"You'll never make it."
We were sitting on a taxiway at O'Hare. The guy next to me was a chatty hedge fund manager. Started talking the minute he sat down. In no time at all I had the ear buds in and pulled out my book.
But that was an hour ago in Traverse City. Now, knowing that my connecting flight home was boarding and I needed to hustle from the far end of the F terminal to the far end of the C terminal, I was in go mode. . . .
A little secret here: I have forever harbored the quiet notion that my body of work would one day be important enough to require a scholarly archive. So ever since 1993 and the Sports Illustrated for Kids book Over the Edge, I have saved every hard copy revision of every manuscript I've ever written (with the exception of In-line Skating Made Easy, which I knew would one day require a great deal of explanation).
I don't know what triggered the memory, but the other day I was suddenly overcome with a wash of humiliation. Sometime in my early twenties, at that point in the wilderness years where I was so deep in the woods that I couldn't remember which way I came in and couldn't possibly see a way out, I decided that the most logical way to fix things was to . . . wait for it: join the French Foreign Legion.
