I try to let at least five people a day know that I’m thinking of them and wishing them well. Sometimes it’s in person; often I send a little email. I don’t say much more than that to my five. Thinking of you. Hope you’re thriving. That sort of thing.
Small talk, I know. Yet small talk powers human activity and human feelings much of the time.
The key to good small talk is to believe, if only for a moment, that it is just as urgent and consequential as any philosophical conundrum or national event. At the core of this belief lie kindness and tenderness. People with whom you make small talk are made aware that for at least one moment in their lives, they have a safe home with you, a place where they are welcome just as they are. They do not need to earn your attention. They receive it simply by existing.
In all my long years, I estimate that I’ve asked half a million people how they’re doing. And they have asked the same question of me, all anticipating the same response. Fine, thanks. We’re doing fine.
The odd thing about that pat exchange is that it is both true and untrue. Actually, now that you ask, I’m not fine. My wife is ill. My friends are kicking the bucket at a terrifying rate. My arthritis is acting up. Yet I tell you I’m fine, not to subvert the truth but rather to create a different truth. A civilizing truth. I’m fine because you took the trouble to ask. Fine is the answer you expect, the one you wish to hear, and I want to honor your expectations, by which I am oddly elevated. For a moment we live contentedly in a fiction of our own manufacture. And by so doing we make it real.
Old men are especially good at small talk, because we have so little else to do. Women manage to do everything and make small talk, too, though with a lot of the women I know small talk often veers into gossip, the fun cousin of small talk, or over to the news, and so becomes a way of commenting on everything.
A simpler lot, men have simpler needs. The other day I watched another codger chatting with the young man who manages a neighborhood food truck. It was fascinating how much the two of them could make of the fact that it was drizzling. Did they think the rain would get heavier, lighter? Would it stop? When would that be, do you think?
Shakespeare often used small talk to get to big talk. A few minor players are babbling about this and that in order to set up Hamlet’s soliloquy or Othello’s rant. They use small talk as a tactic for stalling. That’s not true of pure small talk, which is a thing unto itself, and needn’t serve any other purpose.
Yet the most superficial subjects can go surprisingly deep, a phenomenon that has more to do with attitude than with content. The initiation of small talk — how’re you doin’ — means that someone has chosen to break through the carapace of normal self-interest, and is thinking of you, if only briefly. And you, if only briefly, are pleased enough to return the same question.
Small talk need not be that small. It may be about sports, the weather, TV shows. It’s about the things we share that bind us together. It’s just how you are. It’s how you fit into the same world with me.
Some of my daily five are friends I contact frequently, but I always try to add one or two to the daily mix. Last week I emailed a woman in upstate New York who used to be my assistant and is now an artist; a woman I worked for 19 years ago when I volunteered in a children’s hospital; a doorman in my apartment building who is laid up with a broken foot; a fellow I’ve known since kindergarten, a lawyer now retired in Florida; and another old friend with whom I played one-on-one basketball 50 years ago in Washington, D.C., practically every day. I told him how I missed our games.
“The other night, I was watching Steph Curry, and he reminded me of how I used to score on you at will.” Not all my small-talk messages are sweet.
And not all are written messages. In the course of a normal week, I find a way to chat with delivery people, store clerks, the mailman, my barber, with cops, with the woman at UPS who just had a baby. Babies are gold-mine subjects for small talk. Small talk about small people.
Nicola, a waitress in a favorite restaurant of ours, is from Sicily, and until last year she had never seen snow fall. Whenever Ginny and I dine in that restaurant, we mention the snow to Nicola, who always smiles excitedly.
And whenever we speak of Nicola’s snow, the talk does not seem automatic or pro forma but rather oddly intense, as if there could be nothing more important than this young woman’s moment of joy and revelation. I’m not sure that there is, or ever was.
As for you, you are ennobled in this process. Small talk connects you to those who need it, even if they are unaware that they need it. You feel better for making them feel better. Sometimes I look at a throng of strangers, and want to take the smallest hand, and make talk so small, you can hardly hear it. Yet the din roars through the world.
Roger Rosenblatt is the author of “Making Toast,” “Kayak Morning,” “Cold Moon,” “The Boy Detective,” “Rules for Aging” and the forthcoming “More Rules for Aging.”
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