MARGINALIA

THE LOW-DOWN ON SMALL TALK

Valerie Weaver-Zercher

I used to hate small talk. I’d dread those times between church and Sunday school or during reunions when you shake hands with people and ask them about their asparagus patch or roof repair or the game last night. Any time that I found myself in a crowd where I heard, “How ‘bout them Steelers?” or “Whaddya you think of that storm last night?” or even “How’s your sister-in-law’s cousin’s health?” I’d slink away as fast as I could–or if there wasn’t an easy exit, cower in the corner or hang tight to a good friend if I was lucky enough to have one nearby.

I think it was a combination of shyness and disdain for surface interactions that produced this intense antagonism. I’m not an extrovert and have always preferred old, close friendships to new, budding ones. Plus, in college my friends and I were into deep, meaningful, intimate talk. What good was talking if we weren’t analyzing the twisting contours of someone’s romance, figuring out why God allows suffering, or sharing our five-year future plans?

Sure, we laughed a lot and talked about goofy things–but certainly never about the weather or sports or canning. Even our humor was enlightened, elevated by sarcasm and irony. In fact, we’d make fun of letters from our mothers and grandmothers if they included news of how much tomato juice they put up that week or who in their congregation had appendicitis. We were studying magic realism and situational ethics, daggone it; who had time for quart jars and Sister Vera’s thyroid?

Looking back, I still appreciate that young-adult impulse for intimacy and openness, for deep conversations or none at all. We were coming to terms with our faiths, our vocations, our childhoods, our intellects, and our sexualities, and I’m grateful for the friendships in which we processed these. I still value those friends with whom I can share deeply about intimate, personal subjects.

In fact, I wish I had more of those conversations now, that more of my interactions included cathartic cries and gut-wrenching honesty. And I still believe that small talk can be a convenient vehicle for avoiding painful subjects, that it can be used to create distance when a conversation is getting too prickly close to what really matters.

But I’m becoming sort of a fan of small talk. Perhaps it’s because most of my days are spent talking to a one-year-old. When the bulk of one’s daily talk includes “What does a cow say?” and “Do you have a poopie in your diaper?” even some chit-chat with a neighbor about impatiens or the local chocolate workers’ strike seems like soul-baring conversation.

Perhaps I’m becoming what I disdained in college—an adult preoccupied with those measly little trivialities of life rather than the Really Important Issues Everyone Ought to Care About. Perhaps my stay-at-home “mom-ness” is grinding my brain into a squishy lump of hamburger, useless for shaping sentences about anything more than weather and babies.

Yet I think my new affinity for small talk also comes from realizing its usefulness, not only for avoiding those awkward silences with someone I’ve just just met, but also for staking out those regions of common ground with folks who, for whatever reason, I’m unlikely to become as close to as my college friends.

And since it’s unlikely that I’m going to launch into conversations on the psychological impact of being a missionary kid or the hegemony of consumer culture with my neighbors or the woman at the checkout counter, I’m grateful for gardening and traffic and grandchildren and trash pick-up.

Sometimes we scratch through the surface to those things that really “matter”—this happened often during the days after September 11, when as strangers we shared parts of ourselves we usually keep well-cloaked. But I’m not sure that I even like these categories anymore: things that somehow “matter” and things that somehow don’t.

In fact, one person’s small talk can be another’s life work. For my brother-in-law who is a farmer, for example, the weather isn’t just a polite conversation topic; it’s the force that shapes his days and determines his yield. And who says talking about peas and compost and zinnias isn’t actually talking about God? Or that listening to my neighbors talk with shining eyes about their grandchildren isn’t actually listening to their very souls?

I recently met up with some women who are members of my childhood congregation. I have such good memories of these caring people, but over the years it became clear my family had differing perspectives from most in the congregation about some important matters—women in leadership, for example.

As I entered my senior year of high school, I began to feel acutely the growing distance between my youth group friends and myself. I was headed to a Mennonite college away from home; most of them were going to state universities or trade schools and staying in the county. I was beginning to consider myself a feminist; most of them were hoping to get married soon and be stay-at-home moms (I won’t even get into that irony).

Even as we threw ourselves into those adolescent hilarities of stealing friends’ mattresses, soaping cars, and yelling along with Debbie Gibson songs, we began to talk about things like politics, poverty, and theology. We began tentative arguments that usually dropped into awkward silence. Even while I began longing for the more meaningful and—dare I risk the arrogance—“intellectual” conversations I would find with my college friends, in those last few months of high school I began missing those innocent days of teenage small talk: boys, clothes, cars. Rather than figure out a way to talk about this with my friends, I began to distance myself from them with feverish extracurriculars—such as newspaper, orchestra, dramas—that placed me around college-bound kids like myself. I didn’t know if my friends had changed or if I had. I still don’t.

But as I began saying, I met up with some of their mothers a couple months ago. As we hugged and exchanged greetings, I began feeling sheepish and sad about the gulf that had grown up between their children and me, wishing it could have somehow been otherwise.

Even while I knew I had needed to form my own identity during those years, I wondered whether the high-school me had come across as haughty, impatient, ready to break out of Lancaster County and never look back. I wondered what these mothers thought of me, whether they thought I’d dropped their sons’ and daughters’ friendships without a second thought.

That evening, I couldn’t bring myself to speak of the memories of my own and my family’s leavings, and I’m not sure what good it would have done. Apologize isn’t quite the right word for what I felt I needed to do. Acknowledge is, perhaps—acknowledge the differences that had cropped up between us, the ensuing hurts, the remaining commonalities. But for whatever reason—shyness? lack of courage? lack of energy?—I couldn’t even bring myself to do that.

What I did find, however, was that I was almost ravenous for information about the children of these friends from whom I’d grown so distant. How many children did they have? What were their names? Did they live nearby? Did they still go to our childhood church? Before long I was carried into a delightful stream of small talk with these women from my childhood, laughing about old jokes and the new antics of their grandchildren. They asked about my son and shared some of their memories from early parenthood.

That night, small talk became my savior. I probably shouldn’t speak for the other women, but I think we were using this chatter about daily life as a code to communicate something deeper to each other: I care about you, we have things in common, we share such good memories even though we are distant.

I’m willing to entertain the idea that I used chit-chat as a tool of avoidance that evening. Maybe I should have broached those more painful topics rather than sticking with the safe ones of memory and family. I want to remain critical of the ways small talk can function to mask what should be unmasked, to drown out what should be spoken.

But the subtexts of small talk—care for the other, commonalities among those who are different, familiarity with the stranger—can also turn chit-chat into holy chatter. I mean, who’s to say heaven’s conversations won’t turn frequently to asparagus patches and thunderstorms?

—Valerie Weaver-Zercher, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is the mother of a toddler as well as assistant editor and columnist for DreamSeeker Magazine.