Serendipity and The Fool: Listening to a Voice Across Time

This week, I opened a small collection of poems I inherited decades ago and felt something shift.

They were written by my great-uncle Harlow, who served in World War II and passed away in the early 1980s. I didn’t know him well, but I remember him kindly. He lived far away—to me as a child at least, in San Francisco. It always felt like more of an idea than a place—and he kept mostly to himself. He never married. He read constantly, especially history and science, and sometimes he mailed books to my mother and to me, as if saying, You should see this too.

When my grandmother (his sister) died, the poems came to me. For years, they waited quietly. This week, when I finally read them with care, I wasn’t just struck by their beauty—I recognized something familiar.

Harlow and I write in uncannily similar ways. The rhythms, the patience, the need to make sense of the world without smoothing its edges too much. What we write about, too: truth, time, responsibility, hope that survives hardship without pretending it didn’t happen. It felt less like discovery and more like recognition.

That feeling—when something arrives exactly when it’s needed—has a word. Serendipity. It fits.

Harlow’s life wasn’t easy. I won’t share the full details here, but it’s important to say that his childhood was marked by loss and cruelty, including abuse by a stepfather who eventually sent him and his brother to an orphanage. Despite that, or perhaps because he had looked so directly at what people are capable of, he remained quietly optimistic. His poems don’t deny suffering. They insist on honesty. And then, somehow, they insist on hope anyway.

Reading them now, I was struck by how clearly that voice echoes in one of the central figures of my book series: Doyle Dalton.

Doyle is a time traveler. He has seen the future family his choices will affect, and he knows he hasn’t always chosen well. He has caused harm—sometimes through action, sometimes through avoidance. When he reaches out to Jamie, he calls himself The Fool. Not as a joke. Not as self-pity. But as admission.

In tarot, The Fool is often associated with beginnings, innocence, and leaps of faith. But The Fool also carries responsibility. You step forward knowing you don’t have all the answers. You accept that you may fail. You walk anyway.

Doyle’s plea is simple and devastating: Help me set the record straight. Help me see whether there’s still time.

As I read Harlow’s poems, that same voice rose to meet me across decades. A man trying to tell the truth while there is still time. A man shaped by damage he did not choose, determined not to pass that damage forward if he can help it. A man who knows optimism is not naivety—it is work.

I’ll share one short excerpt here:

DREAMS

It is better to dream beautiful dreams,

and never see these dreams come true,

than never to have dreamed at all.

So, whenever you dream in fantasy,

remember this and you will then

know you’re in fantasy land,

known as Seventh Heaven.

It makes no difference if your dreams

of fantasy come not true, you see —

for, it is the feeling of happiness

that you dreamed in fantasy.

What I hear in these lines isn’t nostalgia. It’s clarity. A refusal to look away. A willingness to be accountable without surrendering hope.

That, to me, is The Fool at his most honest.

The Time Travelers Tarot is now available for purchase.