The Place: Flipnotics

The Cup: Bill enjoyed a nice, cool glass of water while I went for a regular old cup of coffee. They make a fine cup at Flipnotics, in case you’re interested.

Background: On my wish list, you will find a list of interesting people, mostly Austonians, who I am hoping will sit down for coffee with me this year. I have already crossed off Clint Greenleaf and Bridget Dunlap. Now, I’m happy to report, “Anyone who lives in the Pecan Grove RV Park in Austin,” can get crossed through as well. This fortunate success was the result of one of my favorite people in town, Dave Miller, who’s story is interesting enough, it may force me to break my “stranger” rule just so I can share him with you.

Austin, being the awesome city it is, causes people to pack up their worldly belongings and move here at alarming rates. The last statistic I heard was that 1000 new people move here every week. Why? You want my list, or would you rather see the list from people in the list business? The Austin Business Journal’s editor Colin Pope (he’s on my wish list) did a great job creating a list of all the lists we show up on. Have a look AFTER you finish here. Or at least come back, because you aren’t going to want to miss what convinced Bill to move here. Seriously, if I gave you all day, I highly doubt you’d guess. More on that coming up after some:

Common Grounds

1. How did you make your first buck? Guiding hunters on the family land around age 5 or 6.
2. What is your favorite way to unwind? Meditation (He and Willie Nelson may share another relaxation technique. But that’s not been validated).
3. What is the best gift you ever received? Probably a memento from the woman I was lucky enough to love (We’ll get more on her after a bit).
4. What was the last movie you saw? I have Netflix, so I’m always watching something. That last movie I saw in the theater was Skyfall.
5. What is your best feature? My tolerance.
6. What is something you can’t tolerate? Prejudice and arrogance.
7. If you could swap lives with one person for a day, who would you choose? The President (Bill is the second stranger in a row who gave this answer. I’d have to spend a little time narrowing my list down, but I can say with total surety that the President does not make the short list. Or the long one for that matter. That job looks like the hardest, most stressful, thankless employment option imaginable).
8. Who was the most influential person in your life? My mom. She was a great supporter. Growing up, I had very high self-esteem and was taught to be independent.
9. What is the biggest issue facing society today? As a species, it is the effects we’re having on the planet.

Bill has seen a whole lot of this magnificent planet of ours. Not always under the best of circumstances, unfortunately. For example, he saw Vietnam, mostly from the air, when he served our country in the Vietnam war as a helicopter pilot. We didn’t linger on this topic. Not because I wasn’t interested, nor do I think it was a topic Bill woud have shied away from. We simply had moved along before digging in and didn’t find our way back there.

After the war, Bill moved to Colorado where he fed his travel desires by taking work that was seasonal. He worked as a bartender and then was a part of the creation of a restaurant. Being in the food industry in a place that was dependent on tourists, allowed him time off during “off-season” to hit the open road.

Eventually, Bill determined he should finish college, so he went to the University of Tennessee. It was here that Bill began having chest pains. His dad had suffered a heart attack so he knew to take such pains seriously. He headed to the doctor, who after a series of questions and tests, determined Bill’s ticker was tocking just fine. Turned out his problem wasn’t his heart, it was his head. Specifically, stress was to blame.

Doctors love their prescription pads. Got high blood pressure? There’s a pill for that. Acid reflux got you cranky? No fear, a pill is here. Can’t sleep? We’ve got two pills for that. Do you want the one that will make you sleep, or can I interest you in the one that makes you not need sleep at all? NZT-48 anyone? In Bill’s case, his doc’s answer to stress…valium. Brilliant!

OK, so I’m not a doctor. I don’t even play one on TV. But while a medical degree I lack, common sense I’ve got (most of the time). And valium doesn’t seem like the best place to start to treat stress.

Bill took the pills, realized they made him like a zombie, and decided he’d look for another answer. He found it in meditation.

