The prettiest sight.

Talk about putting a smile on your face.

Yesterday while driving, I pulled up next to a truck that had a gun rack mounted in his rear window. Perched comfortably in the rack was a shot gun. As you might imagine, I did a double-take as a thousand scenarios raced through my mind. Was this guy on his way to a robbery? Was he holding the girl in the passenger seat hostage? Or was he merely on his way home from Cabelas?

I don't know the answer and I didn't roll down my window at the stoplight for clarification.

The great part of the experience was remembering a world when it was acceptable to drive around town with a gun in your back window. Back then, nobody thought a thing about it. Kids at school would sometimes have a gun displayed in their truck window and the administration didn't go haywire. Everyone knew it was deer season. And nobody said a peep.

It was a day when people hadn't conceived the rotten notions of doing a lot of harm to a bunch of people right here in our little corner of the world. Sure, there was violence. But there was a lot more innocence then too. I remember picking a girl up in my truck for a date with a gun in the gun rack of the rear window. No the gun wasn't loaded, the shells were tucked under the seat. But she didn't say a word. And I didn't think a thing about it.

I wonder if I'd be so nonchalant today if a kid showed up for a date with my daughter and was toting a piece of hardened blue steel and hand-oiled wood in the window of his car?

All the same, seeing a guy with a gun in his truck window on the highway yesterday put a big smile on my face. And it's still there now as I think of him and I think of simpler times.

Feeling the Energy. A Brand New Perspective.

The other day before leaving the hotel/casino I was holed up in while visiting a client in Las Vegas, I stopped by the gift shop to nose around. After looking at this or that, I struck up a conversation with an extremely nice, older lady who was working the cash-wrap. (Do they still call it the cash wrap in the retail world?)

This lady had moved from Chicago a few years earlier and had settled nicely into Las Vegas, including all that generically represents. I'd like to say that she left the windy city to escape the broken-down Chicago politics of corruption and greed, but our conversation never got that far.

What she did tell me, however, was equally astonishing - and to be truthful, mesmerizing. She proclaimed her great love for this desert oasis with its beautiful sunsets and wide open spaces. But her greatest love was for the sheer energy she felt from the place. There was something special, alive and energizing about this tropic of the windswept dunes - with all its activity, passion and movement.

As she considered how she felt about this one-time Mormon-enclave-turned-latter-day-Sodom-and-Gomorrah (hey, even if you live in a great part of Vegas, you know this is an accurate description of the place,) she figured out the source of the energy and then quickly passed the morsel of wisdom on to me.

"I think it comes from the the gaming," she whispered!

That's right. She said the wonderful energy you feel from Las Vegas comings from the gaming.

This lady may be nearly correct. The energy you feel from Vegas does come from the gaming. Shutter the casinos and watch the city evaporate over night. The crowds would leave, the shows would close and the electricity bills would diminish - all within the blink of a cosmic eye.

Energy comes from a variety of sources and finding a person so enthusiastic about a source that I-don't-care-to-encounter was as strange to me as it was sad. Enough said.