Friendship Friendship!
It’s the perfect blendship!
Cole Porter
Want to be among the great conversationalists of the 21st century?
How about the 22nd?
You can get a head start by getting out there and mixing it up. By using your head.
So get out there and convert somebody— I mean converse with somebody!
Now go on, this time I really mean it!
And you can be a good listener, too.
Great conversationalists listen more than talk.
The Art of Conversation A Guided Tour of a Neglected Pleasure, Catherin Blythe, Gotham Books, 2009
My best conversations inevitably and invariably veer to warm giving and taking talk about matters of the heart.
In other words, for best results, take talking time with a friend.
A friend can be a member of your family, too. Or somebody you meet at a bus stop, if you take the time to get to know them.
Talk about what you love. Notice how it seems to inspire you to talk about all that other stuff.
It can begin anywhere, anytime. My sisters Nancy and Jill loved talking about music they dug, sitting in their bedroom playing records for friends who came over after school. My brother Jimmie and I talked more about comic books and sports with our pals. Games, names and the numbers on the back of uniforms.
Later of course we got into which kid or teacher was disgusted by us, and all the other things that disgusted us— as so much of it so often did…
See how technology tries to separate us into our own worlds, at the same time claiming to bring us closer together?
It changes our own words. We may still have intimate times together laughing, crying, whispering about ourselves and other people. We’ll still talk on the food, the weather, books and movies and sex and what the landscape looks like, what games, podcasts or links to sites we go to or went to.
But, I wonder, does this kind of conversation go on anymore: The one with Shel or Stober or Steve Finkel and me skipping class to skip, gallop, tear on bikes over to Milton’s Drugs on Six Mile Road. Or to DeMott’s Drugs on Seven Mile? To sit at the counter drinking 12 cent chocolate cokes, grabbing a plastic bag of pork rinds to go. And one block closer to Woodward Avenue, the main drag, was Share’s Pharmacy –“Share treats you fair” it said on the window. On the corner there was a Biff’s, Nancy’s favorite place to skip out too, for burgers.
Where were those conversations for you? What did you talk about with your friends? Didn’t the city feel full of talking with your pals?
Hey look! It’s a whole new play about conversation! That’s gotta be a good sign.
Meanwhile, why are the conversations that took place back then the ones we can never remember when we get older?
Were we too busy throwing snowballs at passing cars to comment about it? (Today we’d have a page to comment on about it!)
Did you know that J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye is all about conversations? Holden Caulfield has more than two dozen of them. Conversations come up everywhere he goes in the book. He even comments on what kind of conversation he’s having. What kind they are or were, looking back at them, or even right now during them! He comments on how the conversation is going — one was a lousy conversation, another a witty conversation. Holden has brief and long conversations, “goddam boring” ones and “slightly intellectual” ones, too.
And at the end, after all these attempts to communicate, Holden is left in a pool of tears. Your heart really goes out to him. I recommend this book to all lovers of conversation. And everybody else.
When my father was in college, he and his friends conducted “bull sessions.” That was in the 1940s. By the 70s and 80s, it was sitting up all night in the dormitory rapping. Shooting the shit. Sometimes Bob and Mike, Jerry, Byron, Ted or Kent and I kept on talking until we ended up trucking down to Main Street in Middletown to O’Rourke’s diner for its famous steamed cheeseburgers and eggs.
Walking and talking the whole way there and back.
After all, where can you hear cooler things than from your friends?
Sitting on the floor and talking till dawn
Candles and confidences
Trading old beliefs and humming old songs
And lowering old defenses
“Love Song” in the musical Pippin
One time I discovered that if I stayed up all night? I would learn something. Like staying open to experience.
Hey, I’m just trying to stay open 24/7 here! I’m a one-stop talk shop. One of my college roommates Jeff always put it this way: “The people are the greatest.”
What did he mean? I think that as close as you want to get to another person, you are left finally knowing that there is always more to learn about them.
The mystery in that.
Does it ever end?
Not as long as we keep talking to each other.
So where are you going next?
What will your conversation look like today?
Two friends having coffee together/when something flies by their window
“Hypnotized” by Fleetwood Mac
A tavola non s’inveccchia “When dining at the table with family and friends, one does not grow old.”
A toast from the founder of Riunite, Harry Mariani, from his obituary, NY TIMES Jan 11 2016