The Bigness of Small Talk

Mr. Rosenblatt is the author of the forthcoming book “More Rules for Aging.”

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?

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