Filling out the future

(SitNews) Klawock, Alaska -A former student of mine emailed me asking for help writing his last high school column for his journalism portfolio. It was about a list of things he wanted to do before he was 30. He didn’t know how to start it, or what places and things to list because as we had discussed, noun lists change.I gave him some advice on crafting something honest and meaningful then thought about a promise I made to a girl when I was roughly his age.I wasn’t sure how, because when you’re sitting on the roof talking on the phone with a girl on another island, trying to locate the same constellations like corny teenage romantics do, you don’t think about logistics. But we casually, maybe seriously, agreed that when I turned 28, if we were still single, we’d find each other and get married. That night we decided to be each other’s insurance policies in case the exciting lives we would undoubtedly live still had us unwed by that age.It’s painful to write, not because it didn’t happen, or because I lost touch with her, but because I thought she was my it, my her, my pronoun. My life plan included her.See full column at:http://www.sitnews.us/JLund/060214_jeff_lund.html