“It’s not the same as you remember,” Saoirse tells me over the call.  “Everyone’s either watching a movie, or they’re on their phone.  They don’t want to talk.”

Saoirse is on her first solo overseas adventure, and she’s on a quest for conversation.

She and I are stalwart introverts.  I claim I can’t be comfortable starting a conversation unless there is a counter between me and the other person.  She has observed the same.  A large reason for our choice to work in service – to cook people’s breakfast, to make their coffees — is for the conversation.  Just because we’re most comfortable spending hours and days in isolation, doesn’t mean we don’t need the pleasure of other company.  It does mean we have to push beyond our comfort zones to seek it out.  But when you’re in service to someone, when your job is to make them feel welcome and comfortable, conversation comes with the territory.  And standing behind a counter, wearing an apron or a chef’s coat, is like brandishing a badge of conversational authority.  Of course we’re going to start a conversation with you.  It’s our job to start a conversation with you.  That makes it easier for us.

And here in the cafe, we’ve learned the conversation is as important as the food, whether it’s between us and our customers, or just among our customers themselves.  There are the practical benefits: — finding the best mechanic, a good contractor, trouble-shooting a home repair, sussing out a good doctor  —  and deep emotional and spiritual benefits: learning you aren’t alone with your health problem, finding someone has walked a troubled path before you, listening to someone else’s difficulties as an opportunity to stop fixating on your own.  I’ve watched people shuffle into the cafe so weighed down by their pains and sorrows, they could barely walk unassisted.  Over the span of a single breakfast, as different people stop at their table to chat, I see their faces soften, their smiles emerge, and eventually I’ll even witness laughter.  Their bodies move easier when it’s time to go.  They seem lighter.  They credit the nourishing food.  I think the conversation has just as much to do with it.

And conversation is what 18-year-old Saoirse is seeking in Ireland.  She’s worried she won’t find it.

“You need to find the Blarney Stone and kiss it!” I advise her.  

“Ha ha,” she sarcastically replies.

“You’re in Ireland, for crying out loud,” I say.  “They’re supposed to have the gift of gab!”

“I just can’t do it like you did,” she says.  “No one wants to look up anymore.”

It’s true that counters and chef coats make conversation easier for me.  But before I grew into this career, I spent a lot of years traveling.  And while my natural inclination was to stay quiet, I have always been fascinated by people.  I soon learned that every place I visited could be a lot more memorable when it came with conversation.  So I learned to seek it out.

I saw the spot where John Lennon was shot while listening to an Egyptian cab driver tell of his former life as a videographer before he lost everything and fled to the United States.  I saw the Algarve while dining with a couple having an illicit affair, living on the edge by taking advantage of every credit card offer they could get, borrowing the max, transferring debts from one card to the next and paying only the minimum, looking to see and do as much as possible until they carefully orchestrated a bankruptcy.  I saw Las Vegas while learning the ins and outs of the professional rodeo circuit from a bull-rider-turned rodeo judge.  I spent hours over breakfast with a widow in Montreal who had come to see her life as a celebration of color and femininity.  I went on regular walking dates through the French countryside with a nurse and her dog.  She would pick up the dog’s droppings in her bare hands and carry them home with her.  I ate pizza in a Colorado airport while listening to an earnest marriage proposal from a man four times my age, offering me wealth for life in exchange for daily conversation with him for the rest of his days.  I turned him down.  But I did let him pay for the pizza.

It’s these conversations, I’m realizing, perhaps more than the sites themselves, that have Saoirse craving travel.  Perhaps she wants her own wild stories to tell.  Or perhaps she wants the power of conversation like we have in the cafe…to draw her out of her mind and her worries, to help her overcome her fears and grow stronger.  

But she can’t get past the devices.  “People think I’m a freak if I try to get them to talk when they’re staring at a screen,” she laments.  Ironically, she’s texting me all this while things are slow at the cafe on Saturday.  She has been in constant contact with me, our conversation her only connection while in Ireland.

“Just relax and ask people about themselves,” I remind her.  “Everyone has a story to tell.”  I worry that the world has changed too much, that I’m sending my daughter on a fools’ errand for a type of adventure that is growing increasingly obscure. 

This kid doesn’t give up.  She scans for conversational opportunity as earnestly as she scans bus schedules and maps.  She sets her sights on the older woman who lives in the cottage next door to where she’s staying.  One day, after Saoirse dutifully rolls the household recycling to the curb, she notices that the woman wheels her can back for her at the end of the day.  Saoirse takes this as an opening and goes to the farmers’ market to buy the woman some chocolate caramel tarts.  While there, she she buys herself a cappuccino and sits down on a bench to drink it.  When she sees an older couple looking for a place to sit, she volunteers to share her bench.  From them, she learns where there will be a music session at a nearby pub later that night.  She goes home, delivers the tarts, and invites the woman and her daughter out to the pub.

And that’s when Saoirse’s and my non-stop digital connection starts to break up.  Suddenly, she ’s off on different adventures, exploring more and more places, meeting more and more people.  I’ve gotten very few words from her in the past few days,  only pictures – castles, cottages, cliff edges, all the different coffees she’s been sampling. 

But she does finally call home to let me know she’d gotten her first marriage proposal, from a farmer who was selling horse-drawn carriage rides.

“Come find me if ever you’re in the market for a husband,” he called after her following their conversation in the carriage, where they talked about horse breeding, days off when farming, and the avian flu.  “You don’t find many farm girls like yourself out in these parts!”  

Saoirse laughed and ran off to her next adventure, armed with her gift of gab.

And as for mama, well, I’m counting the hours til it’s time for my little girl to come home next Monday.  Then we can sit out on the porch, listen to the evening thrushes and the song sparrows, and hear all the adventures.  And I’ll quietly celebrate that, in spite of the devices, another generation might still embrace the art of good conversation. 

 

The Hearth of Sap Bush Hollow podcast happens with the support of my patrons on Patreon.  And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons Pam Farley & Paige Eley.

Thank you, folks!  I couldn’t do it without you!  If you’d like to help support my work, you can do so for as little as $1/month by hopping over to Patreon and looking up Shannon Hayes.