Non-Stop Reads: Kelly Lowe – Imagining a World Bigger Than You

Friday, July 26, 2013

Kelly Lowe – Imagining a World Bigger Than You

Imagining a world bigger than you is a prime element in imaging a book

by Kelly Lowe

I’ve heard many people say they’ve had an interesting life and would like to write a book. It takes more than that.

More than anything, writing a book requires having a sense of a world bigger than yourself. After all, to create a book is to create a separate world born out of the imagination—even if the book is nonfiction. I guess the way I came to understand that the world was bigger than little old me, was by seeing many different places and ways of living while I was a child. I feel very fortunate in that my father was a career Navy man and we had the opportunity to live in many interesting places as I was growing up. He was stationed in Virginia Beach, VA, when I was very young and I still remember the big waves at the beach. I went to middle school in San Diego and still find that to be one of my favorite places to visit.

We were stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii for a few years, long before they built the monument over the USS Arizona. At that time we could walk on the deck of the ship.

Perhaps my most favorite place that I lived was Guam. I celebrated my sixteenth birthday there. Loved the island living. We lived on the Naval Air base which had many recreational amenities. I got my life guard certification and fell in love with one of the life guards at the neighborhood pool. My Dad was chief of police on base, so I couldn’t get away with much.

While we lived in Guam I enjoyed our family vacations, including a couple of trips to Japan. That was when the US dollar was worth a whole lot more the yen. I remember that everything seemed so inexpensive. Shopping in Japan was a real bargain at that time.

It was a real culture shock for me when we were transferred to Philadelphia from Guam. I even had to wear shoes to school. It wasn’t long after I graduated from a Catholic high school in Philadelphia that my father was transferred to Satellite Beach, Florida. That was another culture shock.

Our move to Florida happeed to be during the space industry’s hay day. It was all about going to the Moon during that time. I was fortunate enough to be employed at Cape Canaveral by Grumman which had the contract for the lunar landing model.

It wasn’t too long after our landing on the moon project was completed that I left the space industry to become a flight attendant for Delta Airline. This was in the era when traveling was still fun. It was long before 9-11 and the long security lines at the airport. It was also before flight attendants could be married.

After graduating from Delta Airlines flight attendants school in Atlanta, Georgia, I was based in Chicago which was not an especially good place to be flying out of in the winter. And it was especially not a good place for Florida Girl to live in the winter. Needless to say, I requested a transfer to warmer weather as soon as it was possible, and it wasn’t long before I was calling New Orleans home.

I could stretch the truth and say my time involved in the NASA moon mission led me into astrology and my book, but it’s not true. However, I do believe all that I saw traveling the world gave me a sense of perspective, a vision that showed me that I was part of something larger than myself and gave me the confidence to capture that vision in a book.

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