Its a Small World After All

In the last 2 weeks, I've had some oddly bizarre encounters with random people.  Sort of a 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon on crack type of thing. In fact, I'm only 4 degrees from Kevin Bacon, which may or may not explain the randomness of the next series of events.

For several years, I've known a sister-from-another-mother lived in the exact same dorm room I did, only 12 years earlier.... long before I met her. Nice coincidence, huh? Last week I learned that another friend lived in the exact same dorm room the year after I did. We weren't friends in college either. Mind you, this wasn't at some small school, but rather a large university with thousands of dorm rooms. Weirdly coincidental. 

Last week, while helping a woman organize her home, I caught a glimpse of a picture of my second cousin sitting on her night stand. I mentioned that it was my second cousin, Eleanor. The woman looked at me with gigantic eyes and said, "Eleanor is my cousin." Then, we stood there, looking at each other with that  psycho-music-planning-in-the-back-of-your-mind kind of surreal amazement..... followed by piecing together our histories to discover we were in fact 2nd cousins once removed. Bizarre! My brain actually ached after we finally drew up a relationship map to figure out our connections. 

Come to find out, the cousin we have in common is only related by marriage and isn't even on the side of the family that we share. 

Yep. Its okay if you are confused and those last few sentences didn't make a darn bit of sense. I had to draw a diagram to figure it out myself! 

After learning all this, I called my dad to tell him I found his 2nd cousin. In recounting the story, he told me all sorts of family history from his side. 

Guess what? In the midst of that conversation, and after a little sleuthing of my own (facebook stalking may or may not have been involved) I discovered that my paternal grandfather (the great uncle of my client) worked the majority of his life as a salesman for a business owned by the father of one of my colleagues.  

Yep, my buddy Bill's dad was my grandfather's boss. No, I don't live in Green Acres, population 783. I live in a major metropolitan area!!! 

Oh, and today, while picking up my kids at day camp, I discovered one of my mother's sorority sisters is the mother-in-law of someone in my MOPS group.  The sorority sister doesn't live in our city, and mom and her pal did not go to college here, but rather up the road about 100 miles. Random?

Bizarre indeed... but my life is kinda like that. My friend Kate calls me the human filofax. This week may have proved her to be right.

No wonder I have the Wil.I.am song, "One Tribe" stuck in my head.... go figure.