Meet One New Person Every Day: The Magic of Conversation

By Lynda Beth Unkeless

On January 1, 2015, Lynda Beth Unkeless decided to meet one new person every day and write about them. The person had to be a stranger.

On June 10, 2015, she was diagnosed with two brain tumors and had to stop her project.

After major brain surgery and radiation, she decided to publish those interviews she did manage to do before her diagnosis.

In doing so, she realized a life-long dream of publishing her first book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483568119

Book preview

Epilogue

Introduction

On January 1, 2015, I started the most extraordinary project.

I decided to meet one new person every day for one year and write about it.

Little did I know how much I would discover about other people’s lives and how rewarding it would be for me.

Unfortunately, six months into the project I was suddenly diagnosed with two brain tumors. My extraordinary project stopped. I had major surgery to remove the larger more dangerous tumor in July. I had radiation treatments on the second tumor in November.

Revisiting in 2016 what I had written last year, I found insights and wisdom for how to live more fully. I also found the most prescient hints of what was to follow by being diagnosed with two brain tumors. These hints are bolded in the entries below.

I hope you enjoy reading about these people and our conversations as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Lynda Beth Unkeless

San Francisco, California

(January 1, 2015)

"To receive everything,

one must open

one’s hands and give."

–Taisen Deshimaru

I finally get it:

To live more deeply, I have to give more!

Taisen, this Zen monk, also said:

"You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day

as though a fire were raging in your hair."

Yikes! If a fire was raging in my hair,

I would definitely not waste one more mindless moment on Facebook and/or the world-wide web.

I would be more focused and purposeful in giving-back every single day to the world and people living in it.

This is my fierce practice.

If I have a resolution for 2015, it is to use the time I have left–my one wild and precious life–in a rampage of focused giving.

That way I will receive everything!

Happy New Year!

(January 2, 2015)

Last year I thought about ways to make my life more interesting as I age.

I settled on the idea of talking to one new person every day: that person has to be a stranger.

Yesterday on New Year’s Day, I walked into a bar in Fairfax, California. I met three new babies and one new man.(Babies don’t count because they can’t talk yet!)

He was dressed in mountain bike riding clothes. I noticed two tiny specks of dirt and a little snot coming of his nose. He was drinking a diet coke in a room full of people drinking beer.

What I learned talking with this man who rides mountain bikes, skateboards, motorcycles and shoots guns for fun is:

1. He is immensely optimistic about the state of the world even if he isn’t nearly as hopeful for his personal life. (That’s another post another time…)

2. He explained the difference between an adrenaline and an endorphin rush in mountain biking.

3. He gave a detailed and brilliant explanation and analysis of the fall of Lance Armstrong (brief summation: he just got greedy) and how Tiger Woods’ fall was not in the same category at all and why.

There is so much more I could report on my conversation with him. Suffice to say, he is extremely well informed about current events and between his interests in extreme sports and machines, he is as different from me as all get out.

We became Facebook friends yesterday. I hope to learn more about his machines and bike/skateboard/ motorcycle rides in 2015.

I couldn’t be happier: my life expanded exponentially yesterday.

Look out world: I will be meeting stranger number two today!

(January 3, 2015)

Where’d you get your cool blue sparkly boots? I asked the 4-year old blonde waiting in line yesterday at Bev Mo in Corte Madera, CA.

She had no time to reply when her mother shot back, Santa Claus made a special delivery to our house!

The little girl smiled and did not speak. She was still so enthralled by her beautiful new blue boots.

Oh, right! He drove his sled on to your lawn all the way from The North Pole! I said, keeping the Santa fantasy alive and well even though it was already January 2.

My mother’s birthday was January 2 and if she had not died 26 years ago, she would have turned 90 yesterday.

To meet this little girl and her mother yesterday immediately transported me back to the Christmas magic my mother made for me when I was her age.

No matter how old we grow, certain memories never die.

Meeting stranger number 2 in her beautiful blue boots gave me this priceless gift yesterday.

(January 4, 2015)

I still forget to bring in the bag.

