Sometimes a body just can't get away from everybody else

It has been said that if one were to stand in Piccadilly Circus long enough, eventually one would see everybody one has known in one’s lifetime. I don’t know if anybody has ever tested the theory, or just exactly how long is ‘long enough’ to see all of those people, but it’s an intriguing six degrees of separation premise that might be worth exploring as, oh, maybe a worthy ‘project’ for Paris Hilton, just so she can test out the new-found, post-slammer enlightenment she mentioned to Larry King.

I once sat in an outside café in my hometown, drinking a coffee and waiting for Wendy who was on some sort of an errand, so I had a half-hour or so to kill. In that 30-minute period both of my former wives (who still live in the same town) happened by and stopped to chat. I began to feel like my entire life was passing by me. The proprietor, who is a friend, noticed the passing parade and came over and said: “Hey, Ian, maybe if you sit here long enough, you’ll run into all the girls you dated in high school.”

Yesterday, after Wendy and I had conversed over breakfast about the interconnectedness of people we know – when we were first seeing each other, we found out that we had all sorts of people in common, even at a friendship level, even though we worked and traveled in entirely different realms – and then moved into that six degrees of separation stuff. We thought that even with our personal connections we should create an interconnectedness line chart and just keep expanding it. Eventually we'd have hundreds of people, no doubt. So would anybody else.

A couple of hours later yestereday we were sitting outside at Starbucks in one of those neat little shopping villages that abound in Victoria, when I looked up and saw a woman that I knew I knew. I grasped at a name, and said: “It’s Margot, right?” She looked at me, and said: “Yes, it is. And I know you. Where do I know you from?” Anyway, the long and short of it was, that she is a performer and I had interviewed her for a story many years ago. But then, another woman joined her. And, in this case, Wendy said: “I know you, (to the newcomer). You work in government office downtown and we’ve connected over some documents.” They agreed they had. But wait, there’s more. The newcomer woman looked at me, and we both agreed that we too knew each other. It turned out that she was one of my English students way back at the dawn of time when I taught high school. So, there you had it. Interconnections all over the place just from a random incident on a Sunday morning.

When I was on Rarotonga in the South Pacific a few years ago I got to know a Maori guy who was a local bus driver. We chatted one day about this and that. He said he’d never really been anywhere other than New Zealand, and he was interested that I was from Canada. “My brother lives in Canada, in a town called Chilliwack. I’m going to visit him next year. He has a Harley, and I’m going to rent one when I go to see him and we’re going to tour the Rocky Mountains.” Cool, but as it happens, my brother too lives in Chilliwack. When I returned him I mentioned that to my kid brother, who is a parts manager at a Chrysler dealership. “I know a Maori guy,” my brother said. “He brings his car in for servicing. He has a Harley.” Same guy? What are the odds?

Pretty damn good, it seems. Evidently the ‘math’ of six degrees of separation works out worldwide. Aside from the fact that I have run into people from ‘home’ in far-flung areas of the world, I’ve also established connections via other people, in which we have found out that we knew people in common.

So, here would be an interesting test. We all have people on our bloglists. People from all over the continent, and indeed all over the world. I would suggest that if you pried enough you would find that you and some of your blogger friends actually have some real-time friends or acquaintances or business associates in common. It would take a long time to work that out, but it would be an interesting experience. Don’t choose somebody in your town, or even in your province or state, but go farther afield and see where your connections are.

Should you try this, and actually make a connection, let the rest of us know about it. It would make a great blog.