The connectedness of things

I have never really experienced the world as a place that is getting smaller. To me, it is a place that is surprisingly large and entirely unconcerned with me and my actions. I have always lived in one relatively tidy community or other, with never more than four degrees of separation between me and everyone known by everyone I know. Lincoln was fantastic for that - there are about 2.5 degrees there - the .5 is the coffee shop that serves as your social network hub.

One of the things that we, as a family, did this weekend was pick up a dining room table from an antique store in Brownville. We put it up, my father polished it, and we borrowed the kitchen table chairs to sit at for dinner with a guest last evening. My parents even pulled out the Spode for flatware. It was lovely.
 

Conversation turned, as it inevitably does when dining with a family, to stories of that family's history. We talked about my father's now deceased horrifying aunts. And we talked about my youthful collisions driving my parents' boat of a car. We clarified family myth that we could not possibly be descended from Samuel Johnson, as he has no issue. Turns out the real family myth is descent from Ben Jonson. Mythical genealogy turned to more researched information including the highly suspect reality that my sister and I are very likely qualified to be members of The Daughters of the American Revolution. It is an honor I would not normally pursue, but that I have a niece, and that niece may, in fact, benefit from membership in such a weird organization. I keep hoping that we were royalists, not because I am not a patriot, but because it would save so much paperwork.

Bozo Sapiens recognizes that today is the day of The DAR's formation, and reminds readers that for all of their helmet hair and traditionalist fundamentalism, they have done important things for women. (not excluding providing yet another excellent example that sex does not determine ability to be a bone head)

When I graduated from the 8th grade, I was given an award for good citizenship from the DAR. The award was given to a boy and a girl, and the young man who received it was someone who was just a really nice person. Genuinely a nice person to be around. They didn't tell us we were to get the award, and I have no idea where it is now. I never really thought of it as legitimate, not in my case anyway - because I wasn't very popular, I didn't participate whenever I could get away with it, I never did my homework and was kind of creepy, in that way that highly (almost pathologically) individual adolescents are.

The world is not any smaller than it was before.