My nephew has more than the normal allotment of friends. It is probably a combination of charisma, extensive travel, and a generous spirit that has attracted a ribbon of people to gravitate toward him.
Mind you such migration has been severely limited given the current restrictions, but social media sill manages to let light slip through the barriers.
This week he posed a question.
"What is something you have done that you're fairly confident you're the ONLY person on my friends list to have ever done? Given the wide range of people I know, I think this will be interesting."
In under forty eight hours there has been a stream of confessions that would make a hermit laugh. It turns out I don't need to go anywhere to travel on the wings of his acquaintances whose lives are far more adventurous than my own.
"Taught a non-verbal 10 yo to ride a unicycle."
"I saw my newborn/infant son’s beating heart post surgery."
"Born an hour before I was born as I was born at the same time the clocks went back an hour."
"I had dinner with Mr Rogers and his wife.."
"Emigrated to America on the RMS Queen Mary."
"Spent two years after the Haiti Earthquake to arrange surgery for an injured girl. Found a surgeon and hospital in NJ to do the surgery at no cost, a rescue pilot in FL who offered to provide transportation but for the longest time could not get her humanitarian parole visa approved by the US govt. I wrote a personal letter to then President Obama and former president Jimmy Carter as a last resort. A college intern working for Jimmy Carter read my letter and presented it to him, and
the visa was approved within 24 hours and she did have the surgery."
"Sleepwalked out of my apartment only wearing underpants, and locked myself out in the middle of the night. Woke up in the freezing stairwell on my way to the attic. Had to cover myself with a door mat and knock on a neighbor’s door for help.. I didn’t know the neighbor."
"Attended the last hippie camping festival at Stonehenge in 1984, stormed the police barricades at dawn and climbed on the stones to watch the sunrise."
"Rode on the roof of a car at 85 miles an hour"
"Worked in the Presidential Protection Service. Specifically on Air Force One and Two."
"Meditating, as guided by a Buddhist monk wearing a "space suit", inside a lava tube, while on a simulated EVA from a "lunar habitat", on the Big Island of Hawaii."
"I showed the Dalai Lama what live looping with a viola is like. It took him a moment to understand it technically, and when he did he exploded into laughter and joy."
"Ran with the Olympic torch"
"I mounted some solar panels to a donkey and then hiked for a week to a remote village in the Himalayas to install them on a medical hut"
"My one and only “drug deal” was with an international pharmaceutical company back in the late 90’s. I was out at the wharfs in Boston, late night with a friend, on the street in the pouring rain, when a delivery truck drove by and a box fell out the back. We picked it up and took it back to our apartment in Cambridge where we figured out it was a shipment of experimental drugs. We tracked down the company and called them to let them know we had their shipment. They offered us $200 reward
(after holding out a bit) and we made the exchange the next day. After that I decided to end my drug dealing career while I was ahead."
