Having a Vacation in Colorado

posted at 10:41 pm
on Aug. 28, 2008

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Today, I went dirt bike riding for the first time.

I didn’t die.

I did wear a bike helmet and running shoes instead of flip flops.

After I rode the dirt bike, I tried out an ATV—which I have done before, when I was 15.

This time, I could reach the foot pedals while seated so I didn’t have to stand the whole time.

I’m having a good time, visiting Susie’s relatives: David and Barbara, and their kids.  They have a lovely place near Denver.  It’s on a huge piece of land, and they have an awful lot of things that are very entertaining, like a great big TV and a motor home.

“I never dreamed I’d have so many toys,” David said to me in his garage, while we looked at the dirt bikes and basketballs and tool boxes and SUVs and everything else in his garage, after eating a delicious pork tenderloin on his fancy BBQ.

He wasn’t being boastful.  Nor was he wistful about the perils of materialism and the forgotten quest for a simple lifestyle, as I think many of my Vancouver friends might interpret his comment.

No, he was just saying: He’s a fortunate man in a fortunate family, whose bounty has exceeded what he ever dreamed of growing up.

And what’s interesting about that, is that we spent a fair amount of the day talking over lunch and while working on the motor home about the adversities and setbacks that we’d each faced.  Even good luck, it seems, doesn’t always come easily or without consequences.

Because the other thing that’s interesting, is how much he and she and the family seem to give to their community, to their friends and to their family.  They have a pretty wonderful spirit of wanting to help out whoever’s in the most need.  That’s not always the easiest person to help.

In fact, it’s pretty easy to help out your best friend, and harder to help out someone you don’t know that well, but often that’s the more valuable assistance, the place where the littlest gesture can have the biggest impact.

Anyway, those are the lessons I learned today: Help out those in need, be truly grateful for what you have, whatever that is, and always wear a helmet when dirt biking, even if it’s a girl’s helmet with flowers on it.  You never know.

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