Background - August 9, 2010. My brother John and I were chatting on the phone and he told me about a car accident he had seen reported on the weekend update. The fatal accident had taken place only hours before in a town we know well called Bethesda, Maryland. Sadly a 64 year old man with a medical condition had lost control of his car and crossed the median strip, crashing head on into a mini-van and killing himself and the female driver of the van. The woman had been less than a mile from her home and on the way to get her hair done. After receiving a call from the salon, her husband had traveled her route to the shop and come upon the accident only to see them loading her into the ambulance. She had already passed away and the paramedics had to hold him back as he was now hysterical. It was a miserable, miserable, miserable story.
The Sunday night of the very same weekend my brother came to our house to have dinner and had a conversation with my husband about the job he was going to interview for that week. He told my husband about a guy that he had worked with a few years back who was now at this same company. It was a good connection for him and, although he hadn’t talked to this guy for a couple of years now, had always been fond of him. He was looking forward to a chance to catch up and possibly even work with him again.
He told me he didn’t know why he hadn’t kept in contact with this guy because they’d had a fairly strong connection due to the severe peanut allergy that my brother shared with this man’s son. They had spent many a day talking about the dangers and management of such an allergy. My brother was very fond of this guy and they had developed a nice friendship that he now missed.
S.C.O.U.T. - Monday morning my brother was surprised to receive a text from another former co-worker. It was a woman who had also worked for the old company and also knew the guy whose son has the peanut allergy. The text informed my brother that the woman who had been killed in the car accident in Maryland was, in fact, this man’s wife. My brother was stunned and it took a bit for the uncanny timing of the weekend events to settle in on him. The idea that he had unwittingly spent the beginning of the weekend thinking about the poor woman who had died in the accident and her devastated husband only to find out that the devastated husband was the old friend that he had spent the remained of the weekend thinking about left little room to call it a mere coincidence.
I have found that identifying a S.C.O.U.T. and always finding its meaning, should there be one, are two completely separate excersizes. Perhaps the bond he had developed with this man over the peanut allergy had opened up an eternal cosmic line of communication, or perhaps he “attracted” this information due to the upcoming interview, perhaps it was a slap in the face from God, the universe, and the “powers that be” telling him that a fellow human being was gonna need some friends - old friends, new friends and all the friends in between - to hold himself together after this life wrecking tragedy.
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