My husband and I have a few go-to topics for when we can't think of anything to say and we are eating a meal. Number one is movies. We analyze a movie we've recently seen, or a director or actor. It's fun. Another is childhood. This may surprise you, but after more than four decades of marriage, there are still things we don't know about each other. The other day my husband described his childhood house again and for the first time I realized they had a playroom. I only saw his house one time and it was eons ago, so we discussed the objects in the room and the dutch door at one end that allowed the whole room to be like a giant playpen, where his parents could look in through the top half and have the bottom half closed. Pretty clever. My husband has amazing recall over his childhood, whereas I have many fewer memories. But he stayed in the same town and house, whereas I moved a few times. My favorite place, Virginia I remember the most about, including the wild violets in the spring and daffodils growing on the hill where we kept three sheep to eat the grass.
Topics we avoid are politics and our kids. Both take us down the road to worry or speculation, and we try to remain detached from the zeitgeist and pretending we can manage our kids' lives. We can only observe.
In a pinch, I ask him a science question, as he is an encyclopedia of such information or I tell him the plot of a novel I'm reading that I know he'll never pick up. In such a way we entertain each other despite seeing each other quite a lot now that we're retired.
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