common trends

it is amazing that there are some themes in life that run common through everyones lives regardless of differences of religion, culture, and national origin.
MD and i have worked together for over a year now, and on the surface you would think that we would have little in common, besides our employer. but lately we have found a mutual subject of conversation:elderly relatives.
he is not the only one i discuss this with. caitlin enjoys the same phone calls i do, only hers come from toronto. our phone conversations with our parents are identical: on saturday i was informed that the temperature had fallen overnight by 5 degrees. amazingly, the weatherman had got it all wrong and my father was cross that he had not had time to prepare psychologically for this climate transistion. caitlins father suffered a similar shock over in ontario. it seems the weathermen around the globe were consipiring to trick pensioners.
i get these phone calls at least once a week. the go on forever and are almost entirely uniform in content, yet provide great entertainment to my family.
weather is a standard feature in my conversations on the phone to home. international politcal conspiracies, real or imagined, are another. MD gets his share of these as well, but he has another issue to face: the car. his father has driven the same car since 1975 and refuses to change it. but MD complains that he spends more repairing the thing than it would cost to but a new one. i completely understand: my dad has had the same fridge for THIRTY SIX YEARS. we unite over such dilemmas at the till point. MD is plotting a way to make the car disappear without his father noticing. that would be rather hard to manage with a fridge though...so i must think of another way!
oh and needless to say none of our fathers can use a mobile phone.....