Oh The People You Meet

A friend writes "You just never know who you're talking to and what they have done..." I've been thinking about that and it is so true.

As a child I remember my godfather playing chess with my dad. Two grown-ups who could sit for hours without any apparent movement did not impress me much. Later on I discovered that that same godfather sang opera with some big name divas on the summer circuit. In the winter he taught English and music at a Midwestern college.

By the time I was twelve I had met Uncle Mac, a dashing pink faced, white haired man who came to visit our next door neighbors. He was funny, debonair and always made me feel like a beautiful princess right out of one of my books. The last time I saw him was at my wedding and it is the only picture I have of him, a simple side shot of a man in the distance. He disappeared shortly after that and I found out he had gone "underground" because his daughter had been taken hostage. He was some sort of international spy who had worked for the government most of his life. He never surfaced.

In high school I met a tall thin woman at my grandmother's nursing home. She was talking about her son who liked to box and how good she thought he was. His name was George Foreman!

The man who interviewed me this past year is an ordained Baptist minister who just happened to miss our first appointment because a helicopter picked him up and whisked him off someplace. He sends my grandson post cards from all over the world and routinely travels, when working, with a gun on one hip and a large knife on the other.

Now I hear that a small sweet faced young man I thought of as a kid going to school while working at a fast food place is being sent on a two week special forces mission to Afghanistan to aid in the rescue of prisoners, or hostages.

Of course there have been other times, like when I was expounding on my (very knowledgeable?) views of what the Catholic church thought of birth control to a man who later became one of my best friends and who turned out to be a Catholic priest!

I always discover, after the fact, that the stuff of books is right here where I am.