Small worlds

When my family first began coming to Maui in 2000, I was semi-surprised to see a student of mine from Princeton, with her family, at the same resort. Only semi-surprised because one realizes how small a world the, how should one say, educated class in America is. It's like the wonderful scene in "Room With A View," where the Daniel Day Lewis character says, apropos of the "coincidence" of people who knew each other in Italy meeting again in the Italian rooms of the British Museum, that it is in reality no coincidence at all but utterly expected. So of course I should meet my Princeton students at a resort on Maui; the surprise is that I haven't met more of them.
So now five years later I see my same student and her family again (our schedules didn't overlap for a few years) and find that she is a third-year law student (which I sort of knew, since I wrote one of her law school recommendations), and that her brother is a fellow at one of those libertarian D.C. think tanks, and that her socialist parents are aghast. Again, I think that it is both a small world and not a small world; that we are schools of fish who swim together and circulate in the same small sea. What the hell am I doing in Mississippi, outside of that sea?