Small world stuff

One of the groups we belong to here is the Stewards of the Dells of the Wisconsin River. Since April 2006, the Stewards of the Dells of the Wisconsin River has sought to protect the 15 miles of shore frontage along the Upper and Lower Dells from Nine Eagles to the Rocky Islands, including such famous landmarks as Stand Rock and the Rocky Islands of the Lower Dells, by supporting the work of the DNR, local and county governments, businesses, landowners, and civic groups and concerned citizens with an interest in preserving the beauty and environment of the Dells of the Wisconsin River. It came into being about the same time we moved to the Dells. Tom has been quite involved with them from the beginning and I am also a member.

At the group's Christmas dinner some four or five years ago, my former membership with the Discalced Carmelites came up in conversation with the married couple at our table. The wife got very excited because she had known one of the friars from her childhood and had all sorts of questions about what he was up to. It took me quite by surprise to wind up discussing that particular friar with someone I had just met here in the Dells. He was not, by the way, a Wisconsin native and had spent little time in Wisconsin. But she met him when he gave a retreat at her high school or some such thing, and clearly it had impressed her a great deal.

Forward to this past Tuesday. I was having breakfast with her husband and he handed me a book written by his maternal grandfather. It was the biography of his great-grandfather, who had been born in Vermont but went as a young man in the first half of the nineteenth century to be a trapper and farmer in New York. When Mark gave me the book, he mentioned that much of it was set in the Adirondacks.

"Where?" I asked. "My best friend in the monastery and I often used to spend summer vacation time at his parents' cabin near Lake George."

And as it turned out, the great-grandfather's farm was about twelve miles from where I spent a lot of time back in the day. 

Six degrees of separation ...