Dec 14 2009
If you manage nothing else today, go get the new eBook from Seth Godin and a ton of other fabulous folks, here. And read it immediately. Print pages out and festoon your tree or menorah or whatever with them. Print copies and give to everyone you meet. Because it rocks. And it Matters Now.
Jan 15 2009
Everyone knows you never pick up hitchhikers.
We were driving home from Christmas in Nevada, at my parents’ place. We’d had a white christmas, the boys’ first ever, and ours too. It was cold cold cold, snowy, and perfectly wintry. We’d had a lovely time (which I’ll talk about in another post). And as we drove past the truck stop and onto the onramp of the I-80, a hitchhiker caught our eye.
He looked young. He looked familiar. And he was holding a sign that said “Sacramento, CA. Any help would be appreciated, thank you!” It was the exclamation and the small smiley face next to it that got me. We drove past him, made it a few hundred yards down the road, looked at each other, and turned around at the next off ramp to circle back and pick him up.
And thus began our journey with “Chip”. That’s not his name, it’s just what he goes by, because someone a long time ago noticed his chipmunk cheeks. It’s a name that suits him.
The boys were instantly thrilled to have someone in back with them. They chatted with him about their bionicles, about the snow, and the cold. They were entranced. He told them about sleeping under the freeway overpass, and they compared that to the warm beds they’d been in. There were some thoughtful looks. They asked him about the feathers dangling off his backpack, and he promptly untied them and gave each boy a feather.
As we chatted, he warmed up considerably. We talked about books, about politics, about world situations, about the state of things. He was stunned that a family in a minivan could hold world views so close to his own. And eventually, we asked the question, “How did you start traveling?”
Tired of the drugs and the chaos in his family of origin, he ran away from home at 14, and hit the road as a Traveler. Apparently, when your expectations are minimal, the world is your oyster. You’d think a kid with a start like that would be rough around the edges, wary, cynical. But not Chip. He was absolutely fabulous. He talked to the boys like they were people, he talked to Jason and I like we were still trustworthy, he talked about the world like he was grateful to be in it. Having slept under the freeway overpass for four days I knew for a fact to have been below 20 degrees, Chip only talked about the beautiful snow, his most excellent sleeping bag, and the kindness of the folks running the truck stop across the street where he got hot coffee in the mornings.
As we drove on, we decided that largesse was in order, so we offered that Chip could come with us, have a hot meal, a shower, and a warm bed, and then head on his way in the morning. So that’s what he did. And a nicer, more colorful, more engaging houseguest, we could not have imagined. He told us tales of his adventures, we told him about our plans for the boat. There was a great deal of mutual admiration on both sides.
So what’s the lesson here? Depends on you, really. The lesson I chose to take from this is that it’s possible to be a whole lot happier with almost nothing than it might be with a whole lot of something. It’d be easy to be a whiner, were you to find yourself in Chip’s circumstances, without anything more in this world than the pack you carry. But that’s overly simplistic. He had friends all over the world, he had places to see, and adventures strung out in front of him as far as he could see. Tomorrow was going to be spectacular, as far as Chip was concerned. And I think a lot of us could try that.
