I was going to write something uplifting for the new year – and if you want that right now you could revisit my post from January 2017 (see past posts) which is even more relevant now than then – but I cannot get this guy out of my mind. No, it’s not the one you think. This one has a longish gray ponytail and a silver Lexus with a solar-powered prayer wheel on the dashboard. And this is how we met.

Roberto and I took our ten-year old grandsons to Meow Wolf. It was our first time and we were blown away by the art, the craft, the cleverness and the delight in every room and around every corner. I can’t describe it here, but if you are not local please google it to get the idea. After a couple of hours of amazement we staggered out into the warm December day. Always being hungry, the boys headed for the food trucks. We loaded up with sandwiches and curly fries and found an empty picnic table nearby. As we were happily munching and reminiscing about the Meow Wolf experience a silver Lexus pulled up to the curb just a few yards away and stopped. The driver sat looking at his phone for several minutes, maybe waiting for a child he dropped off inside, I guessed.  We took our time, marveling at the solar-powered prayer wheel on the car’s dashboard, twinkling as it turned in the sunlight. We also marveled at the length of a curly fry and wondered whether we could enter it in the Guinness Book of World Records.

After 45 minutes or so the driver got out of the car — that’s when I saw his gray ponytail — and walked over to the espresso truck. And that’s when a grandson, whose hearing is a lot better than ours, said that he thought the car was running. “It couldn’t be!” I said. “He’s been there so long.” The boys went over to the car and felt it. Yup, they declared it was vibrating. (more…)