On growing up and shrinking down

He came from a town of the smallest size. One school, one hospital, one post office, one bar. Two thousand five hundred citizens and room to run around. No light up billboards or subways, even city buses, not a single cab.

At seventeen the world got bigger, but out the rearview mirror that city still seems mighty small. Some seven hundred thousand citizens somehow hid in houses outside the city core. The inner became our playground; saw the same faces at all the bars.

Off to college in the big smoke, a town painted up to play New York. The subway system shot out to suburbs, counting some six million in its path. The world seemed grand, the buildings tall, eyes wide wandered through the night.

Four years later it had shrunk down to a village size. Degrees of separation became cut strings through hordes of common friends. So off it was to a sprawl of bigger brick. Double those millions, walk through a sea of stranger faces.

Still find ourselves round a table talking to new friends about names we both know. Even across the North Pacific the magnets pull land together. So those from past lives end up here, they never leave our sides.

The globe spins on its axis, smaller every turn. And if we were to launch off and land on the cratered moon, we’d just sit and order beers with space men, stir up the conversation starter, “So who do you know from Winnipeg?”