On a recent Shabbat, I was out in an unfamiliar part of my neighborhood trying to find a specific house on spotty information.A helpful neighbor sent me to the right place, but when we traded names, she stopped me and said I must be Sephardi. It seemed that she too was Sephardi, with her dad having come to Atlanta decades ago from Rhodes.I explained that there weren’t too many Melhados in Rhodes to my knowledge due to us being in Western Europe and the US and Caribbean, but that it was certainly possible for Eastern and Western Sephardim to intermingle. She declared that enough for us to be cousins, and we had a nice conversation before I went to my destination.What cracks me up is that when she found out that I like Sephardic history books and have probably four dozen on the Sephardim of Turkey and the Balkans including half a dozen on Rhodes, she immediately pointed out that I lack such-and-such titles about Rhodes and must buy them asap. That just captures the warm Sephardic personality perfectly: with a wink and a smile, it’s “oh you’re a book guy but you don’t have *my favorite book? Then clearly you have the wrong books!”Still delighted to have made a new friend, and it already gives me a great story to tell.