Six Degrees of Peameal Bacon

When Gordon Lightfoot died this week, my friend Peter posted a photo he’d taken of the two of them together—not just some selfie he was lucky to catch outside a concert: Peter and Gordon were friends. In a similar vein, my sister hung around with Keanu Reeves’s sister—all of us together at Jesse Ketchum P.S. In high school, I was friends with two of Margaret Atwood’s nephews and—decades later—my daughter attended the same daycare as her grandchildren. Toronto likes to fancy itself a bustling world-class city, but I swear we’re really just a small town, overblown.

Inspired by Pussywillows, Cat-tails, Soft Winds and Roses. The photo collage was created by the author. The Lightfoot stamp he found was part of series, designed in 2007, by Circle Design Incorporated. The Atwood stamp was designed in 2021 by Steven Slipp. The photo of a young Keanu Reeves is from the Michael Ochs Archives; the older Keanu was photographed by Anna Hanks; and the fake stamp, itself, is based on a 2014 definitive designed by Entro. And by this point, one has to wonder if the acknowledgments for a 100-word story should be as long as the story itself.