FIVE THANKSGIVINGS is a privately published, 75,000 word novel, contracted by and written for a major US financial financial institution, exclusively for their employees. It follows one family with warmth and humor over the course of almost 40 years, telling the story of what it means to be a family, through the lens of five holiday celebrations.

For what's worth, inspiration for fiction comes from what you know, what you observe, what you can study and what you can imagine. Under the heading of what you know, there is what you can remember. And one of the real joys of writing a novel is being able to reconstruct memories from a warehouse filled with stories that have never quite found a home somewhere else.

Some of those memories fall into the category of "forks in the road." That's a recurring theme with me. I've always been fascinated by the idea that if you had turned here, your life might be totally different than if you had turned there.

In this novel, it's the day before his baby daughter's first Thanksgiving and Douglas is stuck in an airport that's shut down because of a snow storm. He's a thousand miles from home and worries he may not make it in time for the holiday dinner.

Everything in his day is going wrong, until that evening when the storm subsides and, eventually planes begin to move. But his flight home isn't one of them. The best the airline can do is divert him through Chicago which is out of his way, but better than nothing.

A fork in the road.

And it is on that connecting flight from Chicago - a plane he should never have been on - that he meets a man who changes his life by telling him about nickles.

I used it in this book as fiction. I offer it here as the true story of that meeting, that man, and an airplane ride that turned out to be a minor fork in the road in my life.

An Old Man On A Plane And His Philosophy Of Nickels - A True Story