I love conversation — the way it plays, its different styles and its apparent rules. I don’t want to cover a lot of ground in this piece because I just realized I have a lot more to say on the subject. Whenever I’m at a loss for blogstuff, I’ll go into another facet.

Today I went to Peets coffee with my friend, Joan. Just as we sat down at a sidewalk table, a man my age took note of my folded up pantleg. He tapped his artificial right leg and nodded. “What happened to you?”

I told him the short version. Knee replacement gone south, fasciotomy to relieve pressure caused by bloodclots, drug-resistant staph, blah blah blah, amputation.

We talked for a few moments about a mutual friend, the prosthetist who’d done work on him at the VA. The man had just cast my stump for a fitting.

Then he tapped his other leg. “I lost this one, too. A land mine in ‘Nam in the middle of the night. 1969.” He was pleasant, even endearing, but he picked up speed, unspooling his last forty years. Joan returned with the coffees. The man allowed us to yak for a few minutes until a snippet of conversation connected to another of his life experiences and he relaunched. I felt the steamroller coming.

He inhaled. I quickly looked at Joan and said, “So, it’s busy busy busy at work again for you?” I said it with all that fellow-executive importance I could muster. Yeah, that’s it, cook up a The-World’s-On-Our-Shoulders persona and he’ll back off.

And he did for a moment. In that moment, I noticed an old lady walking in our direction. I’d had a similar experience with her when we shared a table months ago. The man seemed to know her and gave her a beckoning greeting. She graciously passed on the opportunity to visit. Uh oh, even her.

It wasn’t long and he was talking at Joan and me again, segueing from Vietnam to prosthetics to some form of Buddhism that gave him solace and allowed him to be with himself. It was getting into crazy-old-man territory. I didn’t feel good about doing it, but I turned to him and very pleasantly said, “I really came here to talk with my friend.”

It worked. Without any resentment, he said goodbye, grabbed his cane, stood up on his two fake legs, and walked off.

Joan complimented me. “You did a good job.”

I guess I did.