Snippets of conversation

As I walk around the city, the airport, I can help but hear little snippets of conversaton among other people. It may be one sentence in a hour long serious business meeting, a phrase in a casual conversation among stangers, a mother talking with her child, a bit of smalltalk between a customer and store clerk.

And it strikes me that here we are, spending our separate lives on this planet, going about our business, and these brief comments, overhead in passing, are some tiny momentary connection.

Sometimes they amount to almost nothing, as when two people are reading a restaurant menu posted in a window, one saying "I don't know. You want to try this place?" Other times they seem really important. At breakfast in a hotel restaurant, I look up from my paper to hear one man at a nearby table say to the goup of four other men, "Look, do I have the right people for this project? 'Cause if I don't, I'll go get some other people." Or simply silly. Or poignant.

My plan over the next few months is to rememeber some of these tidbits, these spoonfuls of talk in the river of conversation, and to write them down to see what happens. What could they mean? Even if the answer turns out to be "Not much," it might be fun.