The view of rolling hills and distant mountains from I-15 into Mesquite, Nevada, this evening was like something out of a Mars movie. It was just light enough to see the details: a little snow on that mountain, surreal stripes on the slide of a bluff, a crusty pale edge just under the lip of a plateau.
The ground in the median of the Interstate was black—was the dirt naturally black and hard, or was there some kind of dirt on the dirt. Road grime, maybe? Nah. There was too much of it. Maybe they dumped black dirt on the red dirt to fill in the median when they built the road. Little tufts of desert plants looked like they were thriving there.
As it all went whizzing by me, I realized I was soon going to be missing spectacular scenery after sundown. I had planned to arrive at Zion National Park after dark and allow myself to be pleasantly surprised by nature’s big show in the morning, but I didn’t want to miss what I thought I might see on the way to the canyon. So I decided to stop.
At first, I looked for campgrounds using my iPad. All I could find were RV parks. They aren’t all Jeep-sleep-friendly, so I hesitated. But then I came over a rise and saw Mesquite sparkling below me. It was bigger than I thought it would be. At the first exit, lo and behold, there was a casino. (I AM in Nevada, just an hour or so north of Vegas.) I decided to drive down to see if they had a cheap room.
The Casa Blanca Casino looked very nice: tall palms, water falling off of spotlit cliffs, an opulent u-shaped cobblestone drive. They only had a king smoking room for $99. Another day, I would have taken it, but my cold has hung on too long, and even the thought of a smoky room made me think I had to cough. They have a sister property, though, not far away, and the rooms were only $41.95. I made a reservation sight unseen, and headed over here.
I’m sitting in the bowling alley of the Virgin River Casino. It’s not quite as nice as the Casa Blance (thus the difference in price), but it will do just fine. Just finished a burger (very good) and chips. It’s league night, and I have a great spectator’s seat at a table behind the teams. It’s so much fun to watch the bowlers and think about how they might know each other, where they’ve come from, and what they might do for a living. It’s obvious they are from all walks of life, all ages, all dispositions.
The thought strikes me that bowling is one of the few places so many different kinds of people can mingle and get along just fine. I’m sure there are other places, but all I can think of right now other than bowling is weddings. That’s probably because I just came from a Vegas wedding. One of my best friends and her now-new husband invited friends and family to join them as they stood in a downtown wedding chapel and tried really hard not to giggle and cry as they said their vows.
It was a perfect wedding. We had people of all kinds wearing the same purple T-shirts that said “Barbie and Ken, 2/29/12.” There was a young up and coming actress, a retired Marine, an insurance account executive, a farmer/trucker, an 18-month-old live cupiedoll, two brave women in wheelchair (one missing an arm and two legs), an attorney, an apartment maintenance man, a nurse, a hearing aid specialist and a microbiologist. And a writer. After the ceremony, we went bowling and absolutely, truly had a blast. My purple T-shirt was an extra large, and longer than my dress, so it looked like I was wearing nothing but a T-shirt with black nylons and bowling shoes. Most of us really sucked at bowling, but we were the bomb when it came to getting along.
The thought crossed my mind that if we can all get along at a wedding, it should be easy for us to get along in other places. At the wedding, we got along because we were there for Barbie and Ken. We got along because we chose to.
At work, whether you work for someone else or yourself, you could make the same decision. If there is someone who rubs you the wrong way, you could decide to let it slide. And then you could make the same decision every day. When I have a client who is difficult, I can resign the account, or I can decide to let it slide and just do the work, bending to let annoyance slide off of me like raindrops off of a leaf. (That’s a Buddhist metaphor.)
Now that I think of it, there’s another time we all seem to get along: a funeral. Ironically, the second of my two best friends texted me 15 minutes before the wedding ceremony to tell me her father had just died. Life turns and turns. A wedding is like a mountain in the glow of a sunset. A funeral is like a vast expanse of hard black dirt on top of red dirt. You don’t know if it’s real.
