Ego Boost - Alaska

I must have been fifteen when I went to Alaska. My cousin Curt offered me a job on his fishing boat. That sort of fell through after three days and I came back home to Illinois.

Doesn't sound like much of a thing to be proud of, does it?

Consider this: I was not then, nor am I now, an outgoing person. These days I can enter a store, go up to the cash register and buy something, all on my own. I can hold conversations with people I don't know without feeling like something under a microscope. (Most days.) I can reasonably function.

Fifteen, I wasn't that well off. And yet I made at least two flight connections getting to Curt's place on Kodiak Island, and then took another flight out to meet his boat. On the way back, I not only had to make the same connections, I missed my flight back to Chicago and had to be rerouted through Seattle, giving me an extra stop.

But that's not all. There was a bit of a miscue on my final arrival back at Kodiak, and I had no one there to meet me at the airport. Which meant I had to make my way back to Curt's house through miles of countryside. Which I did by accepting a ride from utter strangers.

I think about people who were better prepared than I was, who had the experience I lacked and communication skills I still to a degree do not have, who vanished from the face of the earth going out for a cup of coffee, and I realize just how lucky I was. I could have been one of them so very, very easily. Dead and forgotten some place. Makes me realize just how fortunate I was and am.

Unless, of course, the last seventeen years have just been my imaginings as I lay dying.

Which, now that I think of it, would explain a lot...