Saturday Janaury 23 2010

Last night we went out to dinner with some people that we had never met. This couple knew a guy in the States that Steve knew, and on hearing that we were headed for Sao Paulo, he had put us in touch with each other.

Forget the 6 degrees of separation. In Princeton there is little more than half a degree of separation and you can barely turn around and sneeze without the entire town knowing about it.

With a population of somewhere around 20 million, I think Sao Paulo will be a little more annonymous.

But I can't tell you the number of times, that in this wacky lifestyle of living all over the world, we run into people that know people that we know.

Sometimes it is even more direct that that.

We have some dear friends in Princeton and one night about 2 years after we had come back to live there for the second time, we were having dinner with them .(We had also invited an Australian family that we had never met. We make a habit of inviting strangers to our house but that is a story for another day)

Annabelle was talking about her best girlfriend in the UK who had lived in Australia and the name sounded very familiar. I asked if the friend had a twin brother called Richard and low and behold - she did.

It turns out that Annabelle and I had a whole slew of mutual friends in London. She had moved in the sister's circle and I had moved in the brother's. We had attended the same parties and I think even a wedding but never formally met.
Fast forward 25 or so years and we lived within 5 miles of one another, sent our children to the same school and vacationed with them.

Needless to say, everyone at supper was in mild disbelief when we descended into girly gossip of what had happened to all of the mutual friends in the intervening years.

So the moral of this tale is be nice to everyone because you never know when, in a future life, someone turns around and says " oh yes I know her". I would like that commment to be followed by something positive. such as "lovely girl"