Or he used to, anyway.

I know this because he told me so.

It was the summer of 2003, and after a year of relentlessly pitching Jane magazine, one of the editors finally picked up an essay of mine for their “It Happened to Me” column. The piece – about my life as a chronic bedwetter – was featured in their June/July issue, and for two months I practically moonwalked from newsstand to newsstand, buying multiple copies at a time, essentially begging the clerk to ask me why I wanted so many.

“Funny you should ask,” I’d reply, flipping straight open to the page.

In case you’re wondering, yes, I am in fact cringing as I recount this, but I’ll slog on because it speaks to a larger truth. Publishing anything, especially in a national magazine, is such an unimaginably tough task that when I finally caught a break, I was so shocked and awed that I unabashedly basked, big and bold as a sea lion at Fisherman’s Wharf.

So naturally, when I saw Elijah Wood at the airport, I bounded toward him with a magazine in hand.

“Hey,” I said, towering like an Ent over Frodo. “I really love your movies and well, in case you get bored on the plane, here’s something I wrote that might make you laugh. It’s a story about bedwetting.”

He looked down at the story, up at me, down once more, and back up with a supernova for a smile.

“It’s you!” he yelped.

“Huh?”

“I read this already,” he said. “It’s brilliant!”

Far from basking in the moment, it took everything in me not to faint at his feet. I mean, what were the odds?

Elijah seemed genuinely thrilled to meet me, and quickly confessed that he too was a chronic bedwetter. (Though he stopped way earlier than I did.) We spent an hour or so talking while we waited for our flight to board. And while I haven’t seen or spoken to him since, it lives on as one of the most surprising – and exciting – moments of my life.

Apparently, the encounter left some small impression on him too, as he recalled it a couple years later during a Q&A with Jane.

Here’s that clip…