Talk talk talk talk

“God!” my cousin kicks the back of the driver’s seat, “what is taking so long! He’s so slow!”
“Theresa, knock it off,” my aunt says from the passenger’s seat.
“It’s hot in here and he’s taking forever!”
“I said knock it off.”

A minute later my aunt gets out, walks into the gas station, walks right back out and gets back in the car.
“He was talking to the guy behind the counter.”
“I knew it!”

My uncle opens the gas station door, turns in the doorway, raises an arm and shouts “nice chatting with you!” and walks back to the car. We all crack up laughing.

*

Shortly after my first kid was born, in the phase where the sleeplessness was so bad it felt like being drunk most of the time, I went to a bakery near our house to get some bread and a treat for my dessert loving wife. I waited in line. After I ordered I said to the young woman and man behind the counter - high school? college? I can’t tell anymore - “you two, you don’t look like you work at a bakery. Me, I look like I work at a bakery.” I patted my belly. (Mine always makes me think of my grandfather’s. I fell asleep many nights on the couch with my head on his belly while he and my grandmother watched Dallas or Johnny Carson. I called it my pillow and would say “I’m glad you have this fat belly” and he would say “no fat here, pure muscle, just reeeeelaxed stomach muscle in a state of protrusion.“)

“Wellllll –“ said the woman.
“We’re young still,” said the man.
“Me too, I’m not old, today’s my 21st birthday!” and, channeling my grandfather and uncle further, I slapped the flat of my hand on the counter while I laughed at my own joke.

No words or eye contact as they handed me my bag of baked goods and my change.

I walked to my car thinking first “That just happened. I’m that guy.” And then “I’m Uncle Robbie. I’m Grandpa. It’s happened. It was just a matter of time.”

*

It was a running joke for years in my family that my grandfather took half an hour at the gas station because he struck up conversations with the clerks who worked there. This made it funnier that day with my uncle, whose graying hair, wrinkled face, and male pattern expanding forehead made him look a lot like my grandfather.

I worked briefly at a factory with my uncle. He talked the whole time from when I picked him up to when we walked to our separate parts of the line after punching in, and again when we all ate lunch in the gravel yard at the back of the plant. He talked to me and to everyone else. “You see the Bears game? how ‘bout that, huh? Those sonsofbitches. Hey your kid home from college? Mine’s up at the community college.” He listened and he asked questions but if no one else talked, never any silence.

For years my grandfather “drove truck” as he and my grandmother put it. I rode with him on a few week long trips in the summers when I was little and my mom was in rough spots with or between husbands. He talked on the CB a lot with other truckers, and at rest stops - “seen many cops? what you hauling? where you been? where you coming from?” - and he talked a lot with gas station clerks. At truck stop restaurants, where we sat in the smoking section and ate eggs over easy with hashbrowns and toast, and corned beef hash when they had it, he’d introduce me to waitresses, “this is my grandson, Nathan,” he said Nay-than, the ‘th’ voiced like in “them.” I was too young to remember many of the details but his voice was in the air a lot, with the cigarette smoke and the bacon grease.

My dad would later tell me I had “the gift,” in a tone that said it was a curse, "of gab” so “you’d better get a job talking somewhere, somewhere they expect people to talk, somewhere they want someone good at it, somewhere they don’t mind people talking all the time,” adding “makes sense you’d have it, you spent so much time with your mom’s dad when you were little, he had it too.”

My grandmother said similar on multiple occasions after my grandfather died. “Dad,” she always called him that to her kids and her grandkids, “dad, he could talk, he’d talk your ear off, it’d get to where you can’t hear yourself think sometimes. And ornery too,” she’d continue, implying things about what it was like to raise six kids with him, an implication I get and understand now that I’ve been married with kids for a few years, “and damned – excuse the plain English - but damned if but sometimes he’d get you so mad, mad as heck he’d get you but then he’d get to talking your ear off and damned if then you weren’t agreeing with him and then you’d be mad that he’d changed your mind. A real talker.”

After he quit driving truck – “that goddamn Reagan deregulated trucking,” I didn’t know what that meant other than that trucking didn’t pay as good anymore (and now there were trucks pulling two or three trailers sometimes, “those damn things, they’ll kill you, they aren’t safe”). I heard that phrase, “that goddamn Reagan” throughout my childhood. I only ever heard the name Reagan with that adjective attached. Once a goddamn Reagan speech interrupted a Bears game in the last few minutes and my grandfather erupted in shouts of “that goddamn Reagan” and “you sonofabitch!” After trucking, my grandfather got a job at a factory that made hoses. He was active in his union local and was often angry about how things were going. He got really mad when the company introduced mandatory drug testing. He was condescending about drug users, especially the several among his children, but felt insulted that the company suspected employees of drug use, and he felt it was an invasion of privacy. He got into a shouting match at a union meeting when someone said they couldn’t fight the issue. He drove a friend home afterward, who tried to reason with him.

