Friends and the art of conversation

My brother left Minonk in 1954 to attend Trinity College in Hartford, CT. and has remained there ever since to continue his practice as a pathologist. He met his wife Ann, who is from England, when he removed her appendix while she was a nurse in Montreal and Dean was an intern just out of McGill University medical school.

Like most young couples starting life in a new place, they were removed from family and had few friends. However, unlike many young couples, Dean and Ann remained stationary rather than relocating and in the process developed a core set of friends that provided fellowship and support that has endured for 35 years and more. Over the years many weekends were spent taking turns entertaining each other at dinner parties or celebrating special occasions together. I envy their tradition as I feel that one of the most enjoyable activities in life is to engage in long and stimulating conversations while dining on great food and drink.

I salute Dean and Ann and their friends for having the insight into discovering that life is so much richer if it is shared with good friends who are always there in times of need and in times of joy and fellowship.

Today it seems that conversation is more banal and meaningless. I know that lively conversation often exists among the coffee shop crowd but that is as far as it goes. Stimulating and meaningful conversation has now been replaced with the endless gabbing on cell phones. While getting on the airplane this weekend, I noticed people talking on their cell phones while trying to load their luggage in the overhead rack of the airplane. Is a conversation so important that you have to talk while entering an airplane?

Everyone knows about people who talk on the cell phone while driving and trying to eat a hamburger at the same time thus endangering their lives and everyone around them. But my biggest pet peeve is seeing young kids walking down the street talking on the cell phone. What do they need to be talking about while walking down the street? Basically, it seems to me that endless talking on the cell phone is an attempt to cure boredom rather than an attempt to carry on an intelligent conversation about issues that are worth discussing.

We should encourage our children to engage in group conversations that requires a modicum of socialization rather than allowing them to banter endlessly through the isolation of a telephone or a computer. Television and the internet are great inventions but they have helped destroy the social interaction that existed in a network of friends getting together on a regular basis. As a result we are all a little less civil.