This! My mom has done the long rambling disconnected answer thing for as long as I can remember. She’s very extroverted, so she loves conversations and will strike them up anywhere, anytime.
Me, I’m an introvert, plus just naturally brief and businesslike. I will have a short conversation if someone else initiates it, but I don’t go around looking for them.
I think it’s a matter of temperament, not necessarily age.
I knew my mother in law for the last thirty years of her life (she died at 97). But from our first meeting, she did things like this.
Not in answer to a direct question - she was pretty sharp up to her last - but once she got going it sort of started nowhere, nothing happened for a long time, and then it just stopped. I actually tried to remember one story she told, where there was a garage where they sometimes took their car to be fixed, but the garage got torn down and they built apartments there, and a friend of hers moved in there and my MIL went to visit her and there was a tornado warning and they had to go into the bathroom. That was it, and it took, like, twenty minutes to get thru.
It wasn’t age. She did this right from the day I met her. And she could talk about things that happened yesterday just as easily as things that happened during Prohibition. Her mind just operated via this kind of association.
And it worked for her.
She was a world-class crocheter. And it was beautiful handiwork. And she had crocheted an altar cloth for the church where she was an almost daily communicant. And a priest stepped on the altar cloth and ripped a big hole in it. So they consulted the expert.
My MIL looked thoughtfully at the cloth for a few moments. And said "that looks like something I did when the church opened.
The first baptism at that church was Beulah’s daughter." So she picks up the phone and calls her friend Beulah, hi how are you, how’s your leg, did Henry get his colonoscopy, etc, etc. Then “How’s your daughter doing?..Uh huh…uh huh… How does she like it at her new job…blah blah…How old is she now? 57? Oh, that’s nice…etc.”
She hangs up (eventually). “Let’s see - 57, so it must have been 1951”. She goes down to her basement, and walks over to this bookcase filled to bursting with eight million back copies of a magazine of crochet patterns (called, IIRC, The Workbasket). She picks one off the shelf, glances at the date, that’s not right, goes back about eight copies, picks one off, flips thru it for about ten seconds.
“Oh - here it is!” She had found the exact pattern that she had used in 1951.
Three hours later, she had clipped out the damaged portion, recreated it, incorporated it invisibly back into the altar cloth, carefully repaired all the other weak spots, and used some concoction or other to dye the new part to match the rest.
She hangs the thing up to dry, and says to me, “I don’t think Jesus will mind what I did.” I didn’t know what the dickens she was talking about, but later my wife explained the reference.
I miss that old coot. As has been said, I would give something to hear another endless, rambling recitation of - whatever she was talking about.
Regards,
Shodan
This happened to me just yesterday. I met a friend at a steakhouse that I’ve been going to since I was kid (it’s been around since the late 1920s), but was his first time.
The widow of the owner (son of the original owner) is the receptionist and has been for forever. I’m used to her. She’s sweet, but never quite as long-winded as yesterday. Turns out she was lonely being at home over the extended holiday weekend because the restaurant was closed.
I could see my friend was getting a little peeved, but I knew her and didn’t mind. Dang. She must be pushing 90.
Yep. I can name one person who is gonna steal it!
Funny that the OP should mention a pharmacist. My next door neighbor is a retired pharmacist. “Hello” is a 30 minute conversation. No, I’m not exaggerating at all. On top of being long winded, he tends to talk down to you: “They have what they call a ‘weekend special’ that takes place on Saturday and Sunday.” No shit?
Endless stories of pharmacy school, and he forgets that he already told you that scintillating tale. It doesn’t matter, because even if you tell him he already told you that story, he tells it to you again.
“Have you been to San Francisco?” (to my wife) “Yes, I lived there for 25 years.” Cue endless story that includes the history of the city, how it’s laid out, etc.
Nice guy, but STFU once in a while.
I’ve spent years mastering the answers on Trivial Pursuit, watching Jeopardy, reading those little filler blurbs in the newspaper, and collecting all manner of useless factoids, JUST so I can have the pleasure of annoying my sons and their children with pointless rambling monologues about people, places and things they know nothing about. 
I plan on being a vengeful old thang.
This thread reminds me of my cousin* Bob. I don’t mind when he went on rambling accounts of how things used to be when he was young, in fact I find it a bit interesting. But I have a natural interest in history. He’s in hospice care now… I should make time to see him this summer, just in case it’s his last one.
As for my parents(they both still work and insist that they’re too young to retire), I seem to have the opposite problem. Trying to fix something around the house with my dad:
Dad:[hand shoots out] Give me the…[fingers waggle]…thing!
Me: Screw driver?
Dad: No, the other thing
Me:…Hammer? Calk gun? Porpoise? I don’t…?
And my mom has a bad habit of starting a sentence but not finishing it. It’s been tat way for as long as I can remember. Maybe I should get worried when they start speaking normally.
*Actually my father’s cousin, and half a generation older than my father.
I’m fine with the vengeful old thang.
But you’re wasting your time memorizing all those facts. Much easier to simply invent the facts or experiences as you go along. Sort of like that grandpa Simpson monologue back on page 1. Who’s going to disagree with your version of the Famous Downtown Warehouse Fire when it happened 20 years before they were born in a state they’ve never visited? Think of the Power!!
Or as we often to say about our military careers: The older I get, the better I was. Applies to a lot of guy’s recollections of their love life in college too.
I’m 65. Not quite “elderly”, IMO. I have a tendency to do this sometimes, but it is not a recent development.
To be frank, I am not very patient with people that talk just to be talking, so I try not to ramble on about nothing pertinent. But, sometimes someone will ask me a question, and I realize that just the answer that I have would be insufficient without a little background. This is when I have to watch very carefully to keep from starting out, “Well, first the Earth cooled, then the dinosaurs roamed the Earth…”
I do this quite a lot, but never when time is in question, when someone is in a hurry. I do it when me and the people around me have all the time in the world.
My grandmother, who is still alive, calls me every time I don’t really have time. Sometimes I’m in a highly stressing situation, like trying to find the one screw that is not damaged on a floor full of damaged ones, trying to finish my exam. I told her several times, I don’t have time, hey I have to go, sorry but you have to call another time – Slam! I had to hang up on her. And she still didn’t get the message, and called me the day later, at the same time asking about the same stuff. I had to tell her to wait until I’m finished, right now I’m really busy, don’t call me until next week, next week I’m not busy. And then hang up again. And she continued to call all week.
My other grandmother, now deceased, expected me to remember who someone living on the totally opposite of where I was living in the country, someone who I’d never met in my life, someone I couldn’t care less about, and then remember every detail about what was happening in their lives, as if I knew every mundane detail. In person I was sort of embarrased, but on the phone I went into trying to get my points through, say the polite things and then zone out and say huh, yeah, alright.
Yeah I do it, I actually like it in doses, my father also kinda does it. But none of us does it to unsuspecting store clerks. Sometimes I angrily rant at them, but that’s a complaint.
Sorry for the rambling, folks. I’ll stop now.
Yeah. I get the sense that the OP hasn’t spent much time talking to children between the ages of 4 and 11.
I know someone in her 40s who does this. She’s connects this with another irritating habit - interrupting people to predict what they’re going to say. Any time you try to get a word in, she’ll finish your thought for you (whether it’s what you were actually about to say or not) so that she can go back to being the one who’s talking.