The Philosophical Fish

From Wikipedia:

Six degrees of separation (also referred to as the “Human Web”) refers to the idea that everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, “a friend of a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in six steps or fewer. It was originally set out by Frigyes Karinthy and popularized by a play written by John Guare.

Long ago I stopped assuming that I wouldn’t know so-and-so from such-and-such.

Once, when I was a kid, we went to Hawaii. Sitting in the hot tub we got talking to a fellow in the pool. The usual conversation about where are you from…turned out he was best friends with one of my second cousins in a little town outside of Prince George.

Another time I was working in a hair salon and a kid several years younger than me came in. He asked where I was from, when I told him he said I might know his friend. I replied that PG had more than 50,000 people living there so the odds were slim. He gave me a name. I sheepishly replied that he had lived right behind me and I’d had a many-years long crush on his older brother. Man, does that make it look like a hick town!

I spent a month on a teensy little island off Oahu during Grad school. On our last day a girl, who had just arrived, and sat down with the three of us and said “I heard there were other Canadian here”. Turned out that she had lived down the street from one of my labmates and they knew a lot of the same people…in Toronto.

But yesterday was pretty amazing. I was at a BBQ for our volunteer group and one of the former students in the class started chatting with me. His wife had previously told me that he was from Salmon Arm, but we never got any farther than that. Last night he said to me “I think a relative of yours taught me in Grade 1″. Yup, my Granny was his grade 1 teacher, in Canoe. The man grew up in Canoe, a teensy little place outside of Salmon Arm that most people have never heard of. He also knew my Uncle and went to the church that my Granny played the organ for.

Small world indeed!