Since the law changed last year and stores charge for shopping bags, I have paid a dime for one at the checkout counter more times than I care to count.

It’s not paying the dime that bothers me so much.

It’s more the Ouch! I forgot again or the Oh! I haven’t ‘gotten with the program’ or the OMG, why is it so hard to change just one tiny habit that bugs me more…

In San Francisco yesterday, I saw how one woman deals with the new law. She literally wears the bag on her back before she enters the store.

Between crackers and Boboli, I complimented her on her practical ingenuity and asked if I could take her photo.

Sure! I ride my bike all the time in the city…This is a bike messenger bag, she said as I clicked my iPhone.

I think she was slightly amused that someone noticed her resourcefulness.

When I first saw her striding into the store with the big pack on her back, my first thought was modern food shopping has morphed back into ancient hunting and gathering. No longer in the wild, we do it in the aisles.

First thought aside, the pricklier issue remains: how do I change the tiniest of habits as I age?

How do I remember to bring in the proverbial bag?

(January 5, 2015)

Rylee, 21, a world traveler, has a plan.

If all works well, she will have visited and/or lived in New Zealand, China, Central Asia, and the Middle East by age 24.

I met her last night at the Precita Park Cafe in San Francisco. She had just returned from South Korea where she went to a festival on a beach that she said was sort of like Burning Man, only different.

I thought Rylee looked like a young Hillary Swank and told her so. She said people tell her all the time she looks like Justin Bieber or Miley Cyrus.

I don’t like hearing that at all, she said.

She really likes Patti Smith, 68, the singer-songwriter and poet who was part of the punk rock movement in the 1970’s in New York City.

I asked her why.

"I love her music! She’s an androgynous

bad-ass woman who doesn’t give a f—what people think of her."

I gave a few more dollars to her world travel fund last night, but more importantly, I would like to leave her with these lyrics from Patti Smith’s song Wing.

"I was a wing in heaven blue.

soared over the ocean

soared over Spain

And I was free

Needed nobody

It was beautiful

It was beautiful

And if there’s one thing

could do for you

you’d be a wing

In heaven blue."

They seem to suit her so well.

(January 6, 2015)

Why do you still do yoga?

That’s a really good question, he said and stopped to really think before he answered.

A man and woman, married 25 years, sat together on the couch with their daughter, 21. The entire family was taking yoga class together last night at YogaWorks in Larkspur, California.

There are the usual answers: better health, more balance, get energized, peace of mind…but mainly I do it because I want to live longer…I want to be around longer for my daughter.

His daughter leaves next week to take a yoga teacher training course in Costa Rica. His wife started studying yoga in Detroit at age 14.

In the two years I have practiced at this yoga studio, I have never met or seen a whole family doing yoga together. It was a first for me!

I asked the man about his work. He has worked as a behavioral health nurse for 40 years: he works with older adults who have mental illness.

Do you like your job? I asked.

I love my job! he replied, not missing a beat.

Why?

Because the people I work with really care and want community. They are not raising kids anymore or trying to make money. For them it’s all about caring, connecting, and community. Being around them–caring about that–makes all the difference to me.

(January 7, 2015)

Robert Bledsoe has sold mattresses for the last 10 years and he really likes his job. It’s easy, he said.

When there are no customers (which is often), he likes to think about his life or play a computer game. Sometimes, he jokes, I move a paper a few inches across my desk.

It’s not like working at Trader Joe’s, he says, Where there’s always another person non-stop to check out, and there’s no time to think.

He finds special satisfaction when he sells a mattress to a person who is sick or in pain.

When they call me back and say my loved one found some comfort from a good mattress, it’s very gratifying.

The hardest part of his job, he reports, is people who feel entitled to waste his time.

The mattress store was supposed to close at 8 p.m. last night, but Robert extended closing time to give this interview.

I have the next three days off, he said.

Any special plans? I asked.

Nah, maybe do my laundry.

(January 8, 2015)

Are you happy with your number today?

