Five times I almost died

This is Thanksgiving Week here in America. I guess at the top of the gratitude list is that I am here at all.

I don’t know why, but I’ve been preoccupied with cataloging and rating the times in my life when I could have died. I decided to write about it. Why waste the mental effort? Besides, you could use a break from the marketing stories, right?

Here are my five greatest hits. In some cases, literally …

BTW, I asked the MidJourney Artificial Intelligence bot to illustrate each story, and this is what it came up with. Always experimenting!

Number 5: The gorge

Many of you know that I have mentored kids for more than 15 years, especially a young man named Elijah. Elijah is the most athletically-gifted person I have ever known, and today he has a football scholarship at the University of Missouri. Ever since he was little, he was strong, fast, and agile.

One time when he was about eight years old, I took him on a camping trip, and we were hiking around some gorges at a magnificent state park. In a blink of an eye, Elijah had scrambled up a sheer rock canyon wall. The wall of the gorge was slick…