The Race of Joseph

   In life, sometimes we run into people we just connect with. While the terms for this have changed over the years: the principle behind it is still the same: There are people who make life better just by being around them. They could be your siblings, cousins, friends on the other side of town, on the other end of the state, or even farther away like Missouri or Mississippi, Minnesota or Canada.
   You can meet them in all kinds of situations: a class, an ice storm, at church, in Washington, D.C. They might be friends of your aunt's, little siblings of pals, or people you've known since second grade. Lucy Maud Montgomery summed up pretty well what this is, in her book "Anne's House of Dreams", on pages 37-38, in chapter seven, "The Schoolmaster's Bride".

   "I must be getting back to the light," announced Captain Jim. "I've enj'yed this evening something tremenjus."
   "You must come often to see us," said Anne.
   "I wonder if you'd give that invitation if you knew how likely I'll be to accept it," Captain Jim remarked whimsically.
   "Which is another way of saying you wonder if I mean it," smiled Anne. "I do, 'cross my heart', as we used to say at school."
   "Then I'll come. You'll likely to be pestered with me at nearly any hour. And I'd be proud to have you drop down and visit me now and then, too. Gin'rally I haven't anybody to talk to except the First Mate, bless his sociable heart. He's forgotten more'n any McAllister of them all ever knew, but he isn't much of a conversationalist. You're young and I'm old, but our souls are about the same age, I reckon. We both belong to the race that knows Joseph, as Cornelia Bryant would say."
   " 'The race that knows Joseph'?" puzzled Anne.
   "Yes. Cornelia divides all the folks in the world into two kinds - the race that knows Joseph, and the race that don't. If a person sorter sees eye to eye with you, and has pretty much the same ideas about things, and has the same taste in jokes - why, then he belongs to the race that knows Joseph."
   "Oh, I understand," exclaimed Anne, light breaking upon her. "It's what I used to call - and still call in quotation marks - 'kindred spirits'."
   "Jest so, jest so," agreed Captain Jim. "We're it, whatever it is. When you come in to-night, Mistress Blythe, I says to myself, 'Yes, she's one of the race that knows Joseph.' And I'm mighty glad she was, for if wasn't so  we couldn't have had any real satisfaction in each other's company. The race that knows Joseph is the salt of the airth, I reckon."