My Story:

Why I started writing

A bunch of us were leaving an AA meeting in the middle of a brutal Chicago winter, snowdrifts everywhere, hundred-pound icicles bending gutters, our breaths coming out in vaporous puffs lingering in the frigid air like cigarette smoke. In our new-found wisdom gleaned from the meeting we all (all of us grown men, mind you) promptly got into a snowball fight. We were hardly prepared for it. Leather-soled shoes, overcoats, no hats. But snowballs flew like missiles, and we ran around, ducking, sliding, and laughing so hard we were crying.

So it was all good, right?

A couple of days later, one of the guys was all excited remembering the snowball fight and started talking about it, and he said, "Yeah, it was fun, but I lost my diamond wedding ring in that snowball fight."

I was rocked. The guy was super nice. He was being strong about it, but you could see he was hurting. We promptly set out to look for the ring, but the snowball fight had taken place over the course of a city block, and the snow was piled so high finding the ring was an impossibility. Thoroughly downhearted we gave up.

Three weeks later, I woke to the sound of rain ticking my bedroom window. It dawned on me—the rain was going to melt a lot of the snow.

I jumped out of bed, dressed and hurried to where the snowball fight had taken place. There was still a lot of snow, but it was getting melted pretty good. I felt like an idiot, though, looking all over the street, sidewalk, people's lawns, like the people who lived there were going to call the cops and report a crazy person.

Then I saw something shiny lying in the middle of the street. Could it be? No. It must just be aluminum foil from a chewing gum wrapper, or from the liner of a cigarette box. But I walked to it.

It sure was looking like a diamond ring, though. But was it possible?​

I bent low to look, as if my eyes were deceiving me.

They weren't. I picked up the ring and held it tightly in both hands. ​

I could hardly wait to see the guy who lost it. A week later I ran into him at a meeting.

I set the ring on the table in front of him and smiled. He clutched the ring to himself, looked up at me and started crying. Then he gathered himself as best he could and told me how the ring had this huge emotional significance for him. He'd lost it once before when his father died. He'd been distraught at his father's passing and didn't know how he was going to be able to carry on. He told me he prayed: "God, give me a sign that I'm going to make it."

Later that day, as he was cleaning out his car just before going to his father's funeral he found the ring—that was his sign.

Glowing inside, I went home and wrote it all down.

That started me writing and I haven't stopped since.

Me getting lucky on the golf course!