Back in Los Angeles

I believe that so much happens to most people living today that almost anyone's life would be worth a good novel or at least a novella. Having said that, however, I must also concede that some people's lives are more interesting than others. I met one of those people today while waiting in Denver for my final flight to Los Angeles.
A young man probably in his mid thirties sat down next to me in the waiting area and we started talking.
We began with his disappointment about having flown all the way from Los Angeles to Denver in hopes of buying a good condition 1970 car. (I can't remember the make and model.) He found too much rust on the car and didn't make the purchase, so he was just going to stick with the rebuilt 1959 car that he currently owned.
He then talked about  his job as an aircraft designer of military planes for Lockheed Martin. He had previously worked on new models of the U-2 (Some of you might remember that an earlier version of this spy plane was shot down over Russia and the pilot (Gary Powers) taken prisoner.) He spoke about some of the things that the planes he worked on could do but every few sentences would be punctuated by "Well, I can't say any more about it than that (because the information was secret)" He was really negative about President Obama for cancelling a contract for a new presidential helicopter after almost four billion dollars had been spent in design and development; he said that a new helicopter would have to be built anyhow since the present one would be obsolete soon.

He mentioned that he had been born and raised in Montana and really missed it. When I mentioned that I had recently been to Glacier National Park, he said that he had been there many times. When I told him that it had been really chilly when I had been there, he just laughed and said that he was often outdoors when it was as cold as eighty below zero. (This may have been an exaggeration. I don't think even Eskimos leave their igloos when it's that cold.)
He also told me about an experience he and some friends had had snowmobiling in Yellowstone National Park when the temperature was well below zero. It was getting late and they were heading for home when they encountered a herd of bison walking down the road in front of them. They waited a while, but it was getting colder and darker so finally he and his friends slowly weaved their way through the herd until they were able to safely ride home.

Along the way he also mentioned that he had had a brain tumor several years ago and that doctors had removed a tumor as big as a golf ball and surrounding tissue from his head, but he had fully recovered and after a recuperation period of three months, he had returned to work. I remembered that my father had had a brain tumor when he was sixty. He, too, also recovered but he was never able to return to work.
I was just returning from a storytelling performance in Philly, but today my new acquaintance was the one with all the good stories.