Talk About the Weather
Complaining about small talk has become the new small talk
On my morning walk, I wave to my neighbor and ask how he’s doing. “Oh, just waiting for the sun to come out,” he smiles, working on his truck. It’s been two days of gray, damp weather, but it feels like weeks. I tell him this. He agrees. Looking up from the hood, he squints and points to the hills in the distance. “I’ve lived here for twenty years,” he says. “Watching that sunset never gets old.” We exchange a few more pleasantries, and I’m on my way.
Maybe it’s a year of being in quarantine, but I miss talking about the weather: complaining about the heat with a stranger on the train, noticing the first signs of spring with the mail carrier, hearing the barista’s thoughts on Los Angeles summers. During a Zoom call last week, a scientist in Britain tells me it’s warm and sunny there. It occurs to me that the sunlight I see from my window is the same sunlight that’s hitting her, five thousand miles away. It’s easy to talk about the weather because weather is an experience we all share.
This is also why I used to hate talking about it. “Tell me something I don’t know,” I’d think to myself as friends and peers would update me on the temperature in their part of the world. “Who has time for small talk?” The irony, of course, is that complaining about small talk…
