You`re sitting comfortably before a toasty fire, a glass of spirits in your hand and a rapt audience at your feet. The subject is past political conventions, and your daughter and three or four of her friends have just asked you about the Democratic National Convention of 1952. After all, it was the last party convention to go into a second ballot, and you were there. You were really there, working on the floor, and caught up in all of the excitement of the moment.
So you enthusiastically launch into a detailed exposition of exactly what happened on that summer afternoon. If the press had covered it properly, you tell them, it might have even changed the course of American history. You`ve gotten to the climactic moment when a congressman you had just met whispered to you that the Kansas delegation was caucusing and this meant you might be able to. . . .
You look around the room, and your young audience is no longer rapt. As a matter of fact, one of them is almost dozing, and the eyes of the others are beginning to glaze. Once again, you`ve been telling them much more about something than they really wanted to know.
Or perhaps one of the inexhaustible supply of young people in your office has asked you why the firm carries that dark green, hard-edged thingamajig in stock. So you begin the inside, and very gripping, story about how way back in 1959 old Mr. Forbush insisted that cerulean blue was what the thingamajig trade really wanted, and you describe how you, the rising young tiger of the day, talked him into a more salable color, and that furthermore. . . . Yep, there it happened again. Your listener is now watching the redhead at the copying machine.
It is easy to be a bore at any age, but as we get older, it seems to get easier still. If you mostly hang around with people your own age, it`s not quite so bad. There can be a sort of trade-off of tedious remembrances. Joe tells you a long story about the Oldsmobile he had in the `40s that never needed oil. When he`s finished you are weak with excitement. Now it`s your turn to regale him with the equally long saga of your `51 Mercury that always needed oil. The score is thus pretty even. You are both as boring as can be, but you would never admit it to each other.
However, I like to be with young people some of the time. I like their ideas, their freshness about the whole world. In fact, I find many of them more interesting than a lot of my peers. The problem is that if I`m not careful, they may not find me as interesting as their peers. Therefore, I have learned, somewhat painfully, that an older guy has to follow certain rules when he talks to less-than-senior citizens, especially the bright ones.
Do not, for example, bring up matters that occurred more than five years ago, unless you are specifically asked. Of course, this rules out your terrific inventory of thrilling war stories (World War II, naturally), the rousing legends of your childhood and all of those extraordinary college escapades. Young audiences will hand out few prizes for your old memories;
besides, they surely deserve the opportunity to build their own data bank of recountable experiences, without having it cluttered up with yours.
Try always to tell stories that are pleasant and/or amusing. Young folks aren`t likely to be concerned with your troubles. Most of them have already overdosed on an endless stream of calamitous soap operas, tagic mini-series and assorted videocassette