I always thought my father was just like me, no nonsense, no chit chat, just to the point. Until I went with him when he was looking for storage space, and had heard an 80-year old farmer a bit outside of our town had some.

They talked about essentially nothing for twenty minutes but if you listened very carefully, somewhere in between the farmer had asked what my father was looking for, and a few minutes later my father had spent a few sentences on it, and then later it was mentioned that Xx who is the brother of Y you may know him has that company and he is using storage now but in a month half of it will be free and who knows and the rest depends on what Z does in the spring. In the end my dad kept a lot of stuff there for years paying hardly anything.

And in the meantime they understood exactly who the other was, what kind of people they were from, and so on.

I was in awe (I just stood there listening), they just had a whole type of conversation that I couldn't do.

So now I try to practice when I have the chance.