They had names familiar to all Americans, such as Mark, Alex, Peter, Andy, Jenny, etc., which I assumed were artificial constructs to prevent Americans from murdering their Indian names.  This was confirmed when I asked one of them to tell me his Indian name. At my request he repeated it half a dozen times but I never did really get it.  So after that I was quite happy using the more familiar monikers, and now after 3 months of intimate contact I will just refer to them here collectively as “my guys”, ok? 

When my guys first sent me on the hunt for examples to show them what I wanted, I was at a loss about where to begin.  I had just seen a movie on the Hallmark channel that I really liked, so as a starting point I decided to look on Amazon for the book that was the basis for it.  I found the book, and with it the website of the author, and there began my trek into website-land.   Of course, publishing my book was also on my mind.  So I clicked on other books to find out what is “out there”,  and  each had a website that I could peruse and decide what I liked or didn’t like about it.  WOW, what a trip that was.  Who would have thought just watching a movie could introduce me into such a new and at times overwhelming world?  As  I found a few that I really liked and sent them to my guys,  I began to formulate the design I wanted for my site.

Later I would find that what I thought was a whole new world was just a toe in the ocean of what I would experience during the whole process.  And now, even in the aftermath, vistas are still opening that were beyond my wildest imaginings just a few short weeks ago.  In fact,  just last month  when they opened my twitter account and I said that “all hell done broke loose now”,  I still had no idea of what that really  meant.  Now I have connected with individuals all over the globe, and I don’t mean just as casual followers, or with robo-style direct messages.  I have had real interaction with actual people who have genuinely enriched my life.

 One such person is Susan Day.  She not only read and liked my writing, she also offered to send me an article for my guest blog section.  I assumed she would send me one  of her blogs from her own site.  So in return,  I suggested she check out mine and see if there was one there that she liked that she could use on her site.  But that is not what she meant at all.  What she did mean absolutely astounded me.  She found my blogs inspiring, so much so that she wrote a special entry just for me to use as my first guest blog!   When my guys call today, I will see that it gets posted properly, so don’t miss reading it. I am sure that everyone will enjoy it as much as I do.   

Before Susan sent me the article we had a pleasant and comfortable email exchange, and all the while I pictured her as a nice American lady from someplace in the Midwest.  Because she writes kids’ books, and I have also written one, we talked about that and I even sent her one of my stories.  She liked it, so we discussed what to do with it to publish it, and  at last it got me excited about working with that book again after 15 years of keeping it locked away in a drawer.  Who knew that would happen?

Then she told me she had written a whole set of kid’s books about her home town, which she described as a "small town far away from anywhere".  I too gravitate toward towns like that, so I looked it up to see where it was, and as usual i was totally flabbergasted.  Australia!  Yep, I was just a tad bit off in my imagined geographical positioning.  Like half a world off maybe?  I am mostly a home body now in my old age, but in my youth I actually circled the globe.  It took a year and a half, and the world seemed so large at the time.  But now, with all our instantaneous communication, and no particular attention being paid to where the senders and receivers are actually located, the globe has shrunk to where we are really becoming a world community. 

Thus a new understanding of the reality of the world community is today’s port of call on my voyage of self-discovery.   No doubt we can expect many other fascinating lands to pop up on the horizon as we continue to sail on our sea of memories. Feel free to ride along as together we accumulate many new memorable experiences along the way.