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)