I must be really stuck. When nothing is going on, it seems like I can write any number of posts to fill up the time. Once I start traveling this year, all you get is radio silence.
Last weekend, Son 2 got his Master's degree from a big land=grant college in one of the states adjacent to ours. So the rest of us—I mean Wife, Son 1, and I*—all converged on his town to watch the ceremony and with him well. Son 2 and Beryl played hosts to us all. (Wife stayed in their apartment. Son 1 and I each took a hotel room.) Maybe I'll write about those days some time soon.
So the day after Son 2 got his Master's degree, I had breakfast with the rest of the group and then took off for the Schmidt farm. I had googled the directions, so I thought I knew where I was going. In fact I made one wrong turn, and the compounded the problem by not calling the Schmidt's for help until I'd gotten well and truly lost. In the end, my mistake added another two hours onto the trip, but I still got there in time for supper. I call that a win.
The rest of the visit? It's hard to tell, but maybe not so much.
I stayed two nights, arriving Sunday and leaving Tuesday morning. This means I talked with Schmidt over dinner two nights in a row (Sunday and Monday), and also a little bit in a desultory way late Monday morning, as I had to use his wifi for a couple of things. That's not quite the total of our conversation, but it's close. I tried to ask him questions that would give him a forum to talk, but wasn't very successful. And when I told funny stories of my own, often enough they didn't seem to come out very funny in practice. Of course, Schmidt doesn't talk a lot, and he may have had work to attend to. But the silence was noticeable.
I talked rather more with Ma Schmidt—I mean Schmidt's mother, who is 89 and still lives on the farm with him. But those conversations were not very satisfying, in another way. Ma Schmidt has more or less no short-term memory any more. To be clear, her long-term memory is just fine. She knew who I was, and she told stories about her girlhood or about the house they all lived in 50 years ago. No problems there. Then she would turn and ask me a question. I'd answer it, and she'd ask the same question five more times in the course of seven minutes. During the day and a half I was there, she asked me the same few questions—such as, Where did you grow up? Do you have any brothers or sisters? Are your parents both still alive? Do you have any kids? Are they boys or girls? And what are they doing with their lives?—over and over, probably dozens of times each. Any of them would have been a perfectly good conversation-starter. But for that she would have had to remember what I said in reply. So none of those conversations got very far.
The visit kind of left me wondering: Have I forgotten how to socialize with other people? Have I (in particular) forgotten how to socialize with the Schmidts? Was I failing to pick up on social clues? Or (more broadly) is it possible we just have nothing in common any more, other than a history of undergraduate friendship more than forty years ago?
Or, on the other hand, am I just worrying too much? Have I forgotten that this is just how they are, and that I shouldn't expect anything else? That might be it, after all.
I just don't know.
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* This was the first time since Son 2's high school graduation from Durmstrang that all four of us had been in the same place at the same time.
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