Five Interesting Conversations

I've had lots of conversations with people over the holidays, getting together with family and friends, working at the museum, etc. But I've chosen the five most unusual ones for this post.

• I met a bookseller and his wife visiting from Norway. We had a fine time talking about finding treasures in the book world. I told them I was convinced of genetic memory when I went to Norway and felt completely, utterly connected to the land, the people, the aesthetics, the whole feeling there.
  
• I met an elementary school art teacher who also teaches art classes at Utah Valley University. I told him about the new writing assignment sequence for English 1010 there (the course I've been teaching), and how it is designed primarily to develop critical thinking skills. One of the goals is to break students of the habit of deciding their thesis before doing any research and then simply finding quotes to support it. In fact, they don't write a full blown research paper. Instead their final paper is an exploratory research paper in which they write about their experience engaging with the content of their research. I was excited about it. He was excited about it. He even gave me his email address so I can send him more information (which I still need to do). Kindred geeks.
  
• I went with five friends to see Doubt, a movie about a nun (Meryl Streep, amazing) who believes a priest is abusing boys in her school. We had an energetic conversation all the way home. How can you really be certain about anything? And yet we are. I felt bad that they dropped me off first. 
  
• A sales rep at a store we visited recently shared wildly personal information with us. It started with a comment he made about his fifth grandchild being born, and when we expressed disbelief that he could have five at his age, he confessed that he became a grandfather at 36 because he became a father at 18. He then regaled us with stories of subsequent marriages to women and partnerships with men, some of whom had various troubles with various licit and illicit substances. But he seemed nice enough. We'd have bought something from him if we could have rationalized it.
  
• The last one isn't technically a conversation, but I thought it was an interesting encounter. And talking was involved. Whenever I stop by the art museum, I'm never quite sure what I might end up doing. The other day Roger and I stopped by to check on a couple of things and the director turned up with a huge bronze moose statue on a cart. He needed our help getting it off the cart and onto a pedestal. Crazy!