Coffee Serendipitee

Let me tell you a story as I type and sip on my coffee this rainy morning.

My dad was fully Swedish. I grew up with most of the traditions of a Swedish-American childhood. As I grew up, my parents, aunts, and uncles drank a lot of coffee. My mom and her friends at the Swedish Covenant church I grew up in fixed huge pots of egg coffee for every church function. 

I can still remember the aroma of coffee wafting up from the church basement as I descended. It smelled wonderful.

I've always loved the smell of coffee. Imagine my surprise the first time I realized it tasted nothing like it smelled! I figured as I got older, coffee would taste better. Every adult I knew seemed to love it. As I reached my teen years and sipped it here and there to see if my "adult" taste buds had grown in, I realized how different I was from everyone else. 

I got married, had children, ordered Cokes and remarked, "That's my caffeine! Ha ha!" when a friend wanted to meet for coffee. I couldn't stand the taste of coffee! My teaching colleagues would walk the halls early each morning with steaming mugs of coffee. I stocked my classroom fridge with cold, diet Dr Pepper. At family dinners, my aunts would wonder if I was really family. Jokingly, they'd ask me, "How can you be in this family and not drink coffee?" I had no answer for them.

I learned to keep instant coffee in my cabinet, so my Swedish dad wouldn't need to leave the house early in the morning to find a cup of coffee each time he visited.

My sister, Laurie, owned a coffee shop for several years. When I'd visit, she'd always say, "Order anything you want!" My eyes would scan the long menu until I'd find the non-coffee drinks. Her smoothies were great, but I always felt somewhat like a failure. Maybe I wasn't Swedish at all...

And then it happened. I was in contact with cousins in Sweden! My sister, Kris, and I began planning a trip to Sweden, my retirement trip, and I was so excited to meet Gunnel and her family! 

One day, I talked with a friend who had traveled to Sweden several times. She listed things I could expect when visiting a Swedish home, and at the top of that list was something she considered wonderful.

"You can expect to be offered coffee at any home you visit." 

"Oh. Well, what if you don't like coffee?"

She just stared at me. "Well, I guess you could ask for a glass of water..., The water is very good there." 

I went shopping and dragged home a variety of coffees, creamers, syrups, and whatever else I could find. I needed to learn how to drink coffee, fast! I sipped sample coffee at coffee shops in tiny paper cups. I watched what my friends put in their coffee. I tried a tablespoon of coffee in a cup of milk! Nothing worked! All I could taste was bitterness! If I couldn't make it through a second sip of coffee, how would I survive two weeks in Sweden?

My only strategy left was to keep trying every chance I got. I have to admit, I also asked God to heal my taste buds!

The day finally arrived for our trip, and I, yet again, ordered coffee, this time good Swedish coffee, on the Swedish plane headed for Stockholm. I complained to Kris about it. As I talked, I added cream and sugar to the cup the stewardess had handed me.

"Kris, watch this." I raised the cup to my lips and took a tiny sip.

Kris just stared at me, then said, "You can't make that face when we're with our Swedish cousins!" 

"I know!" I was completely dismayed. "There's something wrong with me!"

My first cup of coffee in Gothenburg!

By the time we got to Gothenburg, it was lunchtime. We found a little cafe in the train station and decided to eat there. I ordered lunch and coffee, then sat down and doctored the dark liquid with milk and sugar. The salad tasted wonderful! I looked at the pretty white cup filled to the brim with "the enemy." Reassuring myself that I had a bottle of water as a back-up, I lifted the cup and took a sip. 

What was this wonderful liquid?!? I took another sip. No bitter, screwed-up frown as I swallowed. I was almost as excited to be drinking coffee as I was to be in Sweden!

I ordered coffee every chance I got for the rest of the day! In Sweden, you may find yourself with an opportunity for coffee five or six times a day! They even have a special name for coffee breaks. They call it fika, and I fika-ed several times a day that first week!

I joked that I really must have been broken and all I had needed was to "return to my ‘homeland’ to be reset!"

My Swedish cousins at Fika in Gunnel's home.

Needless to say, lots of coffee and a little jet lag might have caused some sleep problems that week. (They do drink their coffee strong in Sweden!) But it was all worth it! 

The next week, I enjoyed many cups of coffee with my Swedish cousins and never had to ask for a glass of water instead!

On the flight home, I worried that Swedish coffee was different than the coffee at home, and I'd go back to hating it. I’m happy to say that worry was unfounded. The day I got home, I tossed the pop and added a cup of coffee to my morning routine.

Think what you want, but I believe God might have smiled at my silly prayer and decided to answer it. What better time than with my first cup of coffee in Sweden? He is the Giver of Good Gifts, and as odd as that sounds in relation to coffee, maybe He decided to answer my prayer. I really have no other explanation for this marvelous little event. 

Dunedin Coindidence

 

Last Saturday, I sat on the bleachers in a small gym near my home in Kansas and watched my granddaughter playing volleyball.

A woman about my age walked up the steps and sat down with a group on the other side of the aisle. I noticed the back of her T-shirt when she turned to sit. It had a logo of a palm tree and a bagpiper. Above the logo was a name: Dunedin. Under the logo, it read: Highland Games and Festival. I remember wondering how to pronounce Dunedin and whether the name was Scottish because I had just been to Scotland.

I soon forgot about it when my daughters sat down with me. I never mentioned it to anyone, and I didn’t see the woman again.

Later that day, I saw a Facebook post with a picture of a town and a steep road. The caption above the picture read: 

World’s steepest street Dunedin, New Zealand who’s been here?

There was that name I couldn’t pronounce again. That made me curious because it seemed like a huge coincidence to see it twice in a day.

Like I often do when I’m curious about something, I opened DuckDuckGo and typed in Dunedin, and the New Zealand town appeared in the results. Then I added Highland Games and Festival to the search, and a town in Florida popped up that matched the logo on the woman’s shirt. Nothing from Scotland.

I specifically asked for Dunedin in Scotland, but nothing showed up.

Then, I asked for the pronunciation since I’d never heard or read the name before and got this:
/duh-NEE-dn/.

Finally, I searched for the name's origin and found it is the old Gaelic name of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the search engine gave me this: Dunedin means "Edinburgh" in Scottish Gaelic, deriving from "Dùn Èideann," which reflects the city's Scottish heritage. Dùn is the Gaelic word for fort or castle, and Èideann is a centuries-old name for the area where Edinburgh is located.

The last coincidental detail in this sequence is that I had just come home from visiting Edinburgh two months earlier and didn't know Dunedin is an old name for Edinburgh!

Has anything like this ever happened to you? What would you call this coincidental experience? Does it have a name? ChatGPT calls it an illusion, but I’m not so sure.