“Do you meditate?” Bill asks. I want to say “Yes!” but I’m not sure sitting for 10-15 minutes once a week, maybe, while entire imagined scenarios from work play out in my head or conversations I’ve yet to have flash though my mind like a movie, constitutes meditation. As much as I wish the answer was not just “yes” but “yes, I meditate regularly and it has made me a happier, kinder, gentler, more tolerant human being”, the truth is, I do it occasionally and the only thing consistent in my practice is its imperfection. So I tell him that.

Bill is a happy, kind, gentle, tolerant human being, so he tells me it’s OK.

The helicopter pilot training he received in the Army, coupled with flight instructor training he got after, made him a desirable candidate for work in the oilfields. He started work in the Gulf of Mexico and then moved to Africa. The job was four weeks on and four weeks off, so for 16 years, Bill lived half his life in Angola, Africa and the other half was lived, well, everywhere else.

I imagine this life and am instantly green with envy. Of course I’m only envious about four of those weeks in the eight week cylces. The work was hard and it was dangerous. When I ask Bill about a bucket list, he tells me its something he never thought much about because he didn’t expect to live past 50. In addition to this dangerous work in Africa, Bill has survived being shot and recovered from drug-resistant falciparum malaria – twice.

Danger was something Bill was willing to trade for adventure and freedom. I didn’t get to hear even a fraction of Bill’s wild travel tales, but I did hear about the Belgian stewardess who Bill met up with in various exotic locations around the globe. Their love was intense; the relationship magical. It was a golden time. But like Ponyboy explains as he quotes Robert Frost in one of my favorite teenage books/movies, Outsiders, “Nothing gold can stay.” For Bill and the girl in this star-crossed love story, geography proved to be both an ingredient in the magic and also the cause for dissolution. They are still friends and exchange emails often.

Bill told me about another character from his travelling years. He had traveled to an island to do some diving and came across another helicopter pilot. This guy was a bit of a legend among other divers because of his unique breathing ability. Bill tells me that when they’d go on dives, most people would be down for 45 minutes or so and then have to return to the top because their oxygen tanks were empty. This guy would go down for 1 1/2 to 2 hours at a pop. And he wasn’t skip breathing or doing anything dangerous. In addition to this incredible breathing, he always saw way more than anyone else and came up with the most incredible pictures.

Interested in his secret? Staying still.

While all the other divers were off exploring the sea, looking for interesting marine critters, this guy went straight to the ocean floor and parked himself. When you just pass through, you are perceived as a threat and everything scrambles to go into hiding. When you float in, calmly take your spot and are inert, suddenly you are off their radar.  After about ten minutes or so, everything comes alive. That makes good sense.

I wish there had been time for Bill to share more from his globetrotting. We’ll definitely be grabbing another cup so I can hear more. This is the point where our story goes stateside.

Naked ladies.

That got your attention, didn’t it! It got Bill’s too. At long last, we get to the reason Bill moved to Austin, TX in 1980. No, I’m not kidding.

Bill headed to Austin to visit his step-brother – a dentist who Bill tells me was doing quite well for himself. He was thrilled that Bill was coming and had made arrangements to take his sailboat out to Lake Travis with Bill and some girls. Bill describes the lake back then, before years of drought dried it out, and I can imagine that the beauty alone might have been enough to coax him into staying. As Bill was sitting on the stern of the boat, enjoying the view and a glass of champagne, he turned around just in time to see the girls come up from below deck, minus the swimsuits they’d been wearing minutes before. Naked ladies! Bill recovered from his shock and managed to spend an enjoyable day in the buff himself. He tells me he burned places he’d never burned before and I decide it’s time to move on to another subject.

Move on we did, to more naked ladies. I know, right? Those were the 80s, I guess. Bill’s step-brother had a neighbor who’d also been in Vietnam and thought he and Bill would have a lot to talk about. So after the lake, they headed to his place to visit by the pool. The guy comes to the door in a robe and takes them back to the pool area, where two models from Houston are tanning themselves – every square inch.

After the day of naked ladies, new friends, champagne and the lake, Bill decided he did, in fact, need a sailboat of his own, and what better place than Lake Travis to enjoy her?

After 33 years, he finally wore the sailboat out and had to say goodbye to it just a few months ago. I say something about how hard that must have been, and he confirms. I suspect it was even harder than he’s letting on.

