Small world : Merci, Sea Mer

I was musing on what to write about for my second post and then I thought that I’d take a step out from the first post. A link. A thread.

My first post was about reconnecting. Reconnecting with the world via online media and reuniting a skateboard with its childhood owner. While chatting with the guy when he collected the skateboard, we were joining dots and sharing our respective memories. I was saying that it’s a small world and he agreed, saying that he’d met British people while on a trip to Australia, only to discover that they lived just a few miles away from each other in the UK.

So this is today’s launch pad. Another connection. Reminiscing has taken me back to the street where I lived growing up. The place that had connected the skateboarder, the skateboard and me. It got me thinking about a time when there were amazing surprising ‘small world’ connections.

People used to pop in to our home. They might have a cuppa or a coffee, or if we were eating they’d join in too. There was an elderly Thai lady who’d been a cleaner at my Dad’s school and she’d even pop in for breakfast. One afternoon two neighbours had popped in and one of my mum’s brothers-in-law was visiting.

I think the kettle was put on and a cup of tea shared. Each guest had a distinct accent, giving a reference point, a clue to places they’d lived: Irish, Scottish and South African. And perhaps it was this connection that got the conversation going.

Within a few moments, they all were sharing about South Africa. They had all lived there at different times in their lives. None of them was born there, but South Africa had deep roots in their lives.

It then emerged that two of them had even lived in the same remote South African town, but at different times. And, when sharing their respective memories an amazing connection surfaced. They had both lived in the same house, but years apart. And to drill back further, that house had been built by one of their grandfathers. Amazing. A wow moment.

I love the wonder behind the threads in each of our lives: the common ground.

A few years back my sister and her family were travelling and remembering this moment shared in our front room, got the details of the house in South Africa. Yes, they visited and told the story to the new owners and were permitted to walk around the grounds.

Amazing.

I’ve been trying to thing of a suitable image for today’s post. Sometimes a connection can be nearer than you think. I’ve just looked up from my desk and to the side of me is an unfinished picture that I painted at school. It’s got the world in it, so that will be my connection to the post. The painting is called ‘En sortant de l’école’, inspired by a poem by Jacques Prevert, a poet, who now I think about it, made the most amazing connections, as poets do. In his poem Chant Song he puns between French and English. Now there’s an amazing connection. Merci. Sea Mer. And indeed water is the link every living thing has in common. None of us can live without the connected elements of H2O, so definitely something to say ‘merci’ for.