Coincidences

In today's mail came a book from a friend of mine (the one who lives in Arlington VA) . We had promised to send one another a book. I had sent Tobias Wolff's Old School several weeks back. When I last spoke to him on the phone, he said he had recieved it, read it, and really liked it. The book from him in today's mail was a little odd. Not odd in its content, but in its timing.
Earlier this morning another friend (the one who lives in New Orleans) called me. He began by talking about the movie he had seen last night on Turner Classic Movies. The film was Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. He said that he had found the movie a little "over-the-top".
"Have you read the book?" I asked.
"No." he replied.
I no doubt bored him with a mini-lecture of how the popularized notion of Frankenstein and Mary Shelly's novel were really quite different and that the film he had seen was Kenneth Branagh's attempt, albeit, a failed attempt, to capture her original thesis. After politely listening, my friend told me he was going to get back to rebuilding his front gate and hung up.

The oddity I mentioned earlier is in the coincidence that the book I recieved was Mary Shelly's Frankenstien. Having read it a few years back, I don't know if I should re-read it or send it on to my friend in New Orleans. I never take coincidences very seriously and certainly never invest them with any other worldly significance.

Probably more interesting is the fact that the edition I recieved was produced as a sample for Xlibris.com the internet's answer to vanity publishing. Did my old friend (a closet surrealist) deleberately set these random events into motion? Or am I investing him with an acumen for the mundane that even I can not touch.