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Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details. A lifetime of talk and how much do we really learn? By J. G. Fabiano "I wonder what dirt tastes like?" That was how I opened my first conversation with a cousin in my parent's backyard over 50 years ago. My cousin and I had never said much to each other before that because we'd always been in the company of grown-ups but they had put us out in the backyard to play while they tried to have some kid-free time inside. My cousin stared back at me blankly. Then he smiled, picked up a handful of dirt and shoved it in his mouth. From the instant look of horror on his face, the spitting and retching and the explosion of tears I realized that dirt was probably not something one should eat. The grown-ups all spilled out of the house to see what the problem was and I told them we were just talking. That was when I realized the power of conversation to teach you things. Conversation became an important part of my life after that. When I entered elementary school we were actually taught how to have a conversation. I remember my teacher telling me to listen first and then add to the conversation what I thought was important. The only problem with this was that everybody thought they had something important to say and nobody wanted to listen. This problem has persisted through most of my adult life. I remember one conversation I had when I was going into third grade. I was sitting at the front of the room because back then it was supposed to be cool to sit at the front of the room. My buddy and I were talking about the possibility of having the dreaded Miss Solomon as a teacher. She was said to be mean and what made it worse was that she had a black mole on the side of her face that was bigger than her nose. The next minute Miss Solomon walked into the room and proceeded to torture us for what would be the next nine months of our lives. That was when I realized that even the most innocent conversations could tempt fate. Conversations at elementary school generally concerned the same subjects. Baseball was big and television had become a center of our lives with conversations about Howdy Doody and the Peanut Gallery. Of course the most exciting conversation I had with my friends was finding out that one of our families had just purchased a color television set. Even though that color was mostly green, just the idea of seeing Howdy Doody's freckles and his plaid shirt was thrilling. Then, something momentous happened toward the end of sixth grade. Until then most of my conversation revolved around baseball. Great baseball players, great baseball games and great baseball plays. My group of friends could converse on the subject for hours without getting bored. Then, one of them asked me if I had seen the new girl in school. My response was immediate and overwhelming. Just the question triggered a hormonal reflex that flooded my body and brain and I realized something fundamental had changed in my life. I had noticed the new girl in school. Not only that, I had noticed there was something different about a lot of the girls in school and, even though I wasn't exactly sure what it was, I knew it was important. So, for the next six years, girls and baseball became an equal part of all my conversations. When I moved on to college my conversations still included girls but they were also becoming more philosophical in nature, more earnest and important, or so I thought. They concerned politics and history and a lot of righteous indignation. My friends and I couldn't figure out how our parents had managed to screw up the world as much as they had, and why they wouldn't just give up their positions of power and hand it all over to us so we could fix everything they had broken. As it came time to leave college our conversations evolved in a new direction; we talked a lot about money and how we never seemed to have enough of it. We talked about things we had never really talked about before, about the future and our place in it. Around this time some of us stopped talking about girls as just girls, and started talking about what it meant to be in love with somebody other than ourselves. For some this was an impossible concept to grasp and they rejected it outright as unrealistic and impractical. I think some of these people went on to run companies like Enron! Those of us who were fortunate enough to find that other person went on to have different kinds of conversations. Conversations about social responsibility and our place in the world and what we could do to help. Every now and then the conversation would steer inexorably towards family, and how the most responsible thing we could do was to bring up our children wisely and teach them to become good citizens. Babies were born, which led to conversations about gastric reflux, the merits of cloth diapers versus plastic, how baby just said her first words and how daddy would keep the boogey man away. These conversations took up the next 18 years of our lives. Then, suddenly, our conversations were back to money and how the hell we were supposed to pay for four years of college without losing the home we had worked so hard to acquire. These conversations were followed almost immediately by discussions about how much it cost to pay for the average wedding and did this quote from the caterer include a special appearance by The Rolling Stones! At social gatherings we no longer talked about justice and social equality; we talked about Botox injections, the fascination of following your own colonoscopy on a TV monitor and how this old college roommate had just been told by his doctor that he had a prostate the size of a hubcap. Now, I look to the future and I see myself, sitting on a rocker on the front porch of some over-priced nursing home, telling everybody how wonderful my grandchildren are and, here, wouldn't you like to see this accordion sized reel of pictures of them? Then one bright summer day, I expect, I'll turn to some old geezer rocking next to me and say: "I wonder what dirt tastes like?" The End
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