After the incident with the valet parking ticket, I started seeing 389 and then 38 everywhere: on YouTube as subscriber numbers, as the calories burned on the elliptical machine, as the ticket number of the corsage I picked up for my son’s high school dance. I recorded these in my Notes app, as I do my dreams. Sometimes I would screenshot the image on the phone and circle the 38 or 389 and share it with a friend.

In April, I went to a writing conference in Oregon. My hotel room was 308. The bill for breakfast the next morning came to $38. Later that day, I went to a meeting with a tech industry professional. The street address was 308.

For dinner, a friend and I went to a burger joint to watch another friend read poetry. We told the poet about all the 308s and 38s and she said, with reasonable calm, that earlier in the day she and another writer were at Portland’s Lan Su Chinese Garden. At the end of the tour, they went to the teahouse in the tower of cosmic reflections. At the end of the tea ceremony, she told us, they were invited to choose a stick that had a number on it (I can’t remember for what purpose). She chose 38.

It all felt very magical on the trip itself, but I wonder if it wasn’t all some kind of collaborative mania.

That night, the same friend and I went to another reading. A mutual friend was reading from her book. Before she was announced, the friend sat with us. I asked what section she was going to read, and she said she was planning on asking the audience to call out a page number. We laughed and told her all about the 38s. When she was called up to read, as promised she asked the audience for a page number. Can you guess what number was shouted first?

For the rest of the trip, my friend and I spotted 38 on license plates all over Oregon. At some point, we realized that 38 was also the year his mother was born, which is relevant because the other reason we were in Oregon was to visit a long-lost half brother he had learned about only recently. His mother, now passed, had given up this baby for adoption without telling anyone except the baby’s father.

It all felt very magical on the trip itself, but I wonder if it wasn’t all some kind of collaborative mania.