I learned of Mike Nichols’ death yesterday, which set me to thinking of my second cousin, the actor Herb Edelman. (At least I think he’s my second cousin. Perhaps he’s my first cousin once removed. I’m not entirely sure how genealogists parse these relationships. He was my father’s father’s brother’s son, if that makes things any clearer. Probably not.)

The reason thinking of Nichols had me thinking of Herb is because it was their accidental meeting that got my cousin into the acting business. Per Wikipedia, after getting out of the Army, Herb “enrolled in Brooklyn College as a Theater student, but eventually dropped out. He later worked as a hotel manager and as a taxicab driver. One of his fares was director Mike Nichols, who in 1963 cast Edelman in his breakthrough Broadway role, as the bewildered telephone repairman in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park.”

An interesting factoid. But you might ask, where’s the serendipity?

Here’s the serendipity.

Last night—that is, later the same day when I was already thinking of Herb—a cousin of mine contacted me on Facebook to tell me that another cousin of mine had uploaded a photo of Herb there—a photo I’d never seen before. And even better—it was a photo of him with my father.

There they are, Herb to the left, my father Barney to the right, looking unbelievably young. I’m not sure of the year this was taken, but I think I can make out a sailor hat on my father’s head, so I’m going to guess it’s in the 1952-1953 range, when Dad was in the Navy and would have been 18 or 19. But who knows? It might have been a year or two earlier, when the hat was only aspirational.

Hi, Dad. Still missing you.

Ain’t serendipity grand?