Embrace the Unexpected

Tehachipi dusted with snow. A field full of jumbo jets in Mojave. The almost comically hard snow line above the desert. Our first night sleeping in a Walmart parking lot.

If our trip had gone as planned we would have missed all this. We would never have planned a trip which included being stuck in Bakersfield because the freeways were blocked due to snow.

You cannot plan for everything. Indeed, you should plan. But as every nomad knows no plan survives contact with the highway.

Discontent and unhappiness are caused by our refusal to acknowledge and accept what is. Call it serendipity, the universe, God. Embrace the adventures that happen all on their own.

Like most true stories, there’s just no way we could make this stuff up.

9 comments

  1. I wish I was with you guys! That sounds so great. Living life just the way I like it — full of “happenstance” and miracles. Have fun!

  2. When you get snow, make snow cones. (It goes without saying to avoid the yellow ones. You can always trust me to make sure dying high-school jokes still circulate.)

    I agree that plans can be pretty wispy things when the hurricane comes in and whips the paper they’re written on through a concrete wall. But does Sue let you embrace all of these unexpected snow sprites? Even if they’re in mini-skirts?

  3. You and Frank Zappa . . .

    Not sure what you’re drinking that’s putting miniskirts on the snow sprites, though it does remind me of the leather miniskirt Sue almost bought when we first moved to northern California.

    So close . . .

  4. We would never have planned a trip which included being stuck in Bakersfield
    While in college in Boston, I fell in love with a guy “from the coast.” When I opted to travel home with him that summer, the friend from Pasadena that we drove with said, “Bakersfield is not the coast.” When I applied for a temporary drafting job there, the woman who interviewed me said, “I will not hire you. Get out now! If you stay here, you will never, ever be able to leave. You will not have the income or the home equity to go anywhere else. Leave right now!”
    That was 1972. No one else would even interview me because I was a female draftsman, so I flew home and got a summer job. But I married Bakersfield, and I still go there often.

  5. Howdy, Patty! We like Bakersfield, and I kick myself that I never made the time to see Buck at the Crystal Palace.

    But it’s not “the coast” by any stretch.

    Wait; you’ve been married 40 years?

  6. Sue and I have just decided to let people think we’re the right age to have a 7-year-old. Everyone guesses our age anywhere from 10-15 years younger than we are, so I’m just gonna be 39 forever like another great comedian was.

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