Every year as I get older I find myself getting more impatient in conversations that I have with family and friends. Not impatience over someone discussing why the book they just read will stay with them forever or someone telling me an interesting, richly-detailed story, but the little nuances of conversation. Too much detail that doesn’t add anything to the subject matter or staying focused too long on one single aspect of a subject.
My wife, Julie, thinks I’m just getting cranky as I approach fifty. Like just about everyone else, I have caught myself rambling on about one subject over dinner or in conversations with friends and family. But I’m trying to change. Really, I am. There’s nothing worse than talking to someone and suddenly realizing that their eyes have glazed over, and they’re thirty seconds away from going into an irreversible coma.
Even though Julie thinks I have the attention span of a second-grader, sometimes it’s the ebb and flow of the conversation that keeps it interesting and entertaining. When I was in high school the fastest way for a teacher to lose me was to drill down on one mundane portion of the lecture (come to think of it… maybe that’s why I was such an abysmal math student) instead of keeping the lesson moving at a fair pace. I believe now as then, that you have to bounce a lecture or conversation to keep it interesting.
A few years ago I was having dinner at a convention with a very knowledgeable business associate of mine. For over an hour, he droned on and on about the technical issues of repairing plumbing in manufactured homes. This was all he knew or cared about in life… and after sixty-plus minutes of trying to gently guide the dialogue to another subject, I told him the truth about how I felt about his myopic terms of friendly conversation.
“Richard, you know I really like you.” I said, cutting him off in mid-sentence. “But I have to tell you the truth. If we were forced to spend the rest of our lives together on a deserted island… I would kill and eat you within twenty four hours of stepping foot on the beach!”
He paused for a moment, smiling, searching my eyes for signs of my usual bullshit... or to fathom if I was speaking the truth. I didn’t smile back. To this day he still talks too much about plumbing, but we discuss other things as well and I haven’t had to eat him - yet.
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