A Not So Boring Life

Six Degrees of Separation I was reminded of this theory of interconnectedness today.  First put forward by a Hungarian author in 1929, it postulates that everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world.   Many of you probably know it through that Will Smith movie. In the late seventies, I met Larry Evans, a laid-off steelworker, self-taught writer and all-around rabble rouser who had moved to Pittsburgh PA from his birthplace of Baltimore, MD after a stint as a VISTA volunteer in a Florida migrant camp.  When we met, I was a VISTA volunteer working with laid-off steelworkers in Pittsburgh through an Adult Literacy program, while also studying at a local community college. Larry was the founder and guiding light of an innovative worker-writer magazine called the Mill Hunk Herald .   Surviving on goodwill, youthful energy, sporadic donations and hard-fought subscriptions, the quarterly magazine came to life on th

Around the latter part of 1984, I was well immersed in the Nicaraguan farming cooperative “La Quinta”.  I had passed most of the tests that had come my way:  bathing in a cold river; gratefully eating a never changing diet of tortilla, bean and/or rice dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner, served with cup after cup of overly sweet coffee; hauling hundred pound sacks of potatoes out of the fields and generally working side by side with the cooperative members in whatever task was at hand.  I had learned enough Spanish to fend off the majority of jokes about my mispronunciation of fairly common words.  I had even been congratulated for how easily and quickly the words hijo de puta! (‘son of a whore’) rolled off my tongue at any injury or minor mishap.  I was known by all as “Guillermo” – the more easily remembered Spanish translation of William. I had been accepted, in all my quirky gringo ways, as a member of the cooperative.  One evening, in the darkening space of an old cat