There was a woman sitting next to me on the plane ride from Denver to Los Angeles. She was beautiful. We made love upon landing, and I haven’t seen her since. That didn’t happen. But, oh if it did … (sigh) Oh if it did.

I’ll try again:

There was an elderly woman sitting next to me on the plane ride from Denver to Los Angeles. She was average, but her smell filled my nostrils with a wonderful lilac scent. I felt compelled to talk to her, but I was afraid. I was a mere youth in her eyes, inexperienced in the fine art of conversation. She would start talking about her life during the Ford presidency, and I would try to relate everything back to Watergate, as if I actually understood what really happened there. Lilac, her fake name I just came up with, would see right through my ignorant façade. For that reason, I spent half the flight avoiding her, looking out the window, counting the number of baseball fields and golf courses down below. Every time I would see one, I would say, “I could be playing baseball there,” or, “Gee, that sand trap looks big.” Looking back on it, how juvenile Lilac must have thought I was, counting unnatural landforms on my hand and talking to myself.

After running out of fingers, I turned to Lilac, who was reading. I’m sure Lilac loves to read, spending every night re-reading her favorite Shakespearean plays and Grisham novels. Today, she was reading something else: “The Fine Art of Small Talk.” Ha! Lilac was shy.

My whole perception of her changed. I imagined her whole life was spent wishing she could talk to people, but her fear of conversation had prevented her from doing so. Maybe she hadn’t spoken in years. Maybe her fear led her to go on a talking strike, in which her goal was to extend her “Mute Streak” to Cal Ripken-like proportions. God, I had to admire her self-control. I could now relate to Lilac because I too went on a talking strike years ago when I refused to speak to my father after he wouldn’t buy me a Ghostbusters Proton Pack. It lasted three months. We had to bring in an arbiter.

I stared at Lilac while she read, and without thinking, I placed my hand on hers. Before she could have a heart attack, I said, “Lilac, you can practice the fine art of small talk with me.”

“Funny,” she said. “That’s the title of my book.” I flashed a comforting smile when I could have easily given her a look that conveyed the poetic emotion of “No duh.” But, she was old.

“What are your thoughts on Watergate?” Lilac asked.

“Let’s start smaller,” I responded.

Lilac flipped to chapter one in her book entitled, “The Weather.” She read out loud, “Comment on the weather in the form of a question, thus forcing a response.” I told her the use of the word “thus” in the last sentence made the author appear intelligent. Lilac agreed.

So she began asking questions about the weather, and I responded. The book’s methods were working. At one point in the conversation, Lilac actually said, “What – do these weathermen just make this stuff up?” which forced me to giggle. She, however, laughed so hard that her complementary tomato juice went flying all over the sleeping baby in front of us. The baby woke with a vengeance. We were the center of hatred, but we didn’t care. Oh, that Lilac. We were talking small and loving it.

Lilac also hadn’t told me to stop calling her Lilac, which meant one of several things: Either Lilac was her name, thereby confirming my belief that I’ve always had a knack for naming people based on the way they smell. Or, Lilac was not her name, but she was intrigued by the possibility of having a nickname. “Hi, I’m Mirabelle, but my close friends call me Lilac.” This made me proud because, being the originator of her nickname, I would live on forever in her memory.

But wait, I hadn’t told Lilac my name. I didn’t want to live on in her memory as “the boy with the bladder problem.” I’ve said too much. Anyway, before I could tell her my name, she put her finger to my mouth to shush me. She opened the book to a section called, “The Dos and Don’ts of Small Talk.” Damn, this book was thorough. Lilac explained that learning peoples’ names wasn’t small talk. It was what the author called “Big Talk.” Clever. If you learned names, the author contended, there would be pressure to remember the names, which was much too personal. Why? Because if you didn’t like the person whose name you remembered, the next time small talk occurred with that person, it would be cheapened. After cheapening, the small talk would be transformed via photosynthesis into another category of talk: “Fake Talk,” which was the subject of its own separate book.

“Lilac, does this mean we’re through?”

“You knew from the beginning I only wanted small talk,” Lilac replied.

I turned to the window with a hint of a tear in my eye and looked straight down at a baseball field. “There’s one,” I said, and tallied it on my finger.

Goodbye Lilac, (sigh) goodbye.

Wait … that didn’t happen.

I’ll try again …

Seth Reiss, a junior in the

College of Communication, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press.