When do you get to see them?

I did something today that I've been meaning to do for a while, which is to stop and talk on my way back from work. There's an old man who is often sitting along the sidewalk on chester in the afternoons, and he always seemed to enjoy being outdoors.

Today I stopped and talked with him. He is blind, and so I felt really awkward with some of the easy questions like how he liked the weather, as I was using my own perspective of how clear and bright it was. He didn't seem fazed at all and he liked it as well as it was nice and sunny. It took a while to figure out the conversation, in the sense that I wasn't really sure what I was intending to ask about (all I had known going in to it is that I had wanted to talk to him for a while), and I wasn't sure what was okay to talk about. It turned out that it didn't really seem to matter: he was happy to talk about anything. He asked about what I did and I gave the brief brief version, and then I asked about what he did, and I got to hear several really interesting stories. It turns out he didn't mind talking about his blindness, and it related a lot to what he had done for a living, so I got to hear about his job back in the 70's (he was a garbage truck driver), and how he gradually became blind. It turns out he's partially blind and can see faint shadows through one eye.

I found out he had kids, and grand kids, and he told me a lot about them. I then uttered the phrase "When do you get to see them?", and immediately was embarrassed, but he did not seem to mind. I do wonder what the appropriate term to use would have been. He mentioned he has never actually seen any of his children except the oldest, but we talked about that for a while and he seemed pretty ok with it, which isn't what I would expect from my perspective.

I also got to hear a story about when he was a kid, growing up in rural Louisiana, and about a time he went fishing in the creek. The setting reminded me a lot of when I used to go down to the creek near our house in North Carolina, and trying to catch crawdads.

Anyways... I am mostly writing this because I want to remember it. I hope I will get the courage to go talk with him again, as it was very interesting. I ended up finishing my walk home after a while, when his wife came over to see him, and I introduced myself to both before heading home. His name is Yhency (spelling unsure, that's what it sounded like), and his wife is Juanita. (and yes, I'm writing that here because otherwise my horrible memory for names will fail me)

Conversations

An interesting conversation was had today, and it was about having conversations with people. It was sparked by a book which had, for different professions, a list of questions you could ask them that might help start conversation. These questions were a bit outdated, but it led to some interesting methods of getting people talking being suggested by those of us talking about it.

I don't know how to continue this post to make it interesting to comment on, but I will mention several ideas: one was that (for a self-centered conversation), you can bring up a general area/idea that people are likely to ask questions about, for example, if you just traveled somewhere interesting, mentioning that can lead to many more questions about what it was like, and so forth. Another was that even with small-talk sorts of questions, it can help to give longer answers, because it gives more information people can use to continue the conversation, or to find a shared interest. I think there were several more ways mentioned, so if you were there, or know of something interesting about this, please post :)

Conversations are Weird

Today at dinner at Din Tai Fund I got to experience something strange: the stupid little story on CNN's front page about Lindsay Lohan being found passed out in a car actually served to start a conversation. Not only that, but it went on for a while at our table, and ended with the
comment that the other table seemed to be talking about things much more scientific. Of course, when mentioned to the other table they got a good laugh at that notion.

The other interesting conversation starter was the movie Lost in Translation. Arguments raged, minor points were discussed and generally it served to hold most everyone's attention for quite a while.

Anyways. I mostly bring this up to mention a conversation method I picked up a while ago: read the front page of news to get interesting topics to talk about. They may not even be interesting, but it's something to talk about and usually a good way to get started finding a common topic you may be more interested in. (For example, at the memorial day event Nadine had yesterday, one news item mentioned was Dell putting out linux boxes for sale. This triggered a chain of minor conversations until it was established that all four people involved knew programming in various ways, and we went into a discussion of different high level languages. Pretty interesting.)