What's your talent?

We're in a phase right now, as a family, of admiring ourselves.

Every family dinner conversation seems to include a litany of how well we raised our marvelous children, usually in comparison with our newly-fledged ones encounters with their peers, who do not seem to have absorbed the same lessons of self-reliance that ours did.

At my son's birthday dinner last week we somehow got into a description of how talented we all were. DH is Mr. Music. Son Seng Lim is Mr. Music, Jr.  I trotted out my old joke that I'm pretty good at everything and superlative at nothing.

And daughter Nga, who has always been a little bit of a cuckoo in this nest, says , "well what am I good at?

And everyone's first reaction was a moment of awkward silence while we all struggled for the answer.

It was awful.

N in fact has an amazing talent; she's a gifted professional figure skater who has traveled the world getting paid to do this. She's been to US Junior Nationals. But for just a moment our minds went blank.

And then we all realized what Nga's talent really is. She's amazing with people, something the rest of us fail at to varying degrees. She makes friends easily, and keeps them happy. She gets along with all sorts of people.

There are all kinds of talent. Our society thinks of talent as skill-- art or music or sports.

But some people are just talented at life.