Small talk matters.
Wednesdays seniors ride free on the train linking Santa Fe with Albuquerque and points south. On the way home, the gentleman riding in the seat in front turned to my wife and I to smile and say hello. “How are you doing?” he asked.
I answered that we were terrific, taking advantage of the senior citizen freebie. I suggested that he looked to be in the golden years himself.
We fell into conversation. He was a tribal member of the Kewa Pueblo, on his way home to Cochiti. His uncle had served thirty-five years in uniform at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, not far from where I grew up. We talked about the pandemic and when the reservations might be opening again (there’s a National Monument on Tewa land that’s been closed since 2020). He asked where we lived and, referring to my firefighter vest, I explained I lived in the Hondo District of Santa Fe County where I’d worked with a battalion of volunteer hose jockeys. He’d been a hotshot in his younger years, at the top tier of that firefighter world. We were two old men, making old man talk.
Before we parted, I wished him a happy Thanksgiving, quickly adding that I knew it could be a fraught holiday for some native people. He thanked me and returned the Thanksgiving greeting, telling me that he would probably head out tomorrow and shoot a duck to celebrate. His parents were gone and he had no other family. He’d be feasting by himself.
Part of me wanted to ask deeper, more probing questions, the kinds that have become part of our national discourse in a reckoning of how Americans deal with their complicated past. How could Euro-Americans atone for a history of exploitation and begin to mend relations with the original inhabitants of this land? But I sensed this was not the moment for those harder topics. We were just two guys, strangers on a train, making conversation to ease the loneliness and pass the time.
Maybe that’s not enough, but it’s a beginning. Before we can tackle the big questions, we have to be able to make the small talk.
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