Bill made it to my wish list because of his somewhat unusual abode. Bill lives in the famous Pecan Grove RV Park, just across Lady Bird Lake from bustling downtown. Pecan Grove isn’t your grandma’s RV park. It’s a gem and has attracted many interesting residents through the years. My husband’s man crush, Matthew McConaughey, reportedly lived there for a time. Bill tells me the two most recent additions to the park are both attorneys. There is a guy living there who drives a Maserati, for crying out loud. All walks of life, all sorts of interesting characters with fascinating stories. It’s my mecca. I dream of living there!

What’s the best part about his home, according to Bill? Besides the wonderful mix of neighbors and the proximity to everything that’s great about Austin, it’s Bill’s one true love – nature. Specifically, its the kayak access to Lady Bird Lake that Bill loves the most. And at least every other day you can find Bill in his kayak somewhere on the lake, enjoying nature’s majesty.

He admits that it’s grown increasingly crowded in the years since he first started getting out there. Stand-up paddleboarding is the latest craze to take to the water. Bill says its good, though. He’s an active conservationist and knows that the more people spend time in nature and appreciate it, the better chance they’ll have of preserving it and defending it against developers who are looking to profit from it.

Bill is perplexed by something he sees out on the water. It’s not the new species of Yellow Crown Night Heron he sees, or the varieties of turtles he comes across. It’s not the 250 year old trees lining the lake or the fact that Davy Crockett himself may have sat under one. What amazes Bill as he sits, quietly observing the world from his water vessel, is the newest creature to be found on the water: the smartphone.

“People are just too dependent on those things. They can’t put them down,” Bill says going on to describe scenes of people, head-down, staring at a screen as life, real life, happens all around them. “If they would just take the time to look around them, they’d be amazed,” he adds.

I feel a twinge of guilt as I recognize myself in that description. Last weekend, as Dave and I walked home from the bookstore, we came across some gorgeous red flowers. My first instinct was to get out the phone and snap a pic. When I was at a conference this week, I felt compelled to Tweet that I was excited to be there. Then when I unexpectedly became a presenter at the conference, I was thankful that my pal Terry snapped a pic of me in the front of the room to commemorate the experience. Last night on the way to dinner, I checked my Twitter stream to see what was going on and realized Terry had a new podcast ready to listen to. We pulled into the parking place at the restaurant and I said, “Sorry hon, let me just send this Tweet real quick to let Terry know I’m going to listen to the show after dinner.” Dave said, “It’s ok, I’m used to this. You know this is standard procedure now – every time we get into the car.”  Dave didn’t say this to make me feel bad. In fact, it was said in a tone suggesting, “It’s all good. I’m used to this and it’s cool.”

Bill expounds upon his technology dependence observation by adding, “And they just cannot stop talking. I’m out there looking to get away, to find some quiet, and all I hear is non-stop talking. Sometimes, I will slowly paddle over to them, and when they notice me I’ll say, ‘Did you hear that?’ When they ask, ‘Hear what?’, I slowly start paddling away. Suddenly they get very quiet; they are listening.”

I am reminded of the story Bill shared earlier of his diver friend who discovered the secret to seeing the true magic underwater and I see the connection to what Bill has just described. We often get so wrapped up in trying to take it all in; to find something to Tweet out to the world or to snap an Instagram-worthy picture of. In so many ways we are more connected than ever before. But what are we connected to?

Is having a picture of myself presenting at a conference better than the experience itself? Is the pressure of getting the best heron picture detracting from the beauty of the creature in front of you? Is firing off a Tweet a better way of connecting than having a conversation with the man I love sitting in the seat next to me? Is commemorating the moment more valuable than experiencing it?

I ask these questions not because I think the answer is easy, or even obvious. It’s complicated and it’s personal. Bill left me with a greater appreciation of the fleeting nature of time and the importance of being in the moment, however “being” works best for you.

For me, it’s time to slow down. To be still, let the magic unfold around me and to listen. Who knows how much I’ve missed, but I don’t intend to miss anything else.