We often marvel at the amazing designs of nature — the intricate geometry of snowflakes and flowers, for example — and sometimes it feels that way about life in general. Events and people can spin around us in circles that connect and overlap, drawing us together in unexpected ways.
I thought about this recently after one of LeAnn’s monthly family Zoom visits with her cousins and her mother, who is the last living of four sisters. I married into the family, of course, and I sit in as often as I can because they’re the type of family that treats me as family and invites me to share parts of my story, which has connections to theirs.
I wouldn’t have married into the family if LeAnn and I hadn’t both been members of Wilshire Winds and hadn’t taken the time to have dinner together when we discovered our birthdays were four days apart. And then over dinner, we discovered her mother and my grandfather grew up in and near the small Grayson County town of Whitewright. LeAnn’s mother later lived in Sherman while working as a nurse and attended the First Baptist Church there. My father and his parents lived in Sherman at that same time and were members of that same church.
Shortly after I was born and we moved back to Texas from Montana where my father had been stationed in the Air Force, we settled for a brief period in Sherman. I’ve learned since marrying LeAnn that my family lived two houses down and across the street from her aunt, uncle and two cousins. We left just months before they moved in, but all these years later we have common recollections of the neighborhood, the creek and city park across from them and next to us.
We also discovered LeAnn’s father and my father worked for some of their career a block apart near Baylor Medical Center near downtown Dallas. They were both in education – my father at Baylor College of Dentistry and hers at the Dallas Institute of Funeral Service. That makes me wonder if decades before LeAnn and I met, our fathers passed each other on the sidewalk or looked over at each other from their lunch tables at a diner on Gaston Ave.
Spiraling out from our family connections, I did my own stint in Sherman during the summer after my junior year in college as an intern at the Sherman Democrat newspaper. I worked under a young editor named Perry Flippen, who I’ve learned in more recent years is an old friend of Wilshire members Bob and Judy Coleman.
I’ve learned Bob grew up in the North Texas town of Vernon, which I’ve driven through a thousand times on my way to and from New Mexico and Colorado. Not too long ago we learned a relatively new neighbor to us is from Vernon. She and her husband recently transported a windmill from her father’s farm in Vernon and now it stands tall in our old Embree neighborhood near downtown Garland.
LeAnn and I wouldn’t be living in Embree if we hadn’t gotten married after making those Whitewright-Sherman connections over dinner that night, and we wouldn’t have sunk our roots in Embree if there hadn’t been a vacant lot for sale from a man named Kenneth English. As it often goes with residential property transactions, we never met Mr. English, but later I saw his name in an obituary in the Dallas newspaper and discovered he was the grandfather of Wilshire member Barbara Gass Utay.
More connections: When we bought the lot and were planning our house with Wilshire friend Steve Conner, we had to replat the property to bring the old records up to date. When we went to the planning commission meeting to get that approved, one of the commissioners, Louis Moore, seemed familiar to me. As we sat there, it finally clicked into place: I first met Louis at the Southern Baptist Convention in 1982 in New Orleans when he was religion editor at the Houston Chronicle and I was doing the same at the Waco Tribune-Herald.
I hadn’t seen Louis in almost 30 years until that meeting and learned he and his wife Kay lived a couple of blocks over from our new home site. As we got to know them, Kay told us she lived in the house right across the street from us as an infant. A few years ago – with no particular credit to us – the Moores joined Wilshire, adding to a great group of Garland folks at Wilshire.
I could go on and on with more examples of connections but I won’t. The point is: The roots and branches of our lives reach out in many directions and unite us in many ways. It all seems so random, and yet I sometimes believe there’s a divine design in these swirling circles of contact that add warmth and wonder to our lives.