On May 10 of this year Gabe Gudding reprinted a poem by Henry Gould on his blog; the poem incorporates a bit of pink chalk graffito Henry found on the sidewalk in Providence RI when he walked home from work one day. Signed "Clio," as in the Muse of History, it seemed like a sign of some sort.

Years later, he sent the poem to Gabe because Gabe's daughter's name is Clio. Unbeknownst to Henry, she had lived on that street in Providence, and was the author of that graffito.

If this were a Kieslowski film, the serendipitous event would not have been discovered til years later, perhaps when Clio had grown and, now a stunning young woman who reads poetry (because her father, of course, is a poet), she finds the poem in a library, goes looking for the author who had crossed her path so long ago, and in the process, finds the earnest young man who is her destiny ....

But because we have the Internet, chance meetings happen faster -- the span of a generation may collapse to that of a synapse. In the phrase of Ronald Johnson, "Internetted Eternities," indeed.