A small confab

I met this Dutch couple on my flight back from NYC. The lady who was sitting next to me asked if it was my first trip to the United States and I said ‘yes’. She asked me the next obvious question what was I there for. And I said ‘To see another country, meet and talk to new people, someone like you for example and importantly to meet my Superpartner’. Over years, if I have not learnt the art of asking right questions, I have at least learnt to ask back the questions they ask me and that solves two problems – one, they do not feel offended that I was not interested in them by not asking anything and two, the other person doesn’t find me rude because they asked me the same questions. To make sure they not get irritated or think plainly that I copied them, I ask the questions after a while or sometimes twist them a bit so that they appear as new questions altogether. Now it was my turn now to start the conversation and I pretty much asked her this ‘You must have visited US many a times’ and she said ‘O no… this is our second time.’ and before me asking the second question, she said ‘We had gone there to celebrate our 50th anniversary. Both me and my husband are musicians and we had wanted to spend some good time in the same country we were there many years ago’. Now, she left me in a tricky situation, I had only asked one question, which meant that I was supposed to ask one more to even out our situation and her long answer to the first question meant she wanted to talk more, maybe not with me, but ‘just talk’ in general. So, after thinking for a little while, I asked if her children were in Frankfurt (the flight was from NYC to Frankfurt). She replied saying ‘We will be taking a connecting flight to Denmark and we don’t have children. We are united by our love for Music and we wish to learn more and more Music and compose’ (this is when I realized they were Dutch). I liked her answer a lot and that made me write this post. Wish our dictionaries just didn’t give us the conventional answers when we looked for words like ‘children’ (son or daughter of any age). Wish they also said things like ‘beings/things you wish to give your heart and soul to’. Yes, I’m also looking for Philosophies as answers. In the internet age, is that asking for too much?