Connection

“You have excellent penmanship”, says the young woman walking by our rickety old picnic table, crowded in amongst about 15 others on the patio of a whiskey distillery in tiny Buena Vista, CO.

“Hm?”, mutters the old cowboy at the end of the table, not sure she is speaking to him. He’s clutching an old Bic pen in his leathered hand and writing what appears to be poetry in a tattered spiral notebook. His shoulder length gray hair spills out from under his brown leather hat, and the gun in the holster on his hip catches the fading light. (I kid you not, I can’t make this stuff up… he really did have a gun. This is small town Colorado, after all… it’s not all that uncommon. Those of you who have ventured beyond Denver and Boulder in CO know what I mean).

I say “our” table because I’m at the other end of it, sipping at my flight of 4 whiskeys. This is absurd for a couple of reasons. First, the idea of a “flight” of anything in this town is kind of hilarious. It’s just four shots is what it is. Also, I don’t like whiskey. But when in Rome…

“You have excellent penmanship”, she repeats.

“Oh, thanks”.

“Do you know that they don’t teach kids cursive anymore? I have a six year old, and he is only learning to print. Can you imagine? What if someone finds your notebook 50 years from now. Will they be able to read it?”

Now I’m paying attention. Seriously? They don’t teach kids cursive? The cowboy looks distressed. He looks down at his notebook. Then over at his old-fashioned, his third in the short time that I’ve been sitting there. He seems to be deciding if he’ll allow this intrusion. He decides to allow it.

“Why?”, he asks, genuinely confused.

What transpires is a short but lively conversation between three totally unconnected people, with basically nothing in common, other that the firmly held opinion that kids should be taught to write cursive. There’s me, the whiskey-tasting finance nerd from the big city, this old cowboy, and this young woman in overalls and a ponytail, easily 20 years younger than me, and probably 50 years younger than the old man.

Connection. Such an interesting thing. Sometimes ephemeral, gone like a puff of smoke. I’m back at my hotel now, and I’ll never see those two again. That’s the sort of connection that permeates travel adventures – sometimes you follow the thread and keep in contact with people you meet, and sometimes you don’t.

Sometimes connection is more tangible, though… less vaporous and more like honey, pouring over you and warming you, making you wonder where it came from all of a sudden and making you realize you were a bit chilly before and didn’t even know it. Great friendships are like this. Love is like this.

I’m off to Santa Fe tomorrow, to see some old (“old” sounds like a crazy thing to say, since I met these people all of like four months ago, but that’s how it is sometimes, isn’t it… suddenly you find yourself with new old friends) MEA friends. These are the honey people from my summer.

I only stopped in Buena Vista because it’s on the way and I’d never seen it, there was some good hiking to break up the drive, and why not. Who knew I’d get a lecture on the merits of cursive script from a drunk, gun-toting old cowboy? And who knew I’d have anything in common with him? We may disagree on second amendment issues, but I’m right there with him on the crucial issue of kids writing in cursive.

Maybe we can all look for more avenues for connection, no matter how small. I think it warms us when we can find it.

More from Santa Fe in a few days…

Cheers!

Traveling Girl