The Kids Are In Town

After thirty five years of teaching English, I consider myself adept at generating and directing discussion and as you can imagine, I'm also a dazzling conversationalist.

Take last night for example. My daughter Mary and her partner John came to visit from Boston. They are looking to relocate down here so this is a bit of an exploratory mission for them. They spent the night in Downtown Charlotte. We picked them up at a place called the Mellow Mushroom, a tres cool pizza joint.

We returned to Serenity. The kids unpacked. When they were finished, they came down and met us at the kitchen table where a far reaching conversation took place.

It was a joy to participate and a welcome chance to exercise my skills after weeks of  sullen silence and muttered asides. The conversation began with plans and agenda for the coming three days as we synchronized our watches and formulated a schedule. Since these particular subjects tended to concentrate on reality, I was happy to take a back seat and let those more familiar and successful with that concept guide the discussion while I deferred judgment.

Deferring judgement is one of my strengths and the secret to my success as a problem solver especially when I'm leading a conversation. No idea is too crazy to consider while brainstorming.

After about a half hour we had our schedule pretty much approximated. I was looking for an opportunity to gently change direction.

Mary and John are both designers. Mary was saying how in the past month, artificial intelligence has exploded within in her company. Just before departing fro Charlotte, Mary's boss had instructed his artists and writers to use AI whenever possible.

This of course led to the risks and rewards of using artificial intelligence. The discussion was far ranging. We came to the conclusion that AI was here to stay. We speculated about misuse and plagiarism and high school essays. We wondered how many writers and artists would be put out of work. On and on and on into the night. The topic was fascinating and timely.

As for my part, as the leader of the discussion, I committed myself to the conversation while I encouraged open ended exploration by loosening my grip on my ideas and beliefs while employing active, empathetic listening to help everybody tell better stories as I continually sought to seek clarity and definition of words and terms in order to build a common language to uncover common values at the same time applauding/appreciating those moments collective transitional collaboration known as segues to foster the concept that conversation is always an act of creative sensitivit; a paragon of civility and the juncture where humanity shines the brightest.

The conversation burned brightly into the darkness of the night. Finally, with my beer depleted, I found the perfect moment to wrap things up with a summary and a benediction.

Everyone was tired yet stimulated by the conversation. We all retired to our rooms for the night, the ideas and visions generated by our verbal exercise of creativity now ready to percolate into dreams and manifest as idea turning to action turning to destiny.

As soon as we reached our bedroom, Lynn summed up the evening, "You talk to goddamn much."