Cranes: Another Weird Thing
By BetsyG
This story was told to me by my friend Julie (not that Julie, the other Julie; yes that one). If I hadn’t known her for 19 years, I would have thought this story was BS. But she and I have similar mindsets, are practical and highly skeptical, and don’t believe in much of anything, let alone weird things of the nature that this story suggests. So trust me when I say this really happened.
In the town where Julie lives, a young boy named Mike was dying of cancer. Julie didn’t know the family, but she was moved by the story. She makes origami cranes and uses them in crafts projects, and she was inspired to send the mother a crane mobile as well as crane ornaments for Mike’s siblings.
She received a card back from the grateful mother, who also conveyed how stunned she was to receive the package, because she had been looking into doing a crane project of some sort to raise money to fight childhood cancer. She vaguely had in mind something called Cranes for Cancer. (Cranes are a symbol of world peace, among other things, and using cranes to express unity or peace is not uncommon.) The mother was blown away: here she’d been envisioning something and the next day it arrived in a package in the mail.
To me, that’s pretty weird, but I can come up with plausible explanations for the coincidence.
The boy passed away several years ago. A few months back, Julie was trying to think up a project for her daughter’s Girl Scout troop, which was meeting at her house. She decided they would make crane mobiles, a project she’d done with her older daughter’s troop. The day of the meeting, as she was preparing the house for the activity, she realized it was the anniversary of Mike’s death.
That’s another weird but explainable coincidence; she might even have been subconsciously thinking of the boy at that time of year, although I think it’s a bit weird that the meeting involving cranes happened to fall exactly on the day of his death.
Julie babysits a little girl named Marie in her home. One of Julie’s responsibilities in caring for Marie, who’s 4 years old, is to help her learn the letters of the alphabet, which she has difficulty with. She can’t read, spell, or even identify most of letters.
On the day of the meeting, since she already had the materials in the house, Julie offered Marie a craft project assembling crane Christmas ornaments of the same type she had made for Mike’s siblings. As she was assembling the ornament out of beads and paper cranes, Marie looked up at Julie and asked, “What does M-I-K-E spell?”
Mind you, this girl cannot even recognize the letter K.
Oh, and incidentally, the mother has kept up a blog about Mike, and claims that he still speaks to her…through children. I’m not drawing any conclusions.
Please send me your strange but true stories!
February 12th, 2009 at 9:58 am
My Dad died suddenly, accidentally and tragically four years ago. While waiting in the airport, on a layover on my way home after the funeral, I was paged. The page wasn’t my married name, which my ticket was purchased under, but my maiden name. Also my first name had “ie” added, which only a few people call me. My Dad was one of those people.
Fortunately I was on the phone with a friend when the page came over the speaker. I was a bit freaked out that someone was paging my maiden name. I thought maybe something happened to my Mom. Most people at home know me by my maiden name, just for simplicity. They paged over and over, must have been 4 pages before I got to the counter. I told the woman at the counter my name and told her I was being paged. She looked at me like I was a nut. Then I saw a young girl meeting her father in a great big hug. The last page then said “(My name), meet your father at the gate.”
Maybe just a coincidence, maybe a signal, but it freaked me out and still gives me goose bumps.