It's been over a month now, and the NYC shooting that took the lives of a police officer, a security guard, a young woman working for the building's realty company, and a Blackstone executive, has already faded from the news, if not from our memories. Sure, it was New York City. Sure, there was the NFL-CTE angle. Sure, there was a cop killed.
But, hey, only four people were massacred. And there's so much more happening to command our attention. The Whack-a-Mole outrages of the Trump regime, the miniscule day-to-days of our little personal lives.
But these killings in New York got me thinking about what a crazily small world it is, and how few degrees of separation there are between ourselves and national-newsmaking tragedies.
In December, 1999, there was a terrible fire in my hometown of Worcester that took the lives of six firemen. Because this was my hometown. Because I grew up in the sort of blue collar neighborhood where firemen tended to live. (One of my best friends in grammar school was the daughter of a WFD fire lieutenant. They lived in the house behind ours.) Because Worcester, while it may be the second largest city in New England, has a lot of small-town about it, it didn't take long for me to thread a connection to all the fellows who were killed. My friend Michele's cousin Joe. One of my sister Trish's high school classmates. The brother of another classmate. Etc. I was missing one connection, when my brother Rich let me know that his friend Bill had been in AA with the missing piece.
Tangential "connections" to be sure, but close-ish to home.
Fast forward a couple of years to September 11th.
No connection to any of the 343 firemen who lost their lives. But I knew people who knew people.
A colleague of my cousin's husband who was on one of those hijacked planes from Boston.
Three guys from my company who were manning our network operations center, on an upper, upper floor of one of the towers. I didn't know any of them, but I knew their boss. We were by no means work buddies, but we were in plenty of meetings together, and we would always chat when we ran into each other on the elevator or in line in the caf. When the building pancaked, Mike was on the phone with the guys in the NOC. They had been told that they were going to be evacuated to the roof and rescued by helicopter. So they died hoping. Did Mike hear tremendous noise when the building collapsed or did the phone just go dead? I no longer remember.
There were plenty of near miss stories, too. That day, a work friend was on business in an adjacent building. That day, my sister-in-law's brother was just heading into one of the towers to start a new job when the first plane hit.
So, not all that many degrees of separation.
When something big and important happens, I guess it's human nature to think about what sorts of personal connections we have.
The big tragedy this summer was, of course, the flooding Guadalupe River that wiped out so many lives, especially tragic when it came to the loss of so many littles at the Camp Mystic. So heartbreaking to see their waterlogged stuffed animals, their pink and turquoise trunks. To imagine them making friendship bracelets for each other, dancing along to Taylor Swift. Heartbreaking.
I don't know anyone whose girls were campers. Neither does any one I know. Not that I know of. But my brother-in-law in Dallas plays bridge with someone with family members who were camping along the river and were swept away.
When I heard that there was a shooting in the building that housed Blackstone, my first thought was that one of my cousin Bob's sons-in-law works there. I'm not going to pretend in any way, shape, or form, that I know this man. The only time I recall meeting him was at his wedding. (2015?) Unless he was with my cousin's daughter, I doubt I would recognize him if I passed him on the street.
And I probably wouldn't have been aware that he worked at Blackstone, if a few days before the shooting I hadn't seen my cousin Bob for the first time since that wedding. He was up for the summer and visiting his sister, my cousin Barbara, in her rehab facility. And Blackstone came up in the convo.
Since they both held senior positions at Blackstone, I'm guessing that the son-in-law knew the Blackstone exec who was slaughtered. How terrible for her family, her parents, her kids, her husband. But I would be lying if I said I wasn't relieved tha it wasn't my cousin's son-in-law.
As it turns out, my cousin's son in law had a nodding acquaintance with the woman killed. They weren't buddies or direct colleagues, but knew each other.
But there is a there-but-for-fortune element here. My cousin's son-in-law had left work about 10 minutes before the gunman showed up. Pretty close for comfort, that's for sure.
I have no idea how I'm connected to Kevin Bacon, but I'm guessing he's less than six degrees away.
One of the worst rides at Disney has got to be "It's a Small World," but, man, it sure is a small world after all, isn't it.
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Image Source: Enlightened PM
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