I sat against the wall in Durty Nelly’s, an old Irish pub next to the Bunratty Castle near Shannon, Ireland. The bar was packed and next to me was the only available place to sit: a wide, stone windowsill looking out over the running creek below as the place had been a mill at one time. The window has bars on it, otherwise the drop is straight down about fifteen feet. A short, quite Irish-looking Irishman sat on the sill and drank his beer. It was loud from music and talking so that even my companion and I had to yell to hear each other.

The Irishman leaned toward me, his legs dangling above the floor. “Last time I was here I drank too much and fell out the window into the creek. That’s why they put bars up!” He toasted the air and drank, and it was easy to believe him even though the scenario was unlikely. He came straight from central casting, acting all the part of Barry Fitzgerald in The Quiet Man.

After I spoke, revealing my Yankeeness, he asked where I was from and what we were doing there. “Connemara!” he exclaimed. “The wild west!” We laughed as his response was common and I had previously noted that the Wild Atlantic Way which runs through the western portions of County Galway and all of Connemara were indeed rustic, scenes from Banshees of Innisfree shot there, as well as The Quiet Man and others. I told him my ancestry is Irish, Connacht, and in particular County Galway, noting Connemara specifically. He asked the relative surname.

“Walsh!” I screamed over the noise. “There’s some McCormick and others for sure, but Walsh is the Galway connection.

He stood up, set his beer on our table, pulled out his wallet, removed his license, and handed it to me. “Baby John Walsh is the name! Nice to meet you cousin!”

When I returned home, I thought about how connected everyone really is; how I could make trips to Bavaria or Sicily and have similar experiences, pushing out the concentric circles of my DNA. Actually, we do that socially all the time. In one family we usually break down the “lines” by aunts and uncles. Outside the family such as here in the village near Aerie, the families of many watermen have been here since the 1600’s and so when you talk to natives in town you slim down where you are “from” by creeks. “Oh he’s from over near Broad Creek.” “He’s from Mill Creek.” “Her family is down on Stove Point.” But if I head up-county, I simply say I’m from Deltaville. They wouldn’t know the Duck Pond near Parrot’s Island. When I’m down at the college, I note I live “up on the Middle Peninsula.”

You see where it goes.

When traveling as I just did to western Maryland, “I’m from Virginia” suffices. In Ireland, I usually don’t need to expose my already obvious “United States” origin, but for those who know our country, I’ll add the state.

I suppose if we ever end up on Triton, I’d pull out my license and signify to some other-worldly writer that I’m from Earth, just past Mars on the right.

What captivates me about this is the closer our ancestry is to others, the more likely we are to get along. John Walsh and I would have talked anyway since we drank beer next to each other, but once we realized we shared that name the conversation grew deeper, and I learned he wrote restaurant reviews, and he did, in fact, fall out the window into the creek on several occasions.

My brother spent time with Kunzingers in our ancestral village of Lohr a. Main, Germany. I’m Facebook friends with two Michael Kunzingers. One is my son, and the other a mathematician in Austria whose great great great great something or other is the same GGG as mine, back in the early 1800s. It’s just that his line of family never left the old world as mine did in the 1850s.

We all have the same roots no matter how far apart we grew up and eventually branched out, stretching our posterity across distant ideas.

I’m reminded of what now seems like a trite mentality from perhaps the sixties when those coming of age declared against the supporters of the Vietnam War and later the threat of Nuclear War, “We are all one family! The Human Family! We are one race!”

But it’s true. We are. And if nothing else we often drink the same beer, choose the same corner of some obscure pub and maybe bump into a distant cousin.

John Edgar Wideman wrote that everyone needs two parents, four grandparents, eight great-great grandparents, then sixteen, then thirty-two; and that’s just five generations back. He acutely notes that less than two hundred years ago, sixteen men and sixteen women made love. None of the couples most likely knew any of the other couples, living as far apart as Kings County, New York, and County Galway, Ireland, and never met any of the others in their lives, not knowing what would eventually be true—that it was all part of some grand conspiracy to set in motion the DNA which would eventually create you.

We are rooted in our past, which means we are truly rooted in each other to some degree. I understand that doesn’t mean we will get along. Tradition tells us the first two brothers certainly didn’t.

But we are here. Together on this world. At the very least we can have a beer and compare notes I should think.