I’m Rh negative, too.
We are three women chit-chatting over coffee after our synagogue choir sang for a United Church worship service (part of an effort to forge community links). How the conversation moved from “Aren’t the acoustics great?” to “I’m Rh negative, too” will have to remain a mystery. I was there and I have no idea how it happened. I mean, I know how the last step happened: One of the others mentioned their Rh-negative status and the other two of us chimed in. But how did we get to that first comment? I forget.
Worldwide, only 7% of the population is Rh negative, but in Western populations the percentage is higher. About 15% is usually given as the norm, with some groups as high as 25%. So, although it seemed weird to us to be in conversation with two other antigen-type outliers, our group of 30 people might have been expected to have 4 to 7 RH-negatives based on the underlying population.
My niece moved to Berlin, too.
We are three people chit-chatting before our class gets started. At least this time I know how we got here. My Alberta-born niece met a nice German boy while on a foreign-study semester and now lives in Berlin with her family, so when a man removed his jacket to reveal a Berlin sweatshirt, I was curious. It turns out his daughter met a nice German boy while in Israel at university; she now lives in Berlin with her husband and children. Another classmate, overhearing this casual chit-chat, chimed in about his niece. In a class of no more than 10, 3 of us had close family ties to Berlin through the same girl-meets-boy-while-studying-abroad mechanism. How many Canadians have this type of family tie to Berlin? Oddly, that’s not a question that Google is much good for, although 30% (the proportion in our tiny group) seems way too high for the general population.
In both cases — one where we roughly matched the overarching demographic and one where we almost certainly exceeded it by maybe an order of magnitude — what was weird was not so much how many of us there were, but that we found out this random thing we had in common. Neither Rh-factor-links nor Berlin-links had been on my bingo card for the respective days, and yet there we were.
After watching former Canadian military members make quick connections based on places lived, jobs held, and people served with, I’ve sometimes thought that we civilians should wear labels listing 5 obscure-ish things about us in order to facilitate connections in crowds. Birders, bloggers, knitters, photographers, kayakers, quilters, hikers, butter-tart-hounds, baseball fans, and sourdough-bread cognoscenti could find each other much more easily, not to mention RH-negatives and family members of women who have moved to Berlin for love. But three thoughts occur.
First, the charm of the connection lies in its chance-met quality, in the fun of the unexpected. In this roomful of strangers, with how many will I have something non-obvious in common, and will I discover it? Seen that way, it’s like a scavenger hunt through life. A name tag showing my RH factor or a map of where my nieces live would sorta spoil it.
Second, in any roomful of people — likely even in any elevator-ful — there will be connections I can’t imagine or guess ahead of time. Some would be forgotten as soon as discovered, some might be mildly interesting in passing, some could overturn a bias or preconception, some might form the basis of a new relationship.
Third, I’ll never know about most of these connections, but they exist anyway: an impossible-to-chart matrix invisibly connecting the people I meet, as well as those I don’t.
There are no strangers here;
only friends you haven’t met yet.
– William Butler Yeats
Well, let’s not go crazy here. Not everyone will be my friend. But I have come to believe that I share something obscure with almost everyone. If I give those connections a chance — if I even just believe that they exist — they can turn strangers, maybe not into friends, but at least into a community. And that seems worth the effort.
Maybe we just need the right questions in our toolbox.
In my recent memoir-writing class, one woman grew up in Usk, a village of no more than a few hundred people on the banks of the Skeena River, just inland from the coast. To go to school, the kids rode a ferry across the Skeena that was driven by the river current — the ferry operator angled the ferry against the current to go this way or that.
“You’ve never heard of Usk,” she said. “I have, and I’ve been there,” I could reply, recalling my time at the Prince Rupert radio station 60 years ago.
It may be the only point of contact we will have, but it matters.
Jim T
Jim T – Yes, it does matter. The Big Guy (mine, not the one in the sky) says that when he meets someone it’s not a question of whether they have a connection (often, a place lived; sometimes, a person in common) but how long it will take to find it.
I knew I had heard a quote that might fit this, took my old brain a short while (with Dr Goggle’s help)
The theory is there is only 6 degrees of social connection between people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation
Not sure how that works vis-a-vis blood types though
Jim R – 🙂 There were a whole bunch of fun studies in this area many years ago now. I remember one of the tasks was to pass a letter along to someone you knew personally to get the letter (eventually) to a famous cleric in NYC. One of the letters was handed to a farmer in Nebraska. He took it in to his minister, who had been in school with the famous cleric and who was, therefore, able to hand it off directly. That was the shortest chain they found. I think the blood type thing is similar to the question about how likely it is that at least two people in a group will have the same birthday. As I recall it, when you have what used to be a standard class size (~30), it’s almost certain there’ll be two with the same birthday. Odds-wise, you’d think it would be much smaller with the RH factor (or any blood type) because there are so few, compared to possible birth days.
For the record, I am A-negative, and had no idea what proportion of the population I shared that characteristic with. The match-making around Berlin is quite astonishing! The context for these conversations seems very important — the inter-faith connection. Despite the depressing daily news, some parts of the world appear to be evolving along pleasant and peaceful lines.
Laurna – Yes, it’s easy to get discouraged about the state of the world writ large, but there are good things happening every day. As there ever were, I guess.