One Is Silver

The other is gold (as they say in the Girl Scout songbook).

Last night, I went to a recurring Event based around sweet treats of various types. Our host decided to have one more this year before the weather started to get cold, which was probably a good decision since it’s starting to turn cool, bordering on chilly. I knew many in attendance, with names you might well be familiar with: The Outlaw, Razorbackgirl, Buckandi … What made the evening different was that we had some faces we don’t often see and some visiting ones from faraway places! Along with our usual suspects were a cacher from California, a couple from Ontario, and a cacher from Hannover, of all places! We all went back and forth with our various discussions: one group started speaking German together, another discussed how Ontario is like Houston (which I thought was some kind of Poe-esque riddle at first), and still others started talking about college football (I don’t follow it myself, but Vanderbilt beating Alabama for the first time in forty years will never stop being funny to me).

It never ceases to amaze me how different people with little to nothing in common can be united by a single connective thread, whether a sports team, travel, a language, or a hobby. It can also be amazing how we can put behind our differences. There are several cachers I know who are very different in a number of ways: wealth (or lack thereof), age (in both directions), personality, politics, life outlook … It never (or very rarely) matters. I myself am quite different from my fellow cachers, most often in ways having to do with the title of this blog, but in a myriad of other ways as well. But it never matters. Caching makes us all fraternal or sororal above most other concerns. Mind you, it’s not entirely blind. There are cachers I adore and cachers I abhor. Some could be a joy for weeks on end, but others would drain the energy out of me in twenty minutes. But they are still of our kind. They are still one of us. And while we all feel that some are more “one of us” than others, we are all bound together.

I guess my point here (and I do have one) is that the Event might be the most important cache type of all. That may not be a scientific hypothesis, but it may not be wrong, either.