Recently, I made a most unusual observation.
Id est: Your physical proximity to other people – often complete strangers – makes others jump into the far-reaching conclusion that you are somehow related.
And so, in the past few weeks I was randomly assigned a husband, a grandmother and an extra set of parents.
Surely you have had this happen to you. You enter a shop, or a restaurant at the same time as another person, couple or a family. The staff asks: Are you together? And why wouldn’t they make this assumption? We tend to stay close to those who are close to us. A small child is usually in the vicinity of a parent; a husband and wife normally walk side by side. Cultural anthropology manuals say that the phrase close friends indicates closeness of space: in the past, good friends lived close by. A notable exception is the feeling one gets when meeting these friends after months, sometimes years of being away. Within seconds, you feel as if you parted yesterday. Time has shrunk, but your closeness hasn’t.
But I was talking about my new relatives. This is how I got them:
I was on an airplane, sitting next to an elderly lady. The crew were offering water and I asked for sparkling. The young stewardess said: Two of them? She was clearly thinking that there is a connection of sorts between the lady in 5A and me, in 5B; but there was none. We had just chosen, completely unaware of each other’s existence, adjacent seats. Plus, the lady was quick to state her dislike for sparking water. No way could she have been my grandma!
My new husband was on the second airplane I boarded that day, naturally in the seat next to mine. A lady with two children, a baby and a toddler, was sitting in the row behind me and was clearly inconvenienced by the sitting arrangements. I offered to move, if that could help. Thank you – she said, relieved. – I was going to ask you, guys, if you’d mind moving. A somewhat awkward conversation followed, in which I explained I had nothing to do with the probably perfectly pleasant gentleman in the window seat, who kept his earphones in at all times and didn’t once look at me. Could the lady in the row behind have taken this as a sure sign of his eternal devotion to me? I can’t possibly tell.
The most recent addition to my circle of closely unrelated strangers is my extra set of parents. Looking for some food for thought and divine wisdom, I went to a church I’d never attended last Sunday. The mass felt a little long, truth be told, as opposed to the social gathering with tea and biscuits that followed. It turned out some of the church-goers were in Istanbul only in passing. I got talking to an interesting couple of fellow Poles, who lived in Australia and had just visited the states. That is, not the USA, but the Central Asian countries, the names of which end in -stan. We were deep in conversation about the Kyrgyz president, when another parishioner joined. We all talked for quite a while, when she nodded towards me, addressing the visitors: And this is your daughter, right? Some correcting of facts had to then be done.
If the sheer physical proximity of one person to another can make people draw conclusions like this, I thought, what else could be crossing their minds? What complicated scenarios of family sagas could unfold in their imagination? And was the proximity factor working to my advantage, or disadvantage? Finally, does it play tricks on me, too?
There’s no way to know. But I’ll keep looking for the answers. And I’ll be looking closely.
Purple Travel Path 