One evening a few days after I had arrived, I found myself sitting in my room in an almost entirely darkened and otherwise deserted fraternity house, realizing that my planning of this return hadn’t exactly been stellar.  I had let Kath know I was back, but for obvious reasons, she wasn’t on campus now—she was at home with her family, where she needed to be, and my contact with her was naturally intermittent.

Unsure what to do with myself to pass the time, I broke out my guitar and started playing and singing some songs.  After a time, I hit on one that made a big difference in my mood.  It was a very simple song, which I think may have had its origins in slavery, and the essence of it was just to say “I hurt.”  There was eloquence in that simplicity, though, and the simple act of expressing my pain through it brought a surprising amount of relief.

After I finished it, I couldn’t just move on to another song.  I had to savor the feeling it had fostered.

Before long, a thought popped into my head:  “I’ll bet Kath would like to hear that.”  She liked my playing—and actually, so did her dad, in the one brief time I had played for her family.

But another voice in my mind quickly interjected, “No, this isn’t the time.  She’s got enough to cope with as it is.  It would be self-centered and pathetic to bother her with my paltry needs for her attention at this point.”

I found myself having a prolonged and strange sort of silent mental argument with myself.  Oddly, the thoughts that favored reaching out to her didn’t feel entirely like my own.
The argument finally ended with the thought, “If you’re going to do it, you’d better do it now, or you’ll be too late.”  With that, I packed up my guitar, got in my car, and headed—I wasn’t sure why—to the family home of a longtime friend of hers in Palo Alto.

As I pulled up to the house, a female figure was getting into a car at the curb ahead of me.  It was a metallic-blue compact station wagon like the one Kath’s mom drove.

As she pulled away, I followed—a little too closely, actually—trying to get her attention.  I didn’t have much luck in this regard, and she sped up through the tree-lined residential neighborhood, possibly frightened by having a pair of headlights so obviously following her.

Eventually she turned onto a major commercial street, where (going decidedly too fast now) I was finally able to pull up a little closer in an adjacent lane.

The glimpse I got of the driver (in admittedly poor light) didn’t seem to be Kath after all.

Feeling sheepish for having potentially given a complete stranger an unwarranted scare, I headed back to the campus.

The next time Kath and I talked, though, I mentioned the episode—and she told me she had actually been at that same friend’s house, and left at just about the time I arrived.

I didn’t know what to make of what had happened.

Today, more than five decades later, I’m still not sure exactly what happened that night—whether I had actually seen her but not recognized her in the dim light, or there had been an amazing series of coincidences.

However, this turned out not to be the only time that an idea or thought would enter my head that somehow didn’t feel like it was entirely my own.  I still can’t be 100% certain what’s going on in these situations, but with multiple occurrences over time, I’ve been able formulate an at least serviceable—though unusual—hypothesis.