The world has changed. The following is a brief (hopefully!) recounting of an amalgam of experience from my youth. I grew up in the 60s on a ranch in northeastern New Mexico. We were so far off the grid that the first several years we lived there we didn’t even have a telephone, and cell phones were still science fiction.

We did have mail, delivered once a day, and sometimes friends and family would write us a letter to say that they would be coming by on a particular day, on their way to a vacation in Red River or Taos, or up in Colorado. (Our ranch was a convenient mid-point between Texas, where my parents grew up, and the popular vacation spots in the mountains.) When such letters arrived, my parents would quickly reply — by letter, of course — saying that we would be expecting them, with dinner, a bed for the night, horseback riding if they wanted to stay longer, etc.

Then, when the appointed day and time came, dinner prepared and everyone in our family awaiting their arrival — nothing. Dinner was ready at 6:00, and we would usually go ahead and eat soon after, but keep the remainder ready and warm until 8:00 or so, by which time we figured they would already have eaten if they still arrived. Sometimes they did show up late, and sometimes not, but always we speculated as to what might have happened.

When finally they did show up, or we received a letter a few days later apologizing for not showing, we would learn what had happened to keep them from their appointed visit, and my dad pointed out a common theme. No matter how many different scenarios we might have speculated about as the possible cause of their no-show, the cause was almost always something we had not considered.

So one of the life lessons I learned early, and that still sticks with me, mostly, is that life is what happens while we are making other plans, and that when someone doesn’t show, or answer, or whatever, I just carry on with life, and eventually I will find out what happened. I understand that on occasion horrible things do happen, but almost never the things we worry about. And the mundane is FAR more common than the catastrophic.