Talking

One of the issues with being gregarious is that you can always divert yourself away from writing. I spent three days this weekend at a hockey rink watching my son do a skills training clinic. While standing at the glass, watching the lads repeat repeat repeat the drills I met a man whose son was two years younger than man. The man however was eight years older than me and had retired from two different careers, the military and big oil. His son was the product of a second marriage, my sons are not. But with two marriages, two careers and many different places he had lived the man had a goodly number of tales to tell and opinions to share.

The man had lived in two areas where I had lived, the Midwest and the Midatlantic. We commiserated about the lack of Maryland blue crabs here in the landlocked center of the country. Heck, we both bemoaned the lack of good ocean seafood in general here where beef is king. Our talk touched on the different pace of life in both the middle and eastern parts of the country. In the Midwest it takes 20 minutes to get a consensus on whether it is time to go. On the east coast if you don’t commit immediately to go you get left behind.

Talking about places and things is often better or at least easier than struggling for ideas. We talked about the weather on the east coast and how the infrequent nature of snow throws them for a loop when it actually does show up. We talked about the SR-71. One of these aircraft is on display in Kalamazoo. As a kid this was one of the coolest planes I had ever heard about. How could it not be? It was sleek and black and it was the spy plane of choice. My buddy at the glass overlooking the rink claimed he had been an NSA analyst while working for the military. When he was posted in Alaska these kinds of planes would leave at night after the base was closed down and would come back before the base reopened.

We talked about restaurants in Grand Rapids, Salvatore’s on Leonard for pizza in particular. We talked about what could go wrong with a skating drill and darned if my son wasn’t the kid who made the error I was talking about. We talked about how cold the rink was. This is a standard topic for parents in rinks. Here in the mid-Michigan area most rinks are twinned, that is to say that have two full sheets of ice. In such a configuration one rink is always way colder than the other. I don’t know why it just is. Every parent at every rink has to bitch about it. It is, dare I say it, an icebreaker to conversation.

Yeah when you like to talk the choice of putting a pen to paper is a no-brainer second place option. Funny thing, as the years have gone on my typing has gotten better. In some ways it is far easier to type than to write. Still it is easier to flap my jaws.