I had an interesting, and fun, encounter with a couple of strangers last evening that left me feeling happy and a little more optimistic than I have been for a long time. My new girlfriend (Cathy) and I decided to spend a few days at my cabin on Lake Almanor in the Northern California mountains. Lake Almanor is located very near the foot of Mount Lassen, in the location of the 2021 Dixie Fire that devastated almost a million acres of the Sierra Nevada forest. A few years ago my late wife and myself I moved furniture from her family cabin that had been condemned by the Forest Service. That cabin, near South Lake Tahoe, had been built by her father and grand-father in the early 1920’s and been her family’s “mountain getaway” until a change to the freeway drainage washed a nearby cliff away, endangering the cabin. We needed someplace to put all of the old things imbued with family sentimental value – so we purchased another cabin in a country club located on a peninsula in the middle of Lake Almanor.

Cathy and I decided to go to the country club “pub” for a happy hour wine (or two). It was a bustling place, luckily there were two empty bar stools at the end of the bar for us. The lady bartender seemed happy to see me after a year absence. She was full of stories, including funny pantomimes to illustrate some of them. A second lady bartender soon started a conversation with Cathy about a lot of things, eventually talking about her art and many other things. Cathy is an accomplished artist (her website is Catherinelee.com), meaning that when the discussion turned to art she was all in. By this time the couple sitting next to us began to join in to what had become a fun and rather free-wheeling discussion group.

I ended up in an engaging conversation with this couple on a wide range of interesting topics, including life with their new “blended” family where they all of a sudden have five young children, three dogs and a gold fish to manage. I talked about my problems with moving cabins, we talked about all sorts of personal and not so perfect topics. While I only know my side of the conversation, I believe all of us had a really nice time chatting and getting to know each other. At some point in the conversation one of us (perhaps me since I am often rather “politically incorrect”) pointed out that we were enjoying each other in a very free and open way, even though it was pretty obvious that we are widely separated in our political views. I think they are pretty conservative, and I know I am pretty liberal. We all stopped at that point and took stock of my comment, agreed that I was almost certainly correct, and decided that we didn’t even want to explore just how different our views might be. We all just smiled, noted that while that might be true it didn’t matter in the least, decided to ignore all of that – and dove right back into our conversation.

This morning I remembered that conversation with renewed optimism that perhaps the contentious red-blue, right-left, us-them mindset might be abating. Perhaps all of us are getting fed up with the anger, perhaps all of us are releasing that we are all hoping for improving things and just perhaps there are many parts to the answers that can be formed by joining our thoughts and ideas. Maybe it is more fun liking each other and working together to identify the problems, searching for solutions together.

In any case, this encounter with “conservatives” (at least I assume they are, we never really discussed that enough for me to know for sure) was fun, interesting, fruitful and just plain felt friendly and good. I recalled that I had many similar encounters with people with many different points of view on my trip across America. There is MUCH more that we have in common as people than we have differences, and in fact, most of those differences aren’t actually even different – we just think they are until we explore with an open mind and heart.

Last evening’s happy hour chat(s) was (were) really great. On the one hand they were fun, but more importantly they reminded me how wonderful it can feel to just relax and enjoy each other (including our differences).