Six Degrees; or, Three if You're From Mississippi

Today in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: high of 86º, partly cloudy. 

While winter has managed to ravage most of the U.S. for the last couple of weeks, things in GTMO are, well, sort of the same.

And by the same, I mean CRA-ZY.

Crazy seems to happen to me often. Bizarre, strange, unbelievable coincidences happen to me, and happen quite often.

It's going on a honeymoon to Honduras, being one of four people in a resort (including your new spouse), and finding out one of the other 2 people graduated from your college in Hattiesburg. Then meeting the resort owner, who grew up in Honduras with your optometrist---who now lives in Hattiesburg. While eating out with the owner, you find out that the civil engineer for the resort was the father of a friend---who naturally you met while in college in Hattiesburg.

It's sitting on the plane going to that honeymoon and realizing that you and your new husband, who had never met when you got the passports you are holding in your hands, are the owners of passports only a few numbers apart.

It's teaching a child in Colorado Springs, telling her that you like her unusual-sounding name, and once you get the story of her Nigerian father meeting her Mississippian mother at a very small college (Rust), you realize that her grandfather and your grandfather knew each other in the produce broker business in Crystal Springs. That grandfather made a point to drive down to Monticello to my father's business just to meet him. How charming is that?

And it's talking to the parent of a new student this week, and realizing that she, too, is from Crystal Springs, my grandfather's birthplace. And---get this---we have the same maiden name. I've only met a small handful of people with my maiden name who spell it the way I do----I'm definitely not a Smith or a Jones.

This lady also happens to have the same great-great-great-great-grandfather that I do.

I know what you are thinking. How the hell do you know who your gr-gr-gr-gr-grandfather is? 

In the case of my family, it's really easy. This guy, let's call him Joe, outlived two wives and married three times. He had TWENTY ONE children by the three wives. So if someone around the Crystal Springs/Hopewell area has my last name, there is a really, really good chance that we are, in fact, related.

And that, folks, is how I found out that I have a relative (albeit a distant one) living in Cuba.

My Mississippi friends are probably thinking right now that this is not strange at all. The state has a little less than 3 million people. Two of my family lines immigrated to MS pre-Civil War, and one, pre-Revolutionary War. The family story goes that part of my family is Choctaw, so we maybe have been there forever. Many of my friends have the same family story. My family comes from several areas of the state, have people who have worked, lived, and gone to school all over, and chances are, if I meet anyone from my home state, within ten minutes, we will know at least 3 people in common.

I'm not kidding. It's just how it is when you grow up in Mississippi.

And chances are, being from Mississippi, word will get around before you see the person you share in common, as your new acquaintance's friend's cousin's neighbor's sister will tell them about it.

http://geology.com/state-map/mississippi.shtml

I sort of feel sorry for anyone who isn't from Mississippi, because you really don't know how fun it is to figure out how you know some of the same folks.

That, and you miss out on the great conversations about purple speckled butter beans, REAL tomatoes, catfish, and how those poor, poor damnyankees (anyone not from the deep south) butcher the town names Biloxi, Grenada, Gautier, Bogue Chitto, Kosciusko, Pass Christian, and my hometown, Monticello, just to name a few.