Six Degrees of Separation?

There are days when serendipity and weird six degrees of separation circumstances appear.  These days also seem to include re-occurrences of peculiar words, not often used and not even inter-related, but there they are – begging to be noticed. 

The other day, “Q” words followed me everywhere; words that were read, or said, or seen or heard as an afterthought, by me or someone else. There was quietude, a peaceful utterance; quality, in advertising, quicken and quickbooks, then quinoa in a recipe, and then, just when the day was almost done, just when one decided that this obsession with the appearance of “Q” words was too weird even for me, well then “queue” appeared.  No, no, not like the line for the cinema, but rather in a new way (at least previously unknown to me) A queue, I learned, is the Chinese braid worn by men, under the Mandarin regime.  If they were found to be braidless, they would lose their life.   After 1910 or thereabouts, the ruling was abolished.  Then my mind started to wander……Q-tip!  Quintessential!  Quixotic!   What a fine letter Q is! Or is it…queer?   Downton Abbey referred to the Queen’s honor (of course).  This morning, the ducks quacked, the geese squawked…a friend remarked on her quince tree blossoms, even posted it on Facebook.

 And then, the random lunch conversation with the new staff member, on the same day as the “Q” ness.

After following her trajectory from Manhattan to California and back to Manhattan again, she said offhandedly, “ Oh, but I was born in Queens (the Q rears its stately head) and I lived there till I was seven.”  Whereabouts I asked?  “Elmhurst”…………whaaaa?  We learned that we’d gone to the same parish grammar school, though she was a few years behind me.  How does life work, that 50 years after the fact, in an upstate town, at a job, sitting in the dim kitchen, you are speaking to a person who walked the same halls as you?  So very queer.