Reykjavik. 25 Feburary 2021. Quarantine Day 3.
I never excel at small talk.
I’m like my father. Conversations are meandering, long-winded yarns where I talk too much and don’t listen enough. A writer should be interested in the people she meets, but I never ask many questions.
Pandemic life hasn’t helped my social skills. The few times I’m around people at home, I muzzle myself with horror at saying the wrong thing until I burst from holding my talk inside. I notice their wide eyes and uncomfortable expressions when I’ve spoken at least five minutes too long. When I FaceTime with far-flung friends, my interiority is always DO NOT BE THE OBNOXIOUS DOG WHO EXCITEMENT-PEES ON PEOPLE SHE’S HAPPY TO SEE.
On my last residency, I tried to change the way I talk.
I interviewed fellow residents for a project I may yet put into the world. Gave comfort to a fellow resident when her mum was rushed to an Australian hospital. Tried not to talk about American dysfunction. For perhaps the first time in my life, I listened more than I talked.
I arrived in Iceland determined to build upon these conversation skills. My first opportunity? The taxi driver who ferried me from Keflavik International Airport to Reykjavik.
A burly man with a disposable mask stretched over a salt-and-pepper beard. He found me at the airport an hour early, my name typewritten on a whiteboard sign. I pushed my luggage cart behind him and crawled into the back seat of his Mercedes station wagon while he lifted my two hard cases into the hatch.
Early on, we chatted about the usual things: the flight; the echoing emptiness of the airport; the weather. Most Icelanders assume it’s your first time, your virgin voyage to their country. Right away, I told him I’m not new here, and we talked about some of the places we’ve been. (The featured picture is Dynjandifoss, a Westfjords waterfall he loves. I shot this photo last August.)
After a quiet spell, I asked him What’s your favorite thing to see in Iceland?
He was dumbstruck for a few beats before he scratched his head and said That’s a great question.
And he told me how the happiest time of his life was living in a tiny village in East Iceland. He spent six or seven years there – he couldn’t remember which – being a rugged guy, odd-jobbing, and exploring the many routes to Vatnajökull, Europe’s largest non-Arctic glacier. He bounced on the seat as he took me to a seaside town I can’t even spell, and I almost glimpsed his younger self.
We also laughed about assumptions people make about Icelanders.
Before spending a chunk of time here, I assumed all Icelanders eat tons of fish because they live on an island surrounded by a cold, deep ocean. But the Icelandic government considers their waters a crop to be harvested. Every year, they negotiate Northern Atlantic fishing rights with the European Union, and they pre-sell their catch on the international market. The majority of fish is shipped to places like my local Publix, where I often buy Icelandic cod.
I’m writer-in-residence in a fishing town. A fish factory punctures the skyline. Trucks lumber through the village and pick up loads of fish seven days a week. And yet, I can’t buy fresh fish at the grocery store. There’s no fish store on the dock. If I want a fish, I take an empty bag to the fish factory and ask a fisherman for a freebie from their personal allotment, but I can’t pay them.
Icelanders don’t eat rotten shark. Beyond Reykjavik, they don’t consume much fish because it is prohibitively expensive. What’s their protein of choice?
Sheep and horse. I told my driver that was my biggest surprise from living in Iceland. Sheep and horse. And we had another hefty laugh.
Maybe I can learn to talk to strangers before I’m gone.
12 Comments
My biggest regret through this whole pandemic thing is that I just haven’t met many strangers. I’ve avoided them. I see a few on the golf course, but don’t generally communicate. And I know everybody else. It’s a small town.
Where will you go when you can safely talk to a stranger?
Ha! Probably back into a bar. Seriously, I don’t know. Laura and I want to take a driving trip. We’ll be in SoCal next Fall for music…maybe we’ll just wander from there. She’s never seen the Grand Canyon. I’m hopeful Mexico is on the schedule this year, but we’ll see. A lot of it depends on the dog.
Grand Canyon is definitely worth it. Glad to hear he’s hanging on.
The picture is beautiful!
Thank you. It was an enchanted trip. Last August, I went to the WestFjords with two other residents. We stumbled upon this waterfall on our last day.
I will definitely be doing the excited puppy thing. I can’t guarantee there’ll be no wee.
I just want to be spontaneous, go to the pub & burble with random folk.
Going to the pub with you feels like a different lifetime, doesn’t it?
I read an interesting article in The Guardian about long covid and its similarity to ME and fibromyalgia and other long haul illnesses. The experts and advocates the writer interviewed were hopeful that more research on long covid will benefit all conditions.
Rather than you “should” be interested in other people that you meet – no doubt you are genuinely interested – is it finding, as you conclude, learning how to speak with strangers? Tapping into your writer’s natural curiousity clearly leads to wondrous discoveries. Thanks for sharing, Andra.
Speaking to strangers – or anyone really – should always be about them, not me. It’s really a matter of continuing to evolve. I used to need others to care about me because I was broken in ways I didn’t understand. So I talked about myself and wrote about myself too much, because I was trying to understand myself. I don’t need anyone beyond MTM to understand or care anymore, and that not needing helped me look outward and be interested in others differently. It’s bigger and deeper than that, because anything always has more nuance than one can spell out online, but there’s the crux.
It’s good to see you pop up sporadically on IG and LinkedIn. I hope you’re weathering the pandemic?
Have been giving this thought, perhaps with a squeeze of irony. What does the conversation look like between two strangers intent on the conversation not being about themselves, but of the other?
Sometimes in searching for ourselves we find out that we don’t have to go to far. We are just right here where we last left ourselves.
Do you really feel you spoke and wrote about yourself too much? If so, where could you have been had you not done so? It’s the nuance we save for those personal conversations and rightfully so. They are not meant to be public.
Am coping surprisingly well over the last year. Work wise it has been my busiest since I hung up my shingle 5 years ago. Go figure…
“What does the conversation look like between two strangers intent on the conversation not being about themselves, but of the other?”
In the past (and even today, to be honest), I talk too much. I think it’s because silence in conversation is uncomfortable, so I fill every silence with words. In the process, I miss moments to ask the other person questions or explore their lives. I hope conversations with me are more balanced today, but this is a weakness I’ll fight for the rest of my life.
“Do you really feel you spoke and wrote about yourself too much? If so, where could you have been had you not done so?”
My life is different from most people I know. I didn’t have children. I married late. I don’t have a conventional job. Too often, especially when I challenged myself to write a blog post every day, I used my life as fodder. It served a purpose, in that it forced me to write daily. Without the expectation to show up, I wouldn’t have developed that habit. I lacked the discipline to do it privately back then.
I don’t believe I’d be anywhere different right now. I was telling one of the residents my memoir would be a very different book if I wrote it today, not in terms of content but in how I would approach it. From the outside, it may look like I’m very open online. And I used to be. But some things I endured privately in recent years taught me to be more circumspect in what I share. I’m never going to get anything I need from sharing something online. These days, I’m always very careful to post things where I don’t need a response. I don’t need anyone to read it. I don’t need a specific reaction. This probably comes naturally to most people, but to someone as deeply co-dependent as I’ve been most of my life, it isn’t easy for me.
I’m glad to hear you’re doing well despite the pandemic.
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