Way, way back before air conditioning, even when ice boxes didn’t plug into a light socket there was Sam the Watermelon Man. He had a corner location at Goodfellow and Natural Bridge in Saint Louis. On a warm summer evening, families would gather there at Sam’s to dive into delicious watermelon. It was an open air lot with picnic tables on a gravel surface. I remember eating the melon and spitting the seeds out on the ground. What I didn’t know was Joyce and her parents went there too. For all I know we may have seen each other 13 years before we actually met.
There was a movie made a few years back called “Six Degrees of Separation.” The idea was that any two individuals are connected by at most five others. When I did finally meet Joyce, it turned out that we both did indeed have friends that each of us knew, but we did not previously know each other.
The world is bigger than Saint Louis, and I do not care to try and prove or disprove the theory, but it is an interesting thought. Now when I go on the Facebook site, I am amazed at how many people show up on my page listed as mutual friends or friends of others I know. If there is a way to prove the six degrees theory, I am betting on Facebook cracking it.
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