Blog 2104 – 06.29.2021

The People We Meet Along The Way

Sometimes we cross paths with people with whom we decide to share the road for as long as we can and as long as they too they are willing to share the way with us. I met a couple last week at the mobile home/ RV park where I have stayed already a month and will be staying as long as this, my last contract inspector work assignment, lasts. We only spoke briefly when I got back to my trailer evenings after work. The two were usually sitting outside their camper, parked in the space two over from mine with an empty space in between, enjoying the early summer Norfolk, Nebraska weather.

I learned the first time we spoke that they were up from their current home in Tucson, Arizona. Sunday, when I returned to my trailer after doing my weekly laundry at a nearby laundromat, I noticed that my new neighbors were breaking camp, packing up, and preparing to leave. So I asked them, “Where are you headed next?” They said that they had actually lived in this area for many years and had been visiting friends and were headed just north for a few days to visit with some family and friends there before heading to Grand Rapids, South Dakota. I asked if they intended to see the Crazy Horse Monument and they said that they had heard the head was mostly completed and that yes they would be stopping by to see the progress.

I further found out that they had been married fifty seven years with the wife only three years older than I am and the husband six. I shared with them a new take on an old joke that I heard Bill Maher use on his show last week, “Fifty-eight is the new fifty-seven. Most of us like to think we look younger than our actual age and are flattered when others say that we do. But then when we see recent pictures of ourselves or glance in the mirror we wonder if they might need a new prescription for eye wear.

The camera does not lie they say, but people do to others and even to themselves about their age. My new friends were gone when I returned from from lunch at the Whiskey Creek restaurant in Norfolk. We had parted leaving each other our best wishes for safe and happy travels. As I started out this piece, sometimes people cross our paths and we and they decide to travel on together down the road for many years, other encounters are brief and yet connections are made and we are reminded that we perhaps met before in another life or may yet again in this one or another down the road. I left my brief neighbors with the words Roy Rogers and Dale Evans would have sung to them as they did at the end of their nineteen-fifties TV show:

“Happy trails to you until we meet again…”

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

A special thank you to my lovely and loving wife, Linda Lee Stokes, with whom I have traveler the longest and furthest and hope to yet for many more miles and years. I miss you, Baby.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dQkNhFAp2MntoB7P90CAjHEEEm3KIfB3/view?usp=drivesdk

In This Life