Vast Planet, Tiny World
One evening, Jim and I stopped by a table in a local restaurant to speak to the guy who had been our wedding photographer. Mike and I knew each other from my high school days and he and his family had recently begun attending the church my family belonged to. As we chit-chatted, we talked about how we had both graduated from Murray State University in Kentucky. When that happens, there is an understood connection between the people in the conversation and the place. We both obviously shared a love for Murray.
While we were trying to figure out if we had been there at the same time, he mentioned his friend Raymond. The name caught my attention. If he had said Ray, I wouldn’t have thought a thing about it. Although we weren’t in Murray at the same time and there were a few years between us, I also knew a Raymond from Murray. What would the chance be? I asked him more about Raymond. Raymond had been a tennis star in high school and Mike knew all the high school and college athletes because he was the sports writer for the Murray Ledger and Times during that time. My Raymond was a tennis instructor and graduate student. We continued to compare notes. As crazy as it was, we seemed to know the same friend. My Raymond dated one of my colleagues while she and I were grad students working in the Center for Environmental Education. Holy cow.
Jim and I left the table with Mike promising to give me a call the next time Raymond came to his house. It was a couple of months later that Raymond was visiting and I made plans to go over for lunch. Sure enough, Raymond was in the kitchen grinning and hadn’t aged a bit. It was so good to reconnect and update one another about our lives since the mid-eighties.
Maybe a year later, Mike called to tell a story Raymond wanted to have relayed to me. Raymond had been in the Poconos that summer as a tennis instructor. His team played against another team from a camp. While talking to the camp’s tennis coach, he asked the coach who was from Spain, how he spoke English so well. He told Raymond he had been an exchange student in the U.S. Within a few minutes, Raymond found out the Spaniard had lived in southern Illinois near Carbondale (we always say near Carbondale, because no one ever knows our town of 2,000 people; they only know Chicago or Carbondale, 300+ miles apart). Raymond said he had friends in southern Illinois. The young man clarified the actual name of the town in which he lived. It was the town Raymond had friends in, so he asked the young man if he knew Jim and Carla Kirkland. Well of course he did. He had lived with us during his senior year in high school! He was our very own Nacho (nickname for Ignacio). They marveled over it. I couldn’t believe it.
It is crazy enough Mike and I both know Raymond, but for Raymond to travel halfway across the U.S. and Nacho halfway across the world to coach opposing teams in tennis at the same place, at the same time, and have the same people in common, is mind-boggling.
And those are just two of the gazillion connections of which I am aware. I truly believe if we could physically see one string connecting people all over this vast, yet tiny planet, we wouldn’t be able to move or breathe without it tugging on the spiderweb of connections to every other person on Earth. If that were possible, there would be a lot more understanding and a lot less hatred.
Photo by Robert Anasch on Unsplash
