Listening to medical woes likely to induce headaches

Dear Miss Manners: My wife and I are often the recipients of complete verbal medical reports, sometimes from people we barely know.

I am 79, and my wife is 70. We look younger than our years because of healthy eating, exercise and a few cosmetic tweaks. Nevertheless, we both have calendars filled with doctor and dental appointments, which we never discuss with anyone other than one another.

We have grown tired of having to listen to complaints, often coming from individuals younger than us, in which we are spared no details. Quite frankly, we don’t want to be victimized in this manner anymore.

I am tempted to say, “Do you really think, at our age, we don’t have medical/health issues of our own?” Might there be a better way?

Gentle Reader: Certainly not that. If these people have any sense of decorum, they would feel obliged to give you a turn at reciting your medical history.

As an antidote to bores of any sort, Miss Manners recommends chiming in with a slightly irrelevant comment that sounds sympathetic, but also makes it obvious that you have not been following with great attention. For example, while someone is tracing the progress of his kidney stone, you say something like, “Oh, dear, I suppose all this nasty rain we’ve been having doesn’t help.”

Dear Miss Manners: My faith is central to who I am and my life. Those who know me know this about me, as does my new neighbor, who is aware that I am careful about what I bring into my home.

When she went on a trip, she was kind enough to bring a souvenir back for me. It was quite thoughtful and I was touched. The gift was a small item that came wrapped with a magnet statuette of a local deity attached to the packaging. I thanked her immediately and told her I would enjoy using the item, deliberately omitting the fact that I would not be able to keep the magnet portion of the gift.

To my chagrin, she responded by saying that she hoped that it wasn’t a problem with the magnet statuette, and that everything in this place she had visited seemed to reference deities of one sort or another.

I responded that I loved the item, but that I would not be able to keep the statuette, at which point she offered to keep it in her apartment.

How could I have handled this better? Is there a way to graciously refuse a gift? For me, it is not an option to possess items linked with other faith traditions. Nor is there an option to lie.

Gentle Reader: Your reaction — to express gratitude for the gift, and avoid an explanation that was both unnecessary and might be taken as criticism or ingratitude — was not lying; it was compassion and good neighborliness.

That your neighbor did not know to quit when she was ahead is no reason to abandon your approach. In fact, Miss Manners wonders if the donor only realized the problem with the magnet as she was speaking.

A simple, repeated assurance of your gratitude might have stopped further, awkward attempts to smooth over a dawning fear that instead of doing something kind she might have inadvertently offended you. Not all train wrecks can be avoided, but there is no reason to contribute to the derailment.