I was in a gas station market upstate New York one day in August looking for a public restroom. Six hours north of the city, a short way outside a town called Long Lake, it sat at the junction between the southern route by which we were about to be heading home and the western roads, toward Buffalo.
They didn’t have one. I bought a bottle of San Pellegrino and a pack of peanut butter M&Ms from the lady behind the counter anyway. She was in her late ‘60s, with blond-grey hair cut to her shoulders, and she wore a black and white striped shirt. I, my long hair lank and greasy, was in a dark green, cotton crewneck sweatshirt that fit me massively and smelled like three day’s worth of campfire smoke. With the kind of genuine friendliness that makes it easy to open up conversation, she smiled warmly at me and remarked on the beautiful day outside. We chatted casually as she rang me up. “And I really love that it’s sweatshirt weather!” she exclaimed, nodding at mine, as I stepped toward the door. “Me too,” I smiled, “I really do too.” She grinned.
Early that morning, packing up camp, I’d breathed (however toxically) the scent of the campfire and felt the familiar cramp of nostalgia, because it smelled like my childhood and the last camping trips before school would have started again, around this time of year. I’d been steeping in that sentimentally all morning while winding through the dense Adirondack wilderness, past glassy lakes and the hamlets that surrounded them. Just before pulling up to this gas station I’d noticed the quaintness of nearby Victorian-era buildings resembling schoolhouses; their pristine, like-new condition, and only half ignored the urge to step inside each of them and back through time, as it were.
So I was fraught with even more than my usual number of sentimentalities, tripping through a montage of idyllic memories and feeling a girlish excitement for the soon-to-be changing colors of leaves and the chill of the mornings as summer comes to an end. Wrapped up in my green cotton crew in the passenger seat of my boyfriend’s Toyota Highlander, I kept thinking of the stranger who had pinpointed for me, in the most straightforward manner possible, what my thoughts that morning boiled down to. Sweatshirt weather.
If you know someone well it’s easy to know what to say. Small talk tends to turn quickly into big talk: about the deeper meanings behind things, why certain people are drawn to certain types of weather, of memory, of temperament. Friends make connections, piecing the small bits together into a big puzzle that adds up, over time, to the whole person you know so well. Friends might, also, make fun of you for being just like everybody else basic enough to love “sweatah weathah.”
But if you don’t know someone at all, if they’re not from where you’re from, if they’re not of your generation or even your parent’s, I’d like to believe there are conversation starters that are more than just something to say. Maybe strangers can share feelings, can piece together at hyper speed all the things they can sum up about you and you can sum up about them, so a 20-second conversation that looks like small talk is actually just as big as any conversation you might have again in your life.