Finding

There is a flipside to all of our delightful finding-stories, so many synchronicities that parallel, but never touch, my mother's moment on Simcoe Street in Victoria, when she had jsut enough chutzpa to ask a stranger about his clever playen on wheels, and discovered that he was family from Kibbutz Yad Mordecai. Last night, at the one-year memorial yartzeit of my mother-in-law Rachel, may her memory and my own image of her, looking upward, hands raised to heavens, bring blessings to all of us, the relatives started telling of their arrival in small, seasick boats at Haifa's shores. No internet, not even phones, were available, for tracking down relatives. They didn't even know which of their relatives were alive. One took his feverish little son to the health clinic and couldn't get an appointment. A man approached him and said, "In my country I was a paediatrician. I'll check your son. What's the name?"
"Kaston"
"Kaston? My daughter is married to a Kaston." And thus two branches of the family, one who fled to Argentina and one who went straight to Israel, were reconnected.
Why do we delight in these tales? Because we could have passed each other on Simcoe Street a hundred times, and never found out we were related. Because our family, like so many, has members who are assumed dead, but we never found out for sure. Because we don't know how many times we have walked by a relative on the street, and simply not found out we were connected.
"Nice stroller"
"Thank you"
And the two walk on.
Because, like the beautiful sister Bella in Fugitive Pieces, Bella who played the Moonlight Sonata, Bella who figured in her brother's every dream, was carried off, and her brother will always search for her, though the novel has ended. In a weekly radio show here in Israel, family members give the names of their missing relatives. I wonder how many reconnectings there have been.
Here's to internet and to unshyness. And to life. And to the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.