Off the top of my head ...

"Any Thanksgiving plans?" she asked as I sat down for a haircut.

Yep, we balding men also need haircuts every once in a while, even if nobody notices the difference between the pre- and post-haircut!

She was a new one.  I had not seen her before, leave alone getting my hair cut by her.  Her hair had a fluorescent color.  I am always impressed with the courage that people have to walk around with strange hair color.  I can't even bring myself to wearing trousers that are in colors other than the mainstream.  What a wuss I am!

It is not an easy question to answer.  For one, I don't know if she is for or against all the hype over Thanksgiving.  What if she has Native American blood and she detests the genocide of her people that resulted from the interactions with the white folk?  Or, if she has no family and events like Thanksgiving makes her depressed ... life for others is never the same as anything comparable to life as we might experience it.

"Oh, just a low key thing ... just by ourselves," I replied. 

Note that I gave nothing there.  Nothing about who is included in the "ourselves."  What "low key" meant.  Small talk can involve a whole lot of back-and-forth without saying any damn thing; something that took me a while to figure out, and which always baffles most visitors from other countries.

"Me too.  My sister and I go have a buffett at ..." I couldn't catch the name of the place that she mentioned.  But the details don't matter in such small talk.  It is, instead, all about the contextual  back-and-forth.

"Oh cool!"

"Yeah, I am a Native American, and I am not much into Thanksgiving."

I would never have guessed that she is Native American.  But, the intermixing means that even people looking white can have a good deal of native blood.

"My mother is from here.  She belongs to the ... tribe."  Again, I couldn't clearly hear the details.  "My father lives in the reservation in Oklahoma."

A simple haircut for a balding man.  The five minutes reveal a huge world behind the person cutting my hair.

"Drive safely.  Too many people rushing," she said as she dusted me off.

One of my many favorite topics this is--people rushing madly.  "I know, I have no idea where everybody is rushing to."

The haircut and the chat cost me ten dollars.  I added a two dollar tip.

"I appreciate you," she said.

A few minutes into the drive, the car ahead of me came to a complete halt.  An accident that had just happened, with smoke rushing out of the scene.  A damaged car smack in the middle of the road.  A dented car on one side, and another dented car on the other side.

After a couple of minutes of waiting, I, like other drivers, turned around towards alternate routes.