The past is not as long ago as you think. That's a subjective statement, I know, but I'm not talking about a first grader's remembrance of last Christmas being perceptually relative to an octogenarian's recollection of the Eisenhower years.
No, what I mean is this: If you measure the passage of time using human life as your tailor's tape, Earth's current inhabitants are not that far removed from George Washington, William Shakespeare, Pope Constantine or Jesus.
I developed this concept after playing Six Degrees of Separation with some friends one night. Six Degrees is a fun little social exercise based on the supposition that every person on the planet is connected to every other by no more than six people.
Socially connected, that is, like the way you're connected to your neighbors, co-workers, friends and family. These are people you know, for better or worse. So if your co-worker's husband's old college roommate is an assistant director on the set of The Office, you're four degrees separated from Emmy-winning actor Steve Carell.
Pretty cool, huh? I started off with a bang that night, connecting myself by two degrees to the Beatles. A friend's father was a well-known promoter who had worked with everyone from Elvis to Bob Dylan to Bob Hope, but it was his association with the Beatles that really impressed me. Framed photos in his office featured the dad grinning proudly alongside one or another major celebrity, like a fisherman posing with his latest catch.
So I knew a guy who knew the Beatles and there are my two degrees, simple as pie.
But here in the great sprawling suburbs of the New York metropolitan area, it's hard not to connect yourself by two or three degrees to the famous, the infamous or the influential. In fact, I'd say that no matter where you reside in the United States, you'd have to live a pretty insular existence to not be connected to at least one well-known individual.
Now, I know this Six Degrees premise isn't specific to the famous. It's supposed to apply to every person on the planet. But who cares about my connection to an Australian rancher or an Iraqi insurgent? What I want to know is how I'm linked to people of influence; people who've left their mark on history.
And thus did my crowning achievement that night take shape in a flash of unbidden insight. I'd just popped a Coors Light and was raising the can to my lips when I realized that our connections are not limited to the living. I followed this thread for about forty seconds until…Eureka!
I laughed aloud at the effortless connection I'd just made to one of the most significant figures in American history: I am separated by six degrees and five score and forty-four years from our nation's sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln.
Hard to believe, but true as toast. There are only five humans between myself and Honest Abe. All but one is no longer living and Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president, is the fourth degree in this chain. Additionally, the key person in the equation was a member of the Kennedy administration, so JFK is only three degrees away.
Teddy Roosevelt and JFK notwithstanding, I thought the Lincoln connection was by far the coolest, because how exactly is it possible to connect with a man who died back in 1865?
Here's how it works:
A friend of mine is the son of an illustrious Washington lawyer. As a young man, my friend's father was well-acquainted with a granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt. This granddaughter fondly remembered her grandpa Teddy, whose first Secretary of State was Mr. John Hay; the very same John Hay who, as a much younger man, had served as personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln.
So I knew my buddy, my buddy knew his dad, his dad knew TR's granddaughter, the granddaughter knew TR, TR knew Hay, and Hay knew Lincoln.
Pretty freaky, I thought, and my friends agreed.
On the way home that night, I began wondering who shared the planet with whom at certain points in history. Were Leonardo da Vinci and Christopher Columbus alive together? How about Mozart and George Washington? From this line of thinking emerged a "did you know?" game that my kids get quite a kick out of. The facts defy logic until you do the math, but once you do, distant history seems a tad less so.
My grandmother, for instance, was born in 1912. Anyone forty-seven or older that year had breathed the same air as the living Abraham Lincoln. And anyone over the age of eighty-six in 1912 had been born when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, our second and third presidents, still walked the earth. An elderly woman coddling my infant grandmother could herself have been coddled as an infant by an elderly John Adams. So if coddling counted as a Six Degrees "connection" and my grandmother held me when I was a baby, then I could conceivably be only three degrees removed from two signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Against that scenario, Lincoln seems positively recent. When I entered this life in 1961, there were still some people living who'd been born during Lincoln's lifetime. In fact, the very last of those Lincoln-era humans did not pass from mortal existence until the mid-1970's, having spanned the years between horse-drawn carriages on gas-lit cobblestone and car-radio disco on the LA Freeway.
I'll bet ol' Abe himself would agree, if he were with us today at the age of two-hundred, that the past is really not as long ago as you think, no matter how many score years you go back.
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