I think one major element of this is that it was something that was greatly desired by the person who is the "POV character."peter wrote:...or secondly an event or occurrence, the probability of which occuring is so small that it could reasonably be regarded as impossible (eg a man jumps from a plane. His parachute fails to open and he plunges to the ground only to be hauled up two feet short by the cording which has become entangled in the roof girdirs of the skylight he has just smashed through on his way down)...
...(as you probably know the second example is a true story - I heard the guy giving a radio interview the following day).
If something with similarly unlikely probabilities had happened to save the life of a seagull - and you, along with 50 credible witnesses, had seen it all - I don't think it would evoke the same kind of wonder.
That sounds like a pretty wonderful event...peter wrote:...I waited for 10 years for that day to dawn and was devastated when on the morning of the event I woke to thick impenatrable cloud from one end of the horizon to the other. So dejected was I that it was all my new wife could do to persuade me to go out at all...
I had heard that extremely rarely, in the event of a cloudy sky during a total eclipse, it had been observed that just prior to the eclipse the clouds would part and the sun would become visible during the event - but this was wishful thinking and just too much to hope for. We gathered with some hundred or so other people on the cliff edge under the heaviest sky you can imagine. Thick, wall to wall grey cloud obscured the entire sky as the time of totality grew ever closer. With bare minutes to go all of a sudden a cheer went up from the crowd. The impossible was actually happening before our eyes. The cloud grew thinner and thinner until - yes! - there was the sun with the moon near about over it's whole surface. By totality the sun was as free of cloud as a summers day and the entire event - the corona, the diamond ring - was displayed in all it's glory to the unbeliving group of people on that cliff top. With good reason is it called 'The greatest show on earth' - and that day it should never have happened. It didn't for the people who went to the south-coast instead of the north. It didn't for those who went furthur west or stayed to the east. But for us - for the very, very lucky few, who by chance picked the right spot, on the right day at the right time - the miracle happened.
I actually did have something similarly extraordinary happen to a group of people I knew.