Sitting down to write something to go with the photographs I found in my “out and about” time today, the word serendipity came to mind; so I went in search of the word’s etymology.  Here’s what I found:  The first noted use of the word in the English language was in a letter to Horace Mann by Horace Walpole.  Most people know Mann as the “father” of the American effort to provide free education for everybody, and only the few people who had an English teacher like me who put The Castle of Otranto  on a reading list might have a reason to know the Aristocratic British philosopher and author Horace Walpole.  Walpole said he formed the word serendipity from the Persian fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip,” whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” The name stems from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon), from Arabic  Sarandib, which was adopted from Tamil “Seren Deevu” or originally from Sanskrit Suvarnadweepa which literally translates to “Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island.  What I did today and what happens to me often when I go out into the world to see what I can see fits Walpole’s description of the people who make discoveries by accident of things they weren’t looking for.

This morning I noticed, for instance, that the shadow of the nozzle from the gas pump at Costco to my car’s gas tank looked like some strange mythical animal feeding.  The shadow the ground was irresistible, so I shot the picture with my cell phone.  On my bicycle ride later I stopped and watched an encounter between two policemen and a homeless man stopped on the sidewalk beside University Avenue in Hillcrest.  Apparently his cart overloaded with what I presume were all of his worldly possessions was somehow out of compliance with the law.  It seemed to me that everything about the man was out of compliance with life as most of us know it in San Diego. I discretely from a distance snapped a couple of pictures and rode on.  Later when I came out of a grocery store, I stopped to look at some pink Camellias.  A young woman asked me if they were roses, and I told her as much as I know about the difference between roses and camellias. She seemed genuinely interested. I got pictures there, too.  I had bought a can of sweet cherries in heavy juice at the store, so after lunch at home I used the cherries to put the finishing touches on a cheesecake I made yesterday. 

Serendipity.