Since many of the people were over 60 years old, the dress of the day included masks. I believe in masks, since I’m hoping to survive this coronavirus time to live something like my previous life that includes many parties, concerts, handshakes and airplane trips.

But here’s my new discovery.When a bunch of slightly hearing-impaired baby boomers (who proudly listened to and played much loud music in their day) try to talk to each other through masks, it’s interesting. For a while, I nodded along with the various conversations. Then I had to fess up. “Would you repeat that?” I asked. We agreed that we never realized how much we relied on lip-reading to follow a conversation, especially one outdoors in the vigorous Wyoming wind.

The topic was RVs, a newly popular passion among people who long to travel but can’t fly yet.

“We rented an RV, but you couldn’t take logs,” said the woman across from me at a picnic table. Why would you want to take logs, I wondered. After a few minutes discussion about leaving the logs at home, it occurred to me that she said dogs. But isn’t the point of traveling by RV that you can take your dogs?

I described the minimalist truck-camper I was picturing, and my friend said, “But what about a toilet?”

Wait. What? I told my husband I was in favor of roughing it, but no toilet? I think I heard that one correctly. So, do we need a larger truck to carry a larger RV with the luxury of an indoor toilet? This is sounding like our experiences with our daughter’s horse. When our previous small truck couldn’t pull the horse trailer, we had to upgrade to a bigger truck. Then when she traded in for a bigger horse, it required a bigger trailer. I’m worried where this hunt for a minimalist RV might lead us. I really just want a Volkswagen bus from the Sixties, flower decals and all.

Back at the party for Sissy, people were recounting his days as a rodeo clown and soldier before he became a power plant operator and college teacher. You may know about Larry “Sissy” Goodwin, who wore square-dance ruffled dresses on his sturdy frame for deeply-felt reasons stemming from his childhood. His wife Vickie is as beatifically calm now as she was when he was getting beat up in bars for how he dressed. His children and grandchildren remembered him as “much more than the man who wore dresses” in his obituary.

And I remember him as the man who worked tirelessly when a group of UW/Casper professors, students and community members went to Kenya to build a water system. Our 16-year-old daughter went along; she never forgot Sissy’s calm in the face of rude, mocking fellow air travelers. The refusal to repay unkindness with the same matched wonderfully with his willingness to pitch in to give citizens of a remote village access to clean water.

She was a teenaged girl with the typical angst of trying to figure out how to act in the world. He was a fearless, accomplished man at ease with himself and the world around him. When someone tried to insult him by calling him “Sissy,” he embraced the name. He may have inspired her more than anyone else in her upbringing. He died too young in March, but this is one Wyoming character who can’t possibly be forgotten by us baby boomers and the generations of young people he inspired.