As many of you already know, I had grand plans this year for our Summer of America. After a year of sitting at home thanks to Covid, I was ready to be on the move. It was time to see the country. My extensive traveling tour took us all the way to the Grand Canyon in the West, to the middle of Florida in the East, then back again. We racked up 6,000 miles on the road this summer. We created a playlist of favorite songs, packed a lot of snacks, stayed in roadside motels and mega-hotels, and made the best memories in between.
I learned a lot about our country as we drove those miles. Mainly that people are people no matter where they live or what they look like. There are poor people and rich people. Nice people and mean people. People who have a ready smile and easy laugh, and people whose faces are hard and set in place.
The accents might be different, the clothes and shoes vary depending on the climate. The skin tones are dark or light. The food changes from state to state (green or red salsa, anyone?), the art depicts the local culture, and the landscape transforms from stone to sand to green.
But there is one thing that I noticed everyone had in common no matter where we traveled – we love taking those pictures, America.
From the top of the Grand Canyon to the corner of Winslow, Arizona, we pose and smile as soon as someone whips out their phone. We love to snap a picture of where we’ve been, proof that we stood on that very spot at that moment in time.
We probably took thousands of photos this summer and I watched hundreds of other families do the same. We would all stand in line in a certain spot, next to a statue or a historical marker or a giant bunny you could sit on. And I noticed that there were a few unwritten rules everyone seemed to innately understand and follow while taking these pictures.
1 – No cutting in line. Wait your turn. Don’t sneak around the side and try to grab a picture. Go to the back of the line and be patient. No one likes a line-cutter.
2 – Don’t hog the picture spot. Take a few photos of your family and move on. People are waiting, so don’t be rude.
3 – My favorite rule of all. Offer to take the picture of the people in front of you. Grab their phone and say a few cheesy things like “We made it to the Top of the Ball of Yarn!” Become a photo expert and take some shots close up then far away. Giggle with the strangers as you hand them back their phone and say “See you at the Jackrabbit!”
I watched family after family have their pictures taken by strangers. And you know what?
It gave me a little bit of hope that our country was going to be ok.
If we can trust someone we’ve never met to hold our very expensive phones and be the coordinator of our most precious possessions – our family pictures – then maybe, just maybe we can trust each other in the big things too. Maybe we have more faith in our fellow countrymen than we like to believe. Maybe America is not such a bad place where all we do is argue and call each other names.
Maybe the real America is found somewhere near a Giant Jackrabbit – In a line of families all waiting to take a photo.
Maybe someone offers to take a picture of your family and you hand over your phone and after a few shots you ask where that person is from and they say Utah and you say Louisiana and then you invite each other to visit your state sometime. Maybe you decide to snap a picture with that person from Utah just for the fun of it. And you don’t ever know her name or why she’s on the road or who she’s voting for or what she believes. But you know she took your picture. And she smiled a lot. And she told you that you had a beautiful family.
