Henrietta Hay's Column

Maybe it's Fate. Maybe it's the will of God. Maybe it's Hindu karma. Ann Landers suggests that it might be ba-shairt (Yiddish for destiny). Whatever, the things that happen to us which seem above our conscious control or understanding are pretty amazing.

Take, for instance, too much coffee. A friend of mine had a big Maine Coon cat named Sylvester. When Sylvester died, John was distraught. He decided he would not have another cat until fate/ba-shairt/karma brought him face to face with exactly the right one. Recently he drove to Delta on business and had his usual coffee fix before he left. On the way down the coffee kicked in and he pulled off the highway at a rest stop about 100 yards off the road. Before getting back in his car he decided to toss the empty coffee container into the garbage can.

I think we have all had the experience of seeing something, which is so unbelievable that it causes the circuit between the eye and the brain to jam for a second or two. That happened to John when he took the lid off that garbage can and heard a familiar sound. Something was meowing and moving - something that could not possibly be there. When his brain finally clicked in he realized that his eyes had really seen two damp, wiggly kittens staring up at him with big round eyes. It was Karma - love at first sight.

He fished them out and drove quickly to a vet who pronounced the little creatures healthy and about eight weeks old. So now John is the proud and happy housemate of two very special kittens named, appropriately, Java and Jo, the kittens which he knows he was destined to have.

I cannot begin to imagine the kind of person who would drop kittens in a garbage can in the desert, but from that awful act came one happy man and two lucky cats. Destiny!

And then there is a true human miracle that I have been privileged to watch grow for a number of years. My friend the philosopher reports that when she was about 12 she read Dale Evans' book, Dearest Debbie. the story of the Korean orphan who was adopted by Dale and her husband Roy Rogers. She was especially moved by the story and never quite forgot it or the way it had made her feel. Occasionally as time went she on found herself thinking of little Korean babies.

Many years later she was married, the mother of a son and busy with family and career. But she never quite forgot that book, and she started to wonder whether there might really be a special little Korean child who needed her. Her husband had also been thinking about all the lonely children in the world who needed homes and together they started to explore the possibility of a foreign adoption. From wondering to reality is a long, difficult, expensive process, but they made the decision and went through all the preliminaries. She knew that somewhere in a Korean orphanage there was a little girl who needed her. It was fate. Then one day a snapshot of the baby arrived, and all doubts were gone. That was her baby.

Eventually the big day arrived. The entire family, the new mother and father, brother, grandparents, aunts and uncles were lined up at Stapleton anxiously awaiting the plane from Korea.

Then the door opened and the stewardess walked toward them holding the tiny bundle, which she handed to my friend. The white woman and the brown baby looked at each other and she knew instantly that this baby was finally home.

That tiny baby is a beautiful young woman now -- playing soccer and volleyball and shopping the mall and making good grades in middle school. She is as American as you and I, part of a strong American family, but her bloodline is purely Korean and she is fully aware of it. Some day she will go there and see the land where she spent the first 18 months of her life.

My friend the philosopher knows that some invisible line reached across those thousands of miles and connected the baby in the orphanage in Seoul and the family in Colorado. In her words, "We never know where will find a miracle."