As we drove back to Seattle from Cannon Beach last week, we drove past the Vader-Ryderwood exit on I-5, and I realized that exit has particular importance in my life because it’s the exit to the road not taken.

It was the late summer of 1974.  I had two little kids, including a four month old baby, but I needed to go back to work.  My husband made good money and spent same.  In order to keep the bill collectors from knocking on the door, I needed a job and a paycheck.

For the previous seven years I’d worked in the world of education–two years of teaching high school English and five years as a school librarian.  I had a Masters Degree as well as a teaching certificate from Arizona that I was reasonably sure would transfer over to Washington state.  The problem is, we were living in a small western Washington community, Pe Ell, where the teachers tended to die in place.  I was told there were no current openings and weren’t likely to be any in the foreseeable future.

I ended up applying for teaching jobs in other nearby communities.  I also reached out to the local district manager for the Equitable Life Assurance Society, the company where my father had worked for many years.  Policy holders were encouraged to call the local office collect.  I was a policy holder, so I called collect and asked for a job which the district manager, Paul Huntington, subsequently offered. I hesitated, though.  It seemed as though a teaching job would be more in keeping with what I had in mind, but then came a fateful telephone call. In late August the Superintendent of Schools in the Vader/Ryderwood district called to offer me a job, saying in the course of the conversation, “We have this particular class of third graders.”

As he spoke, I could see them in my mind’s eye–a group of scraggly, unruly, mischievous hellions–who had mowed down the first three teachers who’d had the misfortune of being assigned to teach them.  Unfortunately I knew classes just like that–from the inside out.  My grade school class from Greenway School left a trail of retiring, dead, or dying teachers in our wake, including a nervous breakdown or two along the way.

The manner in which the superintendent emphasized the word “particular” sent little warning lights flashing through my psyche.  I told him, thanks, but no thanks, and then called of the district manager in Longview and told him I was his new “man from Equitable.”  (That was their advertising slogan back then–talk to the man from Equitable.  At the time, there had been precious few women allowed to join that “old boys” network).

But join it I did.  Selling insurance was a job I could do and did do–for ten years, long enough to earn a pension, even.  I earned good money, enough to support my kids and me, even when no child support was forthcoming.  But it wasn’t something I loved doing.  It wasn’t something I aspired to.  It wasn’t my dream job.

Still, I wanted to do it to the best of my ability.  So, when I moved to Seattle in the early eighties and the insurance company offered to pay half the freight for any agent who signed up for the Dale Carnegie course, I enrolled immediately.  After all, it seemed to me that a class in “winning friends and influencing people” couldn’t hurt my insurance career.  It turns out I was wrong about that, completely wrong.  Instead of making me a better insurance salesman, it made me quit the insurance business completely.  Not right away, but eventually.

When I arrived at the first class and discovered Dale Carnegie was actually a course in public speaking, I tried to get them to give me a refund.  That was a no-go, so I took the course anyway, doing the required presentations along the way.  One of them called for a talk about something that changed my life, and I spoke about my first husband’s and my chance encounter with a serial killer in 1970 led me to become a far more independent person than I had been before.  Later that night, after the class, one of my fellow students, Carol Erickson, said to me, “Someone should write a book about that.”

I had always wanted to be a writer.  Shortly after our wedding, my first husband, who was allowed in a creative writing class that was closed to me told me there was only going to be one writer in our family and he was it.  So while I was married to him, I put my own writing ambitions on hold.  Other than writing snippets of poetry, I did nothing about my own writing for the next dozen years.

That night, when I heard Carol’s words, the thought that went through my head was, “Why not?  I’m divorced.  What have I got to lose?”  That was on a Thursday night.  On Sunday afternoon, I sat down and started writing my first novel–one that never sold to anyone. Two years later, when I had to choose between selling insurance and writing books, it wasn’t even close.  I left insurance behind in a heartbeat.

Right this moment, I’m forty years and more than fifty published books away from that “particular group of third graders.”  To my knowledge, I’ve never met even one of them, but I’m grateful to them nonetheless.  One thing inevitably leads to another.  That class sent me off on the insurance sales path which led me to Dale Carnegie which led to. . . well . .  here.  All steps are necessary.  No steps may be skipped.

The phone call from that school superintendent was a tipping point in my life–the thing that changed everything.  And each time I pass that Vader/Ryderwood exit, I am filled with thanksgiving to that class and to Robert Frost, too, because that exit not taken really has made all the difference.