Grandpa’s Bill’s house is a calm oasis in Texas hill country, where life is comfortable and things are reassuringly fine just being what they are. Even in San Antonio’s sticky summer heat, there is always so much to do! We drove the Cadillac, went tubing at Schlitterbahn, toured the Alamo and FDR’s ranch, learned to drive a stick shift, ziplined over canyons, bought pralines at Das Peach Haus, and drank buckets of lemon ice tea with the best barbecue of our lives. In a yard buzzing with cicadas and shaded by the twisted limbs of live oaks, we listened to the neighbor’s emu and swam in the kidney-shaped pool, and thought Texas was pretty great.

The best part of visiting Grandpa Bill is stretching out in the leather recliners and watching game shows every morning. It hits me, that game shows are the reality TV before Reality TV, respectfully modeling humble and healthy conversation unscripted on a stage with strangers. The goal is to win the Family Fued or the Showcase Showdown rather than be famous or a fool, and it’s refreshing, that unlike the news or today’s reality shows, the purpose is to be friendly with your adversary rather than create dramatic headlines. They are also a magical source of common ground across generations. A lot of passive respect can be learned through the innocence of game shows, and they give you something fun to talk about with your grandparents.

In the mornings, Mike and I took long walks around the neighborhood to watch the sunrise, some days encountering energetic puppies, others ending in a search for doughnuts. I realized you don’t really know someone until you know their favorite doughnut. Of course, I already knew that Jake likes maple-frosted and Eli likes chocolate, but now I know that Rena likes chocolate too, and Grandpa Bill likes the sour cream old-fashioned ones. He is a man after my own heart.

The boys are still learning to drive, and the lessons to be learned in a state devoted to freeways and big trucks are like being thrown onto another planet. It’s unnerving and unnatural to drive over a giant concrete bridge, suspended over a spaghetti of freeways teeming with traffic while other vehicles blaze through dangerous curves where nobody is ever touching the brakes. There is an assumption that people choose giant cars and ugly freeways fully knowing there is another choice. But when freeways like this are as common as streetlights, and crosswalks don’t really exist because nobody is ever walking, what happens when this is all you know? It would probably make public transportation and small cars feel unnatural and unnerving. I wonder how many choices any of us are actually making, vs. living with the choices that somebody else made for us.

There is always a new perspective and a new lesson to be learned when you listen and look around. Despite what the news tells us, real life evidence seems to tip in favor of people being more alike than different. We’re all going to the grocery store after work and taking our kids to water parks, and packing lunches and celebrating birthdays, and being polite and respectful to strangers, most of the time. We do what we have to do to get through life, and the agenda is basically to find the bright spots and get along. Our Uber driver at the airport was excited about San Antonio Burger Week. The Olive Garden staff took care of my iPhone when I left it behind. The ladies at the park let me hide all our shoes under their picnic table, so they wouldn’t get wet when it started to rain. Everyone loves their pets, and some even care enough to feed the buzzards. In a state filled with F150s, guns, and freeway intersections more terrifying than roller coasters, we have so many more things in common than all the things we think we don’t.

So we are thankful and glad that we have family in a place we might otherwise never see, or worse, might never understand. We are thankful that Bill and Rena are moving to a new home, closer to neighbors and friends in this next stage of their life. We can imagine them now, overlooking the city skyline with their cats, and the boys can remember driving the Z and know they are part of a family bigger than just their parents.

The bigger the family, the more likely you are to find someone in it that’s like you. And that is what all of us are looking for, after all.