Spreading the Words

I’m not the only one who worries that the younger generation, which is well-educated, well-fed and well-dressed, isn’t so great at conversation. The kids I know are adept at writing interesting compositions, but writing isn’t the same as talking. That’s why I’ve been thinking about the old country (St. Louis), when three generations of my family used to get together on Sunday afternoons to eat and schmooze.

Let’s go back to my sophomore year of college. I had visited my boyfriend Harvey’s family, who were the strong, silent types. Well, Harvey was pretty strong, and, except for him, all of them were silent. His father drove a hearse, his mother sat in the back of a fancy jewelry store, hand-stringing pearls (there’s a trick to it) and his sisters worked for an import company in which everyone spoke Dutch, so it’s easy to understand his family’s parsimonious verbal style. At the sole family dinner I attended, the only people chatting were Harvey, a neighbor who owned a grocery store downtown and me.

When it was time for Harvey to meet my uninhibited, animated family, I decided to bring him to one of the Sunday soirees. I figured that the bonhomie would be energizing, but, unfortunately, I was wrong. His discomfort was such that, even though he was polite and had lovely manners, we didn’t stick around. I hated to miss the food, but I had to save my sweetheart. As we drove away, Harvey had only one question: “Why does everybody have to talk, talk, talk all the time?”

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It was disappointing that Harvey couldn’t appreciate extroverted folks who loved each other so much that we just had to let everybody know what was on our minds.

I was used to the nonstop back-and-forth among the union members, smart-alecks, sports nuts, store owners, shul presidents, military vets and self-styled “intellectuals.” I loved the salad bowl of personalities in my family, and I honestly believed that Harvey would find the afternoon crowd lots more fun than his uncommunicative clan.

It boiled down to this: I came from a family of talkers, and Harvey didn’t. That’s not the reason we broke up, but it was a good thing because later in the year, I met Zvi, a talker, who, if there were an Olympics for people who have opinions and ideas and are fond of sharing them, would win gold.

Zvi and I met at a convention in the Midwest. At the opening dinner, my chair backed into his and we had a brief chat, during which he bemoaned the fact that he’d recently hurt his leg and had to use a cane. There was a dance that night, but because he had only one useful leg and I liked his New York-iness, red hair and the fact that he had gone to one of those small, liberal arts, pinko-Commie schools as an undergrad, I decided it would be worth my while to skip the social and stick with him.

We talked for four hours, called it a night and resumed communicating the next day. Zvi is a New Yorker, and the winter after we met, I flew, with much trepidation and insecurity, to meet his sophisticated parents. “You’ll love my mother,” Zvi told me, “and she’ll love you.” Naturally, I was a nervous wreck, but I steeled myself for my first test: a brunch his parents hosted at their co-op. After it was over, we four sat together and I awaited my final grade. I was surprised when my future mother-in-law candidly expressed relief. “I always feel obliged to do my part in the conversation when I’m invited to someone’s house,” she asserted, “and I see that you’re not afraid to talk.”

Zvi and I were married that summer. I was able to graduate early and move to New York, where Zvi had rented an apartment. Between his old friends, family, the people with whom I taught school and the folks in our apartment building, there was no dearth of amusing raconteurs, multilingual storytellers, scandal-sharing informants, lifestyle gurus and shopping mavens.

And that was before the internet and texting. With the miraculous technological gains, there have been critical losses. I suggest that we seasoned talkers reach out, infiltrate the youthful sector of our land, and spread our words.