The Mississippi Golf Club in the Village of Appleton is for us a choice summertime venue. It’s our Porgy and Bess. Located along the meandering Mississippi River it is especially appealing on a balmy, clear Saturday morning such as today when the verdant vegetation is lush, the soaring birds are chirping and the shimmering river is high. To enhance today’s attendance we arranged on short notice to rally with an ancient friend originally from Ottawa and latterly from Nova Scotia but who now lives in nearby Smiths Falls. The primary skill is to calculate the visit to coincide with the weather. And to insure there is no special event to interrupt the casual and convenient ceremony of breakfasting on the patio overlooking the first green – though this morning the annoying female mosquitoes were prolific and drove us into the clubhouse for shelter.
Breakfast generally proves a good time to enjoy the relaxation of the country club unfettered by a crowd. Though the parking lot may be brimming with cars (as it was today), the associated activity is predominantly isolated on the golf course. My dedication to the club was always as a social member going back almost half a century before the original clubhouse burned to the ground. The last time I played golf was as a student at the Cedarhill Golf & Country Club where I had a summer job as lifeguard by the pool. The employment memorably supplied the opportunity to use my Red Cross life saving certification acquired as a teenager at prep school. Since then I have been satisfied to devote myself to sitting on a patio, putting on the nose bag and gabbing with friends while watching the golfers struggle relentlessly in their preposterous enterprise and private ambition.
Whenever I have one of those tender moments in which I recollect how curious yet how marvellous my parents were, it relieves my melancholic anxiety to recall the many instances our entire family accompanied by their friends and mine would congregate as my guests for luncheon at one large table in the clubhouse dining room to celebrate a birthday or Father’s Day or some other excuse for an intimate foregathering. I suspect as my parents aged they couldn’t hear half what was said at table during the tumultuous guffaw but the smiles and nodding heads abounded as testimony to their unqualified approbation.
The gossip at table this morning was as always spirited. Our guest and I go back over forty years. I’m uncertain which is more formidable, the bridges we’ve crossed or the water that has flowed beneath. Seemingly the transition of more than 4 decades is not without its bruises, alteration and overall amusement. Each of us was prompted to wistful reflection. My friend is keen-minded and unforgivably entertaining. His refined veneer betrays an astute acquaintance with life’s sometimes unpredictable occurrences. His success in life is indisputably no accident.
We made a point of introducing our friend to two members of the club; namely, the son of the former Land Registrar of Deeds for Lanark North and the other a celebrated local funeral director. Both gentlemen were kind enough to linger with us for a period to exchange the expected pleasantries. They like we are regulars at the club whose images have long ago blended with the wallpaper. I was anxious for my friend to meet these gentlemen as they are both directly or indirectly part of the complicated map of my being in Lanark County. It tickles me no end that these long-standing associations have now insinuated the fabric of my historic Ottawa friendship; and, most certainly it achieves the height of fortuity that he too now calls Lanark County his home – a serendipity which forty years ago would have been unimaginable.
Many critics, especially the earlier ones, assumed that Hardy employs accident and coincidence in his novels either to add excitement by touches of melodrama as was done by many popular novelists of the Victorian era, or else to suggest intervention in human affairs by a power beyond man’s control which determines the pattern of each life. This thesis attempts to explore these views, and by examining Hardy’s use of coincidence and accident, first in his ballads and short stories, then in the minor novels and finally in the major ones, to discover if Hardy were propounding a philosophic system or if another purpose lies behind the numerous coincidences to be found in his novels. It finds that Hardy was profoundly influenced by ballad techniques and local narrative forms which rely heavily on coincidence. Hardy uses coincidence to inject melodramatic incidents into his novels for the sake of extra liveliness; he uses it to emphasize certain incidents by giving them symbolic significance and he also uses it to hasten to its conclusion a chain of events which, without the coincidence would reach the same conclusion but over a longer period of time. This use of coincidence is a technical device since, although it is used to intensify atmosphere and hasten inevitable endings, it never changes the course of a logically developing sequence of events. It is not used as evidence of forces which work either consciously or unconsciously against the affairs of men. In Jude the Obscure, Hardy’s final novel, accident and coincidence play no part in the unfolding of the plot, and the tragic climax is clearly shown to result from the forces of society.