She was wrapped in a turquoise towel fresh out of the shower at the 24 Hour Fitness ladies’ locker room in Larkspur, California.

I reported I wasn’t happy I had gained a few over the holidays, but I was also relieved it had not been more.

Then we started that very predictable lament women of a certain age make about weight gain post the holidays. I could have had this conversation in my sleep, until she said something that I was not expecting.

You know what really bothers me? she said staring at me with her big dark eyes smeared with black mascara.

I’m 52 years old and I still can’t believe I haven’t solved my weight issue…to be this old and still struggling with it…I am just so sick of it! she exclaimed.

I was flabbergasted by her unexpected confession. Instead I said all the normal things (blah blah blah) that women say to comfort and support each other about this very sensitive issue.

But she was the one who wanted to be more than real: she talked about how emotional eating rules her life and how she eats and eats just to get through her days.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this woman’s honesty. I didn’t ask her name or take her photograph. (After all it is so not cool to whip out an iPhone and point it in a room full of naked and half-dressed women!)

She struck a deep chord in me and it wasn’t because of our number-on-the-scale discussion.

We all yearn to be beyond the issues that have plagued us all our lives. And if we aren’t by a certain age, it is deeply sobering and hugely humbling. Deep down we wonder: will we ever be?

And what if…by the end, we aren’t…

Then what? I wonder…

(January 11, 2015)

97 years is a very long time to practice music.

And that is what Siri, a cellist, and Steve, a guitarist, have between them. Siri, 62, began playing the cello when she was 11. Steve said he’s played guitar for 46 years.

We definitely have in our 10,000 hours, Siri said.

Siri and Steve, a duo, performed tonight at Egan’s Jam House in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. Their performance was quietly stunning. They made me laugh and cry. They live on Whidbey Island and spoke about it very affectionately on stage tonight.

The way they talked about their island made me want to take the ferry there tomorrow to visit.

This is my very first time visiting Seattle. It’s been cold, rainy and overcast since I arrived. The people I have met here have been very kind and helpful. I truly can’t remember when I have been treated this nice in any city for very a long time!

The damp cold here goes deep into my bones. No wonder there’s so many coffee shops, microbreweries, and distilleries. It takes lots of warm liquids to live comfortably here.

I have never seen a city with as many gyms and fitness centers as I have seen here. I thought the San Francisco Bay Area was fitness-crazed, but there are so many different kinds of places to work out in Seattle.

I wonder how do they all manage to stay in business.

(January 12, 2015)

(The big ice cube makes the tequila look sexy he said.)

There was not just one person today to feature for the meet one new person every day blog post.

There were marvelous people all day long which is precisely why being on the road is so much fun…

The taxi driver whose cab I almost demolished who when he learned I was lost helped me find my way back to the freeway…

The beautiful young blonde born and raised in Seattle who made me the most delicious Irish Nutty coffee drink this morning…

The grey-haired goddess with curly dreadlocks who helped me look for a costume ring in a variety store…

The former foreign service officer who took 30 minutes to explain in detail what to see and explore on his island…

The gay performance artist who dresses in drag, does burlesque, performs with fire and talks passionately about the island where he loves to live…

The couple crazy in love I met at dinner but alone with her in the ladies’ room she confesses that she will have to leave him soon if he can’t make a real commitment to her…

The memorable ones

make themselves vulnerable…

They tell their stories truthfully and

create closeness quickly

without concern for saving face…

Meet one new person every day

makes every day an adventure:

my most direct and mysterious encounter with the Unknown…

(January 13, 2015)

The sign on the street said:

America’s Best Roaster

—Wine Enthusiast magazine

Coffee is to Seattle what wine is to the Napa Valley so a wine publication claims this is the best coffee roaster in America?!*!?

I have to check it out. There just might be a story in Storyville on this my last day visiting Seattle for the very first time.

Inside Storyville the baristas wear t-shirts that read:

Love Everybody.

The wall has a large sign that proclaims:

Love everybody. Never ever hurt anybody.

—Garry Phelps

What exactly is going on here?

I ask about the sign on the