Yeah, sadly my boss does this - tell you about stuff you know anyway. She also feels the need to tell you every single detail and stops the narrative to remember trivial details. Like, she’ll try to remember someone’s name, but can’t, so the entire story stops while she’s trying to remember, and even if you hint that it doesn’t really matter, she’ll still keep trying.
Sometimes I want to keep track of all of the inane things she says in a day but every time I start I get depressed at having to write it down as well as listen.
The other day I told my gf how cute she looked in her backwards black beret.
I told her she reminded me of that actor, you know, the one who played Ordell Robbie in Jackie Brown. Come on, you know, not Robert Forster, he played Max Cherry. The black guy, but not Beaumont Livingston. The guy who lived with Melanie, you know the woman who nagged Louis (played by De Niro) until Louis shot her.
“I don’t think I ever saw that movie.”
Of course you did. The Tarantino movie based on Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard, fer christsakes. The movie where <tells entire plot of movie over a fifteen minute period starting from the funky opening scene with Pam Grier’s stewardess strut and ending with the …>.
Nope, she hasn’t seen the movie. But as an educated guess she asks, Samuel L. Jackson?
I feel sorry for all of you people who have to endure rambling responses.
My mom offers up incredibly rich and interesting stories.
I know, they must be interesting since she tells them to me EVERY FRICKIN TIME I VISIT HER!
My dad, too. And he speaks English terribly, and subjects my poor SO to them, and he can’t even understand half of them. Ugh! And these people are completely immune to body language.
One of my co-workers rambles so much that she cannot eat lunch. Her mouth is too busy talking to eat. Truly, her lunch sits on table untouched because she’s blathering about whatever that is of no interest to anyone else. She’s 40 BTW. I can’t imagine what she’ll be like when she is old.
You know where Miss Lucille used to cook rundown on Sundays? She always made a little extra to give to the pastor. That would be the pastor of the Church of God on the waterfront. That old church was rebuilt after the storm of '32. An awful terrible storm. My uncle used to tell me how his boy Charlie, that would be my cousin Charlie, spent that entire storm playing with a yo-yo. Now to get a new yo-yo was something special. It wasn’t anything that you could buy in the store. One of the men would have to carve it out of logwood. Logwood was still an important export in those days and my daddy would spend Saturdays cutting logwood and then load his boat with it before he sailed to Jamaica to go to market. Anyway daddy made a little extra from selling the logwood and he would buy us rundown from Miss Lucille when he got back. But Miss Lucille had to move to the nursing home when she got sick and anyway I need you to send the ambulance to the Sunrise nursing home.
OK, what is happening at the nursing home?
Remember how bad the flu was in '53? It hit everybody so hard. And cousin Charlie, well he got a new truck by then with his earnings from his time at sea, he had to drive to town to get the nurse because Uncle Harry was so sick. But Charlie didn’t make it back cause he ran off the road and got stuck in a ditch on account of the road still having big puddles in the shady spots that hadn’t evaporated after the rain. And anyway a car ran off the road in front of the nursing home just like Charlie’s truck did and that’s why we need an ambulance. :smack:
After many years of trying to explain the situation to her, my mother, who’s in her early 70s, has finally realized that I don’t know the children of the children (now grown) I didn’t know nearly 30 years ago when I last lived in my hometown. It doesn’t keep her from telling me about their exploits at length but at least she knows that I don’t know who she’s talking about, twice removed.
I think it’s just something you have to be patient with, especially family members. It’s tough, though. There are many times in which my wife and I head to our wet bar downstairs after a phone conversation with our respective parents.
I was a health aide and I had clients that were very lonely would be trilled to have anyone to talk to. I bet this is one reason some elderly talk forever and they may be repeating their self and not even realize it. I do say something if I am in a hurry. Young people will ramble on too.
In the case of my 80-something parents, who were struck by this problem about 40 years ago, I think it’s a combination of factors, most of which have already been mentioned. There is an inability to edit thoughts, to consider those which are relevant/interesting versus those which are not.
If one makes the mistake of asking my mother to repeat the last sentence of a rambling response, she is quite unable to do so and must start the tale over from the beginning. I asked her a couple of years ago if she had trouble organizing her thoughts and her answer was an emphatic yes so I suspect there are physical factors at work here.
Older people are also often among our least informed demographic, which means that many are left behind in conversations had by better educated and better informed younger people. Add in a touch of social isolation and it’s pretty understandable why they light up whenever presented with a welcoming ear. I have often suspected that my parents pay as many of their bills as they can in person primarily for the social contact.
My mother, who is now in her eighties, did this as far back as I can remember, even before she was older. (I wonder if it’s more of a generational thing?) Sometimes she’ll stop and say, “what was I going to say?” as if even she has lost track of whatever it was she was trying to convey.
But it’s not just age or generational, because my brother does something similar. With him, it’s not so much when he’s answering questions, but just when he’s telling me about something that happened to him or relaying some other information. He’ll start, and then launch into an aside, and sometimes into another aside before completing the first one, and I’ll end up almost biting my tongue to keep from saying “get to the point” or crossing my arms to keep from making that hand circling “come on, come on!” motion.
