My friend Linda posted a fun idea on Facebook. Google your name and see what comes up. Are you a lead dancer with the San Antonio ballet? An artisan cheesemaker in Idaho? A retired music teacher in Miami?
To play: go to Google, enter your first and last name in quotes, and that’s it. Example: “Jennifer Wilson”
There are approximately 1,294,672 Jennifer Wilsons. Okay, I made that up, but there are a lot of us, so I took the very first entry that came up. Apparently, I wrote a book that was heralded as “Best Nonfiction Book of 2011” by the American Society of Journalists and Authors. (Note: Please leave a comment below with your results! A friend of mine discovered he was a 15 year old ping pong champion.)
Written by Jennifer Wilson, it chronicles the adventures she and her family had when they moved to Croatia for a year in search of her ancestral ties. She and her husband and two young children were living the American Dream in Iowa – a house they fixed up, soccer schedules, two careers, and frequent pilgrimages to Target. And, they felt they were missing something vital despite their privilege, primarily time together as a family and a simpler life that didn’t involve consuming, watching tv and playing video games crammed between errands. On the basis of a yearning and a late night of giddy dreaming (a bottle of wine was involved), they uprooted themselves and moved to Croatia for a year. As you can imagine, that year changed them all in deep and unexpected ways.
I was immediately intrigued by the book’s description because my partner and I have a similar ambition. Read more