Degrees of Separation

As I made my way toward Albany this weekend, I took a short stop at the massage therapist in Keene to see if she could take a last minute appointment since I had managed to pull something in my back. In any case, the door was locked, but just as I was heading back down the stairway, I noticed the door to what appeared to be someone’s home adjacent to the office. Thinking this might be who I was looking for, I rang the doorbell. An older woman answered and I explained my situation. Without missing a beat, she told me to come inside while she called Tina (the masseuse) to find out where she was. Somewhat embarrassed, I tried to explain that that was unnecessary, but before I could finish my sentence she was already on her second phone call with the Noon Mark owners who happened to live in the same building. I now know better than to go ringing people’s doorbells. People are far too helpful.

The small room I stood in served as both a kitchen and dining room, with a mug of dry Cheerios and a bowl of chopped carrots on the table. The carrots were soon explained by the two parakeets peering curiously at me through the bars of their cage on my right. As it turns out, Tina was out of town. My hostess asked me about where I was from and upon uttering the words “Hurricane Road,” I discovered that the woman I was speaking to (Luella) was in fact Anne Biesemeyer’s best friend since childhood. Of course she was. Before I could sneak back out to my car, she brought out several photo albums and showed me family portraits of each member of the Biesemeyer family and of just about everyone else she had ever known. “This is Marty. He was a painter. Oh, here is one of his drawings. He drew penises.” I realized I should pull up a chair.

A few hours later, I was in an airport, people-watching, one of my favorite things to do. I find it endlessly entertaining to imagine the lives of strangers around me. I come up with all sorts of hypotheses about why they dress the way they do, where they’re going, where they’re coming from. At my layover in Detroit, I was doing just that. It struck me that these were not individuals who were likely to have ever heard of Bob Biesemeyer, or Keene, or even the park. There was a woman wearing gray suede boots and trendy glasses, an Asian gentleman discussing the extent of his hangover with his friend, and a young mother trying desperately to get her significant other to take a decent picture of her in front of the airport window. Once I got on the plane, the adventure continued. I watched the woman in first class with her recent blonde highlights and Coach purse skimming the menu options, while the man beside her had clearly just woken up and given himself an unintentional mohawk. It was a small flight, but I was almost positive there weren’t this many people in Keene who didn’t know each other. However, just as I was contemplating what a different world I had walked into, I heard the woman behind me say “…oh yes, I was born in Glens Falls.”