Are the deaths of Romeo and Juliet far-fetched? No. The intricacies of timing, in the hands of a master, create a plausible and enduring tragedy.          

Besides, life is endlessly far-fetched, in large ways and small.

In small ways, we brush up against other lives over and over, often without knowing.

For a long time, I’ve chatted with a woman whose locker is close to mine at the pool. Once she did me a favor by conveying my check—when I was wet and she wasn’t—to the lifeguard.

One day when no one else was around, she sat down on the bench in the locker room. She told me that she had peeked at my name on the check. She asked me if I was related to Paul and Jane.

“They’re my parents,” I said.

She paused. “I’m Ed’s daughter,” she said.

My dad had worked with Ed for twenty-five years. I pictured him instantly. I heard the timbre of his voice.

If it hadn’t been for the check, we wouldn’t have known that our dads were in physical proximity five days a week for a quarter of a century.

This doesn’t change the trajectory of history.

But if you scratch just a little, it’s astonishing how much commonality might be unearthed.

My friend Raia camped in Missouri on her way home to northern Minnesota two springs ago. A couple—the only other campground occupants—pulled in after she did. In the morning, the woman and Raia exchanged pleasantries in the washroom.

The couple had just been in Maine, where they had visited their son and daughter. Their son and my son had been roommates. I’d recently met their daughter—who was in grad school with my son. They now lived in the same four-plex.

Raia put this all together.

One more: My husband is adopted. When he met his cousin Kathy—the niece of his birth mother—he didn’t know that she had been my sister-in-law’s junior high English teacher. There’s more, but I’d have to make a chart.

I understand that it’s not Romeo and Juliet.

But it is life.

Our stories connect.

Ted Kooser, Poet Laureate of the United States (2004-2006) and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (2005) gave a reading on a recent Friday evening at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota.

I considered staying home and going to bed early. But I didn’t. I drove for 53 minutes and arrived in time to eat a lot of cheese and crackers before the reading began.

I am ashamed to have considered staying home.

Ted Kooser read several poems that rang with intention, poetry wrought with keen observation and crafted with heart and chisel. After each poem, little gasps—or whooshes—of surprise and delight escaped from reverent attendees. 

As well as reading, Mr. Kooser spoke about how detail is essential to a poem and how it is the unexpected detail that sets a poem apart.

He talked about associative thinking, a gift to the mind.

Listening to his words, I was an English major again.

At the book signing, I stood in front of him and told him my name. Jane. The regular one, I said. Four letters.

Seated, he leaned forward. He spoke. Maybe I hadn’t been clear about my name?

“Do you know the TV commercial . . .,” he began.

I panicked. How could I have a conversation about a commercial?

“It’s about . . .”

About what? Halitosis? Nail fungus?

Shaking his head, he said, “It doesn’t matter what it’s about. Blythe Danner is in it. I saw you in the audience and thought that you looked like Blythe Danner.”

Ted Kooser thinks that I look like Blythe Danner of screen and stage? (I do have fluffy hair.) Ted Kooser noticed me?

Me?

J-a-n-e? 

I didn’t read the inscription in the book until I was settled in the car. There it was. For Jane.

A King of Poetry had written For Jane, who may or may not look like Blythe Danner to anyone else.

Even if Blythe Danner’s name had never been spoken, it was a poetic evening. I floated home, an English major transported.

In the 2008 movie “kART ACROSS AMERICA,” two friends traverse the United States in a golf cart. Along the way, they ask people, “What’s your art?”

I heard about the movie. Even though I hadn’t seen it, I thought about it as I stood at the light rail station on a cold Saturday.

I kept thinking about it on the train.

What would it be like to ask a stranger, “What’s your art?”

Every few years, especially when I have a ludicrous idea, I am emboldened.

I reached my stop and got off. A young man passed me, going in the opposite direction.

“Are you in a hurry?” I said.

“No.” He stopped. He was boyish and beautiful, his face all sunbeams and his thick dreads bouncing.

“I’d like to ask you something. What’s your art?”

He looked rapturous, as though I’d just handed him a gift card to the universe.

“Music,” he said. “Rap.”

I wished that I had a Popsicle with which to thank him.

This encounter was heartening. I decided that my extensive survey would include three people.

At the coffee shop, a barista with red hair waited to take my order.

“I’d like to ask you a question, ” I said.

Her look said that she expected me to leap over the counter with an ice pick.

“What’s your art?”

She looked at my hands. No ice pick.

“Multimedia and poetry,” she said.

I joined my friend at a table and told her what I’d done. My last interviewee would have to be someone I knew, I said. I couldn’t ask a third stranger. My emboldened self had expired.

My friend looked at me. “Beads,” she said.

“Beads?”

“I liked to work with them when I was little and I still do.”

The survey was over.

Music. Multimedia and poetry. Beads.

Art is expression. A message of love to the world. A confession. Abundance. Despair. Looking inward. Looking outward. Gratitude. Terror. Hope. A garden that flowers with whimsy.

Who cradles the desire to create art?

It’s in all of us.