My father had an uncanny ability to talk with strangers. He lived before popular personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator became common. As far as I know he was never tested on the scale of introversion or extraversion, but I’m pretty sure that all of his children remember him as being very extraverted. When we traveled, he talked to anyone who would give him a few minutes of their time. If we rode on an airliner, he would try to talk his way into a tour of the cockpit. If we took a ferry, he might be found on the bridge, chatting with the captain. If a hotel worker was cleaning the carpet, he would find out what machine and which chemicals were being used. He was naturally curious about all kinds of topics and he enjoyed learning new things. One of the big delights of his life was inviting someone he just met to our house for dinner. Our mother was used to setting an extra place at the table on a moment’s notice. We had a large family and we had signed places at the dinner table and whenever a guest came, I was the one who had to slide down the side of the table so the guest could sit in my place. Counting the number of plates on that side of the table was instinctual for me.

All of us kids have stories of one or more times when as teenagers, we were embarrassed by his delight in meeting and talking with strangers. One summer our family flew to Detroit, where we took factory delivery of a new station wagon, which we then drove to New York and Washington DC before driving across the country back to Montana. While in Washington DC, we were searching for a parking place, when my father noticed a mailbox with our last name on it. He pulled into the driveway, introduced himself and told the person in the house that if we had the same last name, we must be somehow related and he asked them if we could park in their driveway. We tried to talk him out of it, but he persisted and we did park our car at their home for whatever it was we were trying to do.

I think that I gained skill from his example. I think that my children would tell similar stories about me and strangers from their teenage years, though I never thought of myself has having the same natural ability as my father. I am genuinely interested in other people and I enjoy hearing their stories. I learned, through my work in the church, that there is little to fear in meeting new people. I know, after decades of reaching out to people at moments of great crisis in their lives that we have more in common than our differences. When I was a suicide first responder, I always had to be the one to reach out and start talking while the survivors were huddled in shock and grief and had no desire to meet another stranger. Still, it was important that I share with them support and information that they needed. I made many life-changing relationships through that work.

Now, after a big move, I am finding myself in the position of having to meet a lot of new people. Moving means finding a new doctor and a new dentist and a new person to check my glasses. I need to find new people to maintain my car and new people to help me check out of the grocery and hardware stores. I confess that I do very little shopping in other kinds of stores, but I need to meet new people there, too. I’m using my extravert skills a lot these days.

Still, I don’t really think of myself as being terribly extraverted. I am perfectly happy with being by myself. I like to figure out things on my own. Some days I really have to push myself to go to a new place or do a new thing. And, when I think about it, my mind remembers my father and I always think of myself as less extraverted than he was.

Despite the results of Myers-Briggs, which have ben criticized for creating false dichotomies, few of us are completely extraverted or completely introverted and most of us change in our feelings about reaching out depending on many different factors including age, other life events and situation. I’m a seasoned pro at meeting new people in a church social hall. I can go from table to table and work the crowd. I can’t carry that same ability to a cocktail party, where I feel isolated and eager to get out of the room. I avoid those kinds of gatherings as much as possible. Stand me at the doorway of a church sanctuary, however, and I’ll talk to everyone who passes by.

As our country begins to emerge from the pandemic, I have read several statements by friends and colleagues about how much they missed during the time of lock down and how eager they are to return to normal. Honestly, I didn’t suffer that much. I don’t remember feeling confined or cut off. I kept going on with my life. I’m eager to get back to in-person worship. I can’t get excited about church over social media, but most of the rest of the process didn’t bother me at all: shopping less often, staying home more, wearing a face mask in public. I wasn’t that big on going to movies or concerts in the first place, I guess.

I’ll take a few good friends over a ton of acquaintances any day. I’m not worried about popularity. I don’t have a political race to win. Still, I am interested in others. I see the advantages of learning to talk to strangers and met new folk. I’m not ready to limit my contacts to those who are familiar to me. I’m pretty sure I move around that scale of introverted to extraverted all the time. No one position fully describes me. In that, I think I’m like most others who are sometimes extraverted and sometimes introverted.

Occasionally, however, we meet one another and have interesting stories to share.