinkled purple berries. She lifted one out for me to hold. The berries were rocky little things -- distinctly unappetizing. I thanked her, and went on my way.

But that evening, at home, I wondered. I was watching TV with Rhumba, as usual. A commercial for Plavix, the blood thinning drug, came on. Some vast number of Americans take the stuff to keep their arteries clear, their bodies active, and heart attacks at arms length. On the toob, happy grey-haired people pranced like teenagers thanks to the wonders of Plavix. And I'm of an age to take that stuff, but -- never. I don't trust the pharmaceutical industry. Not when they're selling drugs the same way advertisers sell chewing gum or soft drinks.

My mind went back to the crapberries. I'd looked them up on Wikipedia and a few other websites. The articles said that crapberries are a time-honored herbal remedy in Europe for a number of things: eyesight issues, blood circulation problems, even diabetes. And they are heavily loaded with first-class antioxidants, chemicals that might fight cancer. In fresh form, they're eaten as food. They're related to blueberries, and not toxic in any way.

Few of the claims for crapberries had been tested rigorously. And I know that there are a zillion herbs on the market that can supposedly clean out your system, add 40 years to your life and shine your shoes at the same time.

Should I pay attention to a coincidence and buy a pack of the danged things? Or was I being superstitious? I wouldn't trust the pharmaceutical industry, but I would heed the word of a fortune cookie? I turned to Rhumba and told her about the fortune cookie and the old woman and the crapberries.

And she laughed. Rhumba will tell you that this sort of thing happens to her all the time. A name will pop into her head out of nowhere. Then later in the day, she'll read the same name online or hear it on television. And then a day or two later, she'll meet a person by that name.

"Information travels in packs," she said. "But it doesn't mean anything."

We were both talking about synchronicity: those times when two or more unrelated events come together in a way that seems meaningful. My man Carl Jung invented the word "synchronicity" and defined the concept. A lot of people know the idea from the "plate 'o shrimp" monologue in the movie Repo Man (one of my faves):

"A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example, show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, "plate," or "shrimp," or "plate o' shrimp" out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness."

A couple of week ago I read an article about scientists who think that the future can affect the present, at least on the subatomic level. Even subatomically, that's dynamite. But as the Red Queen says in Through the Looking Glass, "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

Rhumba and I both believe in synchronicity, but with a difference: she doesn't believe there's meaning in it. And I'm not sure. Maybe synchronicity is just an eddy in the cosmic information stream, scooping up floating leaves of a particular size and type. But who's to say there isn't something there, sometimes, that you can use? Or that sometimes the future doesn't influence the past?

On the third hand, it's very easy to read synchronicity into mundane phenomena. Seeing the actor William Shatner on TV seven days in a row, for example, simply means that Shatner is a shameless self-promoter and that you watch too much television.

So I still wasn't sure. But -- what was the risk? Twenty bucks for a pound of dried crapberries that were at least harmless and packed with antioxidants? So I phoned in a one-pound order to the herb distributor and picked it up the next day at lunch on Rapid Road. Where I got a fortune cookie telling me that I was about to make a "fun, four-wheeled investment." Hardly.

That night I chowed a generally-recommended dose of crapberries -- 30 grams, maybe half the weight of a snack-sized box of raisins. By the way, I've been calling them crapberries because 1) I'm not ready to make a yea-or-nay recommendation on them, and 2) they taste like crap.

Suppose you bought some dried currants in a box, ate a few and stashed the open box in the back of the pantry and forgot about it for a year. So that they were all hard and dry and stony and odd-tasting. Crapberries don't even taste that good.

After eating the crapberries, I sat down in front of the TV again. Where I'd been drowsing like a middle-aged man who'd eaten too much and exercised too little.

And about ten minutes later, I was wide awake and alert. Holy crap: who turned up the oxygen?
Over the next few days, I stopped falling asleep in my chair in the evening -- well, before 10 pm, anyway. I could concentrate better. I got through a late-afternoon staff meeting without yawning or digging my thumbnail into the ball of my forefinger to stay awake. And that's serious -- I've been reprimanded for nodding off.

Everything physical became easier. My muscles felt looser, I walked faster, my endurance at the gym went up. I stopped eating as many snacks. I just didn't want them.

I won't go into the details, but I did more reading on crapberries. From what I can gather, they're probably dilating my arteries, encouraging capillary growth, and cleaning out the artery gunk somewhat. Something like herbal Plavix.

I've been slowing down the last few years and I thought it was just old age and less exercise. But now I think also that my fuel lines were beginning to clog, and my body -- certainly my brain -- wasn't getting a rich enough mix. On my mom's side of the family, most of the men have a heart attack by my age -- usually non-lethal, but still...

Yes, I'll see a real doctor one of these days and get the heart checked out. But for the time being I feel like I did ten years ago. Except for the achy joints.

And who knows how things will turn out? Maybe crap-berries will stop working for me -- herbs can be like that. Or maybe I'll take them forever. Rhumba, who is wary about toxins, is not sure that I know everything that I need to know. But right now the only downside is purple teeth. Sometimes I look like I've savagely attacked a giant grape.

Meanwhile we got some sad news this past week: the husband of one of Rhumba's old friends had died. They've moved away, so I got on the Internet and found his obit; he'd died of a blood disease. That can happen for no reason, but which is also a very rare but known side effect of several drugs. Including Plavix.

There's that information traveling in packs again. Synchronicity. Does it mean anything? Does it have to? Who knows?

Last Tuesday at work, I ran into a particular co-worker three times in a morning. Normally I see her rarely; she works on another floor. Frankly, dealing with her is a little awkward for me. Although she's probably somebody's grandmother, she's extremely, ah, mammalian, and dresses to prove it. I'm 50-odd, but I still don't get on-the-job cleavage. At least not of the Grand Canyon variety.

But we're polite to each other, so by morning's end we were joking each time our paths crossed. Then I went to lunch at the Chinese restaurant on Rapid Road... guess who walked by my table, looking for a seat?

Of course I had to invite her over. And it turned out she's new in town. And has just rented a room in a house a block from mine. And has already made friends with somebody I know.

Is there an "off" switch to this synchronicity thing? Or should I just stay off Rapid Road?