There are so many things I am not. Young, trendy and techie are three of those.
That could explain why I felt like a dinosaur when my husband and I recently visited our son, his wife and our granddaughter in Silicon Valley, California.
In my last column, I described some of our travel adventures/challenges, but getting there was just the beginning. Oh my, yes.
Because I am a chronic, pathological observer and analyzer, roaming around a place as … um … “different” as the San Francisco area very nearly blew my circuits.
If I don’t continue to download observations from my trip, I’m afraid I may spontaneously combust, so please indulge me.
First, one more weird thing about our flight out there (as if anything could top the male flight attendant flirting with my husband): before the plane even left Atlanta, folks all around us, including the guy sitting next to me, closed their window shades and kept them closed for the entire five-hour trip.
We were passing over all kinds of scenic terrain—I could see it on the flight-tracking screen on the seat backs—but for some reason, lots of these passengers didn’t want to see any of it.
It was like nap time at a daycare center in there.
“What’s wrong with these people?” I whispered to my husband. “Why doesn’t anybody want to see anything?”
Observation number one: The world is full of people who fly through life with their shades closed. They think there’s nothing extraordinary to see, so for them, there isn’t. They miss so much.
Upon arriving at the San Francisco airport, it became apparent that while we were technically still in the U.S.A., we were, indeed, strangers in a strange land.
I was especially curious about an expensively dressed man on the airport shuttle train who, I deduced, surely must be an international criminal of some sort. A big Russian mobster, perhaps, or European drug lord. (Okay, so maybe they don’t usually ride airport shuttles. Humor me.)
This guy had such a strange, stony, scary demeanor that it drove me nuts not to know his story. I did, however, resist the urge to chat him up, realizing that if he told me anything, he might then have to kill me.
Observation number two: There are lots of strange people in this world, and I don’t have to analyze them all. God does, and that’s what counts. But I do need to be Jesus to them, even if that means simply smiling and letting them off the train first.
We drove from the airport to our son’s apartment in Mountain View, where the first microchip processor was developed back in the ’50s, starting the whole Silicon Valley phenomenon.
The trendy streets around the Mountain View area are teeming with young programmers from all over the world. Around every corner it seems you come upon another huge maze of buildings housing a company that has become a big part of our everyday lives—Google, Apple, and Facebook, among many others.
On the first day of our visit, I noticed a large bus rumbling down the narrow street in front of my son’s apartment.
“That’s the Facebook bus picking up employees in our apartment complex,” explained my daughter-in-law.
“This is like a ‘mill village’ for techies,” I thought.
It all seemed a bit surreal to me. And transient. It’s nearly impossible for normal people to buy houses out there. It feels like everybody is just passing through.
Observation number three: I love doing life with people I’ve known for decades, not just weeks. I value roots more than wings at this point in my life.
But then I am, after all, a dinosaur. And a happy one at that.