(My story is adapted from what I posted on an older, similar thread, so apologies if you suspect you've read this before.)
I grew up in the Sonoran desert, an hour outside Phoenix, with teachers for parents. We all had the summer off, so during my middle school years, my parents stuffed me into the back seat of our '83 Mercury Marquis coupe with a plastic basket full of books, and we inched our way across the country, dragging a pop-up trailer behind at the absolutely blinding speed of 55 mph, to the Midwest, where we visited all the family members we barely ever saw or heard from otherwise.
On one of those trips, I came down with chicken pox. I, the Plague Child, must've been the modern version of Typhoid Mary, shedding virus particles and coating every McDonald's bathroom, roadside rest stop, and presidential museum from Arizona to Michigan with disease.
We were at some relatives' house in Michigan when the pustules finally erupted, and there I stayed for roughly a week, stoned to the gills on Benadryl, while I scabbed up and unsuccessfully tried to stifle the urge to scratch myself raw. The limited time I spent awake was dead boring. Mid-'80s daytime TV stank (what kid gave a crap about Phil Donahue or soap operas?), so I raided the bookshelf of my relatives' long-grown children, where I snagged a book called Young Skin Diver. The story grabbed my attention, and I thought that this scuba diving thing sounded awesome. I already loved to swim at my hometown's municipal pool, and I particularly loved swimming underwater. If I could actually breathe while down there... Wow...that would be soooooo much fun. But it was just a fantasy. Home was six-plus hours away from the ocean; actually getting to scuba dive was as likely as my sprouting wings.
Fast forward about ten years, to December 1996. I was working as a lifeguard at a YMCA in SoCal, and my branch's Aquatics Director brought in a scuba instructor with the idea of getting a training program rolling. Even with the significant employee discount, I totally couldn't afford the class--I earned $7/hour and only had 20 hours a week during the winter months--but I figured this was a now-or-never moment, so I ponied up the money and took the OW class.
Doing it meant that my diet for the next four months consisted of Banquet frozen dinners, day-old discounted pastries, and free samples from a supermarket deli, but scuba diving was exactly as awesome as I'd read it was. I could hang out underwater as long as I wanted (or at long as my tank lasted, anyway) and putz around, looking at awesome stuff and just plain having fun. I will never, ever eat another Banquet frozen dinner, but I loved the class, and I've been diving ever since.
