The world is not that big
I spent this weekend (and a bit of last week) flying out to Massachusetts for a friend's wedding. My wife and I knew Christine in high school, and we saw each other from time to time in college, and she was at our wedding last November.
Christine is terribly smart, a masterful planner, and good at picking guys. You could tell all of these things from the wedding. She's happy, and we're all happy for her. Also, her wedding helped me be more okay with the Catholic church, which I have trouble with from time to time.
A couple of things struck me, though. One of Christine's friends at the wedding, who also just got married, was talking about his college career, and it turns out that he roomed with two of my high school friends in college - two friends who hardly knew Christine at all.
Also, my brother gave me a call after the wedding. He'd been driving several fencing club members home from a tournament, and he saw a guy broken down by the side of the road. He was about to reluctantly drive past - he had a van full of fencers, it was late, it was the derriere-end of nowhere - when he noticed that the man was wearing a fencing jacket as well. He stopped, and the man turned out to be our good friend Chester, who graduated a couple of years ago.
My uncle used to say that there are only eighty people in the world and the rest is done with mirrors. Events like these do make me wonder. I don't think I'd say that the world is shrinking. But I think that, the more people we care about, the tighter we pull the whole world towards us.
