Loquaciousness

It’s really no surprise how many old friends who read my blog make a joke about the improvement of encountering me in this electronic medium where with a click I can be turned off.  Of course, they are being witty, but I detect an underlying truth. Here at home my husband who retired five years ago has made it clear that he can take only so much conversation with me, and I think back to my second wife, a demonstrably laconic lady, who would deliberately turn to her reading, which I now see was her way of shutting out more talk. We have recently become friends with a former therapist, and I note that in our evenings of chit-chat together she will suddenly turn to Richard to ask him a question that draws him into the conversation.  She was a family counselor and I suppose on the alert for the family member who never gets his/her say. I am used to aggressive conversationalists, having grown up with six siblings, all of them voluble, loud, and witty, monitored at table by our mother who was herself no mean speaker.  So while some males have an instinct to go for the jugular, I go for the verbal opening. I well remember my second wife’s mother, another talker, who was once in conversation with me when her husband, a retired admiral sitting near us, cleared his throat in that way people have of demonstrating their intention to speak.  We paused, but inarticulate guy that he was, the struggle to shape his thoughts into words was going to take a bit of time, and we, having paused, proceeded to open up another volley.  The admiral was enraged, to which his wife said sharply: “Sweetheart, this is conversation, and you have to fight to get into it.”  I guess it’s true that I never tire of talking.  I remember once driving to Provincetown from Cambridge with a dear friend, another great talker, and all the way there, all the time at the restaurant where we ate lunch, and afterward strolling on the National Seashore, and then in the drive back we never stopped talking.  The next morning we both admitted that our jaws muscles were so sore from a day of constant motion that we could hardly speak. I was a university professor for forty two years, and lecturing is natural to me, an occupation that also habituates one to being the center of attention, as well as enjoying a certain built-in prestige.  All of which, obviously, encourages the tendency to run off at the mouth endlessly.  Naive and self-obsessed that I am, the rude awakening came rather late in life when a group of young people, chefs and hair dressers, were required to suffer my presence at an evening’s gathering because I  was a house guest.  After having politely presented themselves and made the obligatory verbal niceties, they none of them again acknowledged my presence the entire evening, and I thought of films of peasant life in Eastern Europe where the elderly toothless crone with a kerchief around her head sits by the fireplace in silence. On the other hand, my professional life required study and research which acquainted me with solitude and silence, which have become the essential elements of my retirement years.  In the first year after I stepped down, when the phone no longer rang, it was hard for me to comprehend that I was no longer needed.  At the time of the financial crisis we made the decision to create a permanent Massachusetts home in our house at the seashore.  It is lovely there, the garden is stunning, walking on the beach brings on utter peace of mind, but on the other hand it is extraordinarily lonely.  The other residents seem to be cut from some other spiritual and intellectual fabric, there is the sketchiest of public transportation, a town center which exists in theory more than reality does not harbor a bookstore, an art theater, or a lively tapas bar, all of which means a life of utter isolation punctuated by somewhat arduous trips on a commuter train to Cambridge from a nearby town. As I have adjusted to this new phase of my life, I have benefited from pondering what I remember of the memoir of Albert Speer, called Spandau: The Secret Diaries. My reader will no doubt find this odd, but the book is his account of how he survived the mental torture of twenty years, some of it in solitary confinement, in Spandau prison for his role in the Nazi atrocities. If one was born to be gregarious and loquacious, then learning another way of life takes effort.