Oddly Connected

Does anybody remember that TV show 'Connections' on PBS? It was by James Burke and it detailed the ways that various scientific achievements were connected to one another, sometimes across centuries. I loved that show.
   When I was in New York recently I discovered a few wildly improbable connections of my own, people who don't know one another, who have never met and probably never will, connected through me.
   I had dinner with a friend of mine from high school who now lives in Manhattan, Steve, and as we walked the city afterward he was telling me about his experiences in the city on September 11, 2001. Steve worked across the street from the World Trade Center, and he has some horrific, ghastly stories about what he saw that day, really terrible stuff. I told him that I have friend here in Los Angeles who was also in New York on 9/11, she worked at AIG not too far from his building, and she was one of the thousands of people who had to walk back across the Brooklyn Bridge to get home that day.
   Amazingly, Steve told me he lived in Brooklyn then, and he was also one of those Bridge pedestrians. He and Marna were on the bridge at the same time, going to the same place.
   Coincidence enough, right? Then I was visiting my uncle who, among other things, is an EMT. He volunteered down at Ground Zero starting on September 12th. I told him about Steve, and my uncle knew exactly where Steve's office building was - he'd been working right there - and he described several things exactly as Steve had, without any prompting from me. Two more people who didn't know each other who had been in the same place and seen the same things, their only connection being me.
   Still coincidence enough. But there's more. My friend Marna also volunteered at Ground Zero in the months following the attack. She had been cleaning up as much as they let civilians, and serving food to the emergency workers. One of whom was my uncle. He's not one to pass up a meal, especially after that kind of work, so Marna probably encountered my uncle several times.
   It's freaky if you think about it, a more tragic version of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. Three people in a city like New York, all of them crossing paths at the one time or another, their only connection - besides the tragedy of that day - being that they know me.
   The world's not as big as you might think it is.