“Ah you’re just as bad as all those other sonsabitches,” my grandfather said.
“You know, you’d have more friends if you kept your mouth shut sometimes,” his friend replied as got out of the car.

I overheard my grandmother tell this story to my mom. “It’s true, it’s true!” they laughed, “and Dad was surprised, as if he didn’t know it!”

*

“I’m going to bed.” It’s 10 o’clock. Our kids have just gone to bed.

“Okay, sleep well.”

My wife goes to bed early most nights because the baby sleeps in our bed and wakes her up a lot at night to nurse. We don’t hang out that much. When we do, we have a great time, we just don’t have much time together these days. My friend Heather once described parenting as spending several years choosing which of your basic needs you’re going to have go unmet, and sometimes you don’t get to make a choice. You do what you can, and sort of coast on fumes for a long time. She told me once after a temper tantrum, mine I mean, “this is about the age your kids are. Some day you’re going to get 30 good sleeps in a row and you will feel like a completely different person.” And 30 hangouts with my partner, and time to read for fun, and…

Of course I miss my kids when I’m away from them. My wife and I remind each other “this is a difficult time, it won’t always be like this.” I said the other day on a too early morning after a too long night “some day it will just be the two of us in bed and that will be weird.” That sentence was hopeful as I first opened my mouth but it finished up wistful. We have a king sized bed. Our baby, sleeping lengthwise can make it so there’s really only room for one other person to sleep in it. My wife replied “someday it will just be two of us in the house too.” That didn’t feel hopeful at all. When I stay in a hotel with a king sized bed it feels so big and empty there ought to be an echo.

Recently I was out of town for work and after a long day I tried to go to bed early but I couldn’t sleep because I hadn’t moved around enough so I went for a long walk. I could only think about my kids. I felt like I talked to every person, almost all women, that I saw pushing a stroller or carrying a baby. I worry I’m being weird. I ask questions about their kids, mention my kids right away. In these as in many conversations, sometimes during and often afterward, and sometimes more than once if the slip-ups are notable, I replay the script in my head, picking at my lines, wondering “who wrote this crap? who directed this clown?” Every conversation is a chance to fail, a risk of embarrassment, an opportunity to be terrible and to make more bad memories.

I bought dinner at a falafel stand. The guy making the sandwich made a lot of small talk – “this your first time eating here? You’re gonna love it, we do this unique sauce, people always come back.” I remembered working nights at Subway in high school, the boredom and the minutes crawling by, I loved the short rush that came two hours before close, when the second shift at the factory across the street went on lunch break. I talked a lot about music with an older guy – twenty four, an adult but cool, I thought – who always came in and got triple olives and triple mayo on his sandwich, and asked for a fork. He later walked up behind a guy at an ATM and stabbed him to death and took his money.

We weren’t friends. We just both liked Ministry at lot, mostly, and the timing was right – he came in at a time when my co-worker and I had done all the talking we had in us for a while, all the prep for the next day’s opening was done, it was too early to clean up for close, and I was bored and lonely. Hungry for conversation. As enthusiastic as he was to talk, I think he was the same. I don’t know what he did at the factory.

I thought about Chris and about high school me after I said good night to the falafel guy. I wondered if he was outgoing because bored and lonely, like Chris, like me in high school, and, I suddenly realized, like my uncle and grandfather. I always thought they talked so much because they were friendly and that they enjoyed conversation. When they weren’t shouting they were always smiling, and they never shouted to hurt - they never shouted so you cowered - like my parents did. So they seemed friendly and happy as far as I thought about them when I was a kid, and up through my mid 30s.

My uncle ran a modified radial arm saw, mostly. He’d get lumber and a list of dimensions and cut accordingly, for 8, 10, 12 hours, with the occasional break. My grandfather sat behind the wheel, mostly, staring at the white lines between highway lanes. Neither finished high school, something they were sensitive about and in their view a mistake they didn’t want repeated. “You stay in school, with your brains, you finish school, you hear me? You go to college.” They both had six kids and later in life my grandfather often had his adult kids and their kids living at his house. Maybe they felt confined in their lives. Maybe they felt nervous and exposed in conversation sometimes. Maybe they talked so much because they were hungry inside.