Random Chats
If you know me - or follow this blog - you know my relationship with my husband began with a random chat while he fixed my fridge. Jack was the master of them. He had friends all over Toronto - and doubtless in his first home, Wrocław, Poland too - simply because he couldn’t not engage with people.
This is part of Jack’s legacy to me. Oh, I can’t lie - I’ve never exactly been a shy person. But with Jack as my model, I ramped up my random chattiness while I was with him and have carried it forward into my post-Jack life.
This is certainly true in Weston, where I started off as a dog-owner, a well-documented way to meet people. The club of canine companions is enormous and welcoming! Middle-aged bank presidents chat about pooh bags with social work students; a housecleaner who arrived in the ‘80s from Poland advises a newly arrived Syrian physics professor about the best off leash parks in Toronto. They have probably never discussed their professional lives. But Molly’s mom celebrates as much as Fido’s dad when Fido’s diarrhea is stopped with a little pumpkin puree. In my case, there are two tough-looking young men with fierce looking dogs who always exchange greetings with me even now, despite my doglessness, all because I once had my fierce-looking dog, Bidi.
Another primo place for casual conversation is the checkout line. Pre-COVID, when I still felt like putting my weekly grocery money into Galen Weston’s coffers,* I was grateful when my favourite Superstore cashiers were the ones to scan and chat with me about this and that. Jack had friends in the convenience stores across the GTA he frequented - you know, those ones where you could get a carton of DuMaurier for a dollar or two less than the going rate. I swear he put a few kids through uni.
I recently had a random chat experience in an unlikely place - the courtyard at the TD Bank towers in downtown Toronto. It’s not a place I typically go so I went early for a meeting so I could drink in the experience and enjoy an al fresco poke bowl. When, post-lunch, I pulled out a book, I felt as incongruous as the seven bronze larger-than-life cows next to me among the skyscrapers. I imagined how the people who dashed by me, late for important opportunities to make even more money, might open their Kindles in bed that night, reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People or the current-day equivalent. Instead, I was discovering for the nth time how gendered our history lessons had been by reading Karin Wells’ More than a Footnote: Canadian Women You Should Know.
My reading was interrupted by a young Japanese man inquiring if he could ask me a question. He was so polite and so sweet I was happy to agree.
“What is a quote you live your life by?” he asked me, rolling each word out from his mouth in a well-rehearsed way.
“I beg your pardon?”
He repeated the question and I listened more carefully, catching it through his new-to-English accent. I loved the question and sat musing for a moment, grinning that he would ask me. By now, his teacher had arrived too, to watch the exchange and help if he was needed.
“Oh, I’ve got one! ‘If music be the food of ….” As I started into the opening of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, his teacher burst out laughing.
“You won’t believe it but I was just telling my students that one because it’s MY favourite!” he exclaimed. We laughed and marvelled at the coincidence.
“Ok, let me find another.” I thought about Portia’s speech from the Merchant of Venice, a good one for a former lawyer but I wasn’t sure I could get much past ‘the quality of mercy is not strained’. I moved on.
“Oh, oh, I know. ‘Bubble bubble, toil and trouble, fire burn and caldron bubble.’” Not exactly words I live by but it’s fun to recite and it’s a passage I heard many, many times. My father had once memorized the entire opening scene of Macbeth for who knows what reason other than he sometimes did odd things.
My new young friend was fascinated by the passage and asked me what it was from and what it meant. I blathered on about witches and creepiness (and watched him carefully write ‘cripy’ in his notebook) for a bit, positing that Shakespeare wanted to catch the audience’s attention with something they would not expect at the theatre, especially at the opening of a drama. I was having a lot of fun making up shit.
By the end of our 15 minutes together, Kanta and I had exchanged email addresses and taken a selfie. I also learned that his teacher speaks seven languages and knows the best way to learn a new one is to try. His methodology is entirely based on street-level chatting. His students collect 200 quotes from strangers and in so doing, have 200 exchanges with people they would otherwise have passed by.
I was enchanted by the experience.
I will continue to talk to strangers.
Try it. For every unsatisfactory exchange you’ll have, you’ll have many rich ones.
* Together with his sister, Galen will inherit the Weston fortune made through their Loblaw grocery empire. During the height of COVID and in the inflationary period since, they’ve done all they can do to eliminate the role of cashier, replacing them with the infuriating self-checkouts that don’t respond to your conversation, even when you tell them to fuck off. Which I have.
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