Talking to Yourself

We were in an occult book store on Central Avenue in Northeast Minneapolis. You know the place, books on esoteric subjects, tarot, kabbalah, living on the land on one wall and glass jars filled with herbal remedies on the opposite wall, the whole thing smelling like 1968. There was a guy in there, probably a contemporary of mine, with shoulder length very dirty hair and clothes that hung on his undernourished frame. He was talking non-stop in a loud, grating voice about Botswana, for some reason. Also Peter, Paul and Mary, communal living, and the advent of legal cannabis in Minnesota set to come in two weeks. I really wanted to feel comfortable with this person on the margins. I wanted to be okay with him, but manic speech stresses my nervous system. I had to go into a vacant back room to calm down.

On the other hand, Uncle David was talking hogs and chickens and berries. He was talking life on the farm in southern Minnesota where they didn’t get electricity until 1941. I met him at a sprawling backyard birthday party for my grandson who just turned 18. David is my daughter-in-law’s uncle, an entirely new face for me, out of an entirely new universe.  What do I know from hogs? He was en route to Canada to go fishing with a half dozen other family members. The wildfire smoke had hung over Minneapolis earlier in the day and David wasn’t sure what the breathing would be like up north. Still, the prospect of Canadian lakes densely populated with willing fish had to be taken seriously. They were going to eat their steak tacos and their lemon bars and head out. No question about it. David is an avid storyteller and was more than happy to fill me in on mid-century Minnesota farm life while eating a plate piled high with barbecue. 

Photo by Kameron Kincade on Unsplash

I was transfixed by the romance of it, like any sixties-vintage city girl would be. His mother, he said, only went to the store for the basics like coffee and sugar, commodities shipped in from tropical latitudes unimaginable in Minnesota. Otherwise, everything was harvested on the farm and canned, even meat and chicken. Quarts and quarts of strawberries were picked every day in the season and cooked down for jam. Food was plentiful. Work was relentless, but not resented, at least not in the storytelling. Several of his older brothers went in the military during the Korean War which made the work load even heavier. I realized I had no way of evaluating the nuances of his story. Was it backbreaking, the berry picking, the wood cutting? Or was it just the way it was, what you did to live the good life on the land you owned. His story was coherent and vivid with colors and animal squawking. He talked for a long time in a cheerful monologue and although he wasn’t making much space for anyone else to jump in, I found I could listen to him without fidgeting. I heard and saw the word pictures he drew of a time maybe sixty years ago that really was communal. They didn’t have to go back to the land. They were already on it.

But the bookstore guy just droned on and on. It was clear that he had no one else to talk to and, all alone, had to plant himself, uninvited, in a public space, ranting and raving in order to be noticed. He did not have a story to tell that other people wanted to listen to. His speech was disconnected, repetitive, even assaultive. It hurts to imagine how many people are out there talking to themselves. Isolation erases the awareness of how to go about communicating. Many people seem to have lost this awareness. In a social situation, they will either monologue or remain silent, as if the back and forth of conversing never occurs to them or maybe they have no idea how to go about doing it. It makes me wonder if some people think asking a question might be considered rude. Conversation is intimate. If you ask someone, “What’s it like for you to be almost 80 years old? What brings you joy? How deeply are you heartbroken by the climate catastrophe?” you’re bringing them closer to you. If you don’t invite the other person to meet  you halfway, you’d better be a world class raconteur and have a story to tell that draws the listener in to imagine that they are already there with you on the farm. Helps them create mental pictures of themselves milking and canning and baking bread like the fantasies in the minds of city people when I was in my twenties and people read The Whole Earth Catalog.  

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