Small Talk

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 20 seconds

I sat in my study, inspecting my socks as I put on my shoes before work. The socks – which I had thought of as one of my good pairs, two of my go-to guys, a pair I still considered in my starting lineup – were wearing out. The bottoms had worn thin and a hole had opened near one of the ankles, too low to hide behind the guise of a pant leg.

After I stood up and walked a few steps to the window, I could feel the sock tops beginning to lose their grip on my lower calf. A few more steps and they would have fallen to my ankles, unable to hold themselves up any longer.

Standing at the window, I opened the blinds enough that it would be easy for me to see out but require someone to go out of their way to look in. On the inside looking out, the neighborhood was silent. A man mowed his lawn down the street; a 9-year-old tossed a football to himself at the end of the cul-de-sac. Two women conversed at the bottom of a driveway. All from a distance. That was how I liked it.

I had considered buying a garage door opener.

Not because I didn’t want to get out of my car and lift the garage door myself, I usually don’t mind the task. I can appreciate the physical activity. I often wonder if that’s why we’ve become such an obese society. Too many garage door openers.

No, I bought a garage door opener to avoid my neighbor. I can press a button a block away and my garage will be open and waiting when I arrive, my driveway like the palm of a giant concrete hand that carries me into the garage then slowly closes, shutting me in from the annoyances of the neighborhood. With a glance into the rearview mirror, I escape direct contact with nothing more than a polite wave.

In his defense, my neighbor is not a bad person. He does not disturb me or cut down my trees or deflate my tires. He is not “up to no good.” His kids do not play ball on my lawn; his dog does not use my yard as if it were a Port-O-Can at a rockfest.

But my neighbor likes to chat.

Last week I pulled into my driveway and got out to open the garage door. My neighbor was out with the hose watering his shrubs. I inadvertently made eye contact.

“Hey there, Larry,” he said.

“Hey!” I shot back, unexpectently enthusiastic. As is usually the case with people, he knew my name and I did not know his. I was pretty sure it was Ed, but it could have been Ted and I had a small suspicion it was Arnold. But I think I would’ve remembered Arnold if it were Arnold.

Regardless, it was too late to clarify, as there had been at least eight conversations since he had moved in three months earlier.

The problem with Ed is that the only thing we have in common is the 12-foot patch of grass between our houses. The main topics available under these circumstances are terribly limited and inevitably gravitate to watering the grass and the general upkeep of our respective landscaping. Following that, it’s news and comment on how hot it’s been lately.

“How about this heat? It’s something else, huh?” he once asked.

“Whew! Is it hot enough for you?” he demanded on another occasion.

For one, and to be completely honest, it’s not hot enough for me. I’m cold natured. When others are uncomfortably warm in T-shirts and shorts, I’m relaxing casually in jeans and a fleece pullover. And two, it’s summer. It’s hot. I get it.

I’ve always tried to keep weather off limits in conversations with people I hardly know. It’s weather, we can’t control it, let’s move on.

Now, if it snows 4 ½ feet overnight, fine, let’s discuss the oddity of the occurrence. We can repeat all the records and superlatives we heard on the local news that morning. And if golf ball-sized hail plummets from the sky in a moment’s notice, we can gripe about how we normally park our cars in the garage but we happened to leave them out that afternoon only to see them damaged. We can compare insurance quotes and swap techniques we read on the Internet about how to repair hail damage yourself for a fraction of the cost. Otherwise, there are other activities I’d rather do and anything else I’d rather chat about if forced to chat.

One evening, Ed went after another standby: The Job. “How are things down at the newspaper?”

Before I understood the rules of small talk, a less-than-mild acquaintance asked me how my job was going and I actually told him.

I spoke of how we were down two copy editors while having to battle an overbearing managing editor and mediate arguments between the design director and the photo editor. My mouth sprawled about how we had more space to fill in the newspaper because of the declining number of ads sold and how that was consistent with a nationwide trend in the industry. Couple that with the rising cost of newsprint . . .

I realized I had lost person back at “Oh, wait’ll you hear this.” He had not cared about my employment situation, much less the state of newspapers in the United States. He probably just wanted me to ask him how his job was going so he could tell me how the local chamber of commerce was honoring him and 15 others later that month at the Outstanding Merchants banquet. He probably wanted to discuss his sales figures and the number of employees he now had working under him, which was most likely three but he would have said seven.

“How’s work going?” required a response along the lines of “Oh just fine,” or at worst a “Don’t even ask,” followed by a muted guffaw and a rolling of the eyes. “Don’t even ask” tends to strike a chord with most people, as I have found that hating your job is not uncommon.

But when Ed asked me about my job, maybe he was different. Maybe he really wanted to know. At least he knew what job I had.

“It’s going alright,” I said, shrugging my shoulders as if I had nothing to complain about.

Sensing my answer had been too short, I blurted out a phrase I had never used before, heard once in the midst of small talk, perhaps.

“Same old same old.”

He nodded, as if knowing exactly where I was coming from. Had he gone as far as he could at his job? Had his once ambitious career dreams completely faded?

Same old, same old?

He nodded because if I had asked him about his job, he would’ve replied with the exact phrase.

And I would have shook my head and said, “Yeah, tell me about it.”

(This story originally appeared in the literary journal Peeks and Valleys)