Six Degrees of Separation or It's a Small World

I was trying to explain the theory of Six Degrees of Separation to a young friend the other day and she greeted the information with skepticism. I blame that on youth as everything seems so big the younger you are. Even the kitchen you grew up in seems huge until you visit it again as an adult. Everything shrinks as we grow older, except maybe taxes and waistlines. But I digress. There is a story in all of this.

When I was a child my parents took me on vacations to Door County during the summers. One night we visited the studio of "The Glassblower," as Tom Yelvington called himself. He would open his studio after dark and put on glassblowing demonstrations, lighting up the night with long strings and balls of molten glass. I remember this performance and the amazing process by which he would take a hunk of nothing and turn it into a beautiful vase or bowl. By the time I was a teenager he had shut down his studio and my parents and I never heard what happened to him.

During my last week in the firm I was assigned to a new desk right next to a secretary who had just been hired. She introduced herself as Mary Yelvington. In my mind I immediately saw molten glass spinning in the dark of night. She has red hair just like her brother, Tom. She tells me he has retired and is living right here in Milwaukee. The counters in my mother's kitchen just became a little lower than I remembered them.