The chief joy of travelling comes from getting from where you were to where you choose to be, on time. A close second would be finding that your luggage has almost matched your trip and can be found on arrival. Unexpectedly high on the list of pleasures, though, are chance encounters. Seemingly dealt by fate at random, your seatmates may leave lasting impressions. They may quietly change your life. A bucket list is a list of experiences or achievements that a person writes down, when young, and crosses off as each is accomplished. Improbable items on the list may approach one hundred. They help give a sense of meaning to life, of progress, of winning in a competition to reach the writers dreams. A bucket list seems to symbolize purposeful living. The term relates to what people set out to grasp before they kick the bucket. The motivational value is obvious. A word for the opposite kind of life is hard to propose. It would be a life, like the one that is the subject of this book; made up of unplanned reactions to unexpected events. Such a life might be unachieving or hum drum. It could, as easily, be striking. It could be serene carefree, lucky or unlucky, looking back. Most readers, like this author, will not have a bucket list. Life unfolds as it may. Like snow flakes, no two haphazard lives will be identical. The chance events of life can, just as forcefully, change the outcomes of carefully planned and structured lives. The value to you, as a traveller, is to recognize the balance of opportunity and effort that colours all our lives, in whatever order those two influences may come. Here, then, is your opportunity for a chance encounter. If you knew the author in one of the two dozen or more scenarios of your shared life, this is your chance to reminisce. What came before and what came after, in his life or in your own? How did it all come about? How did it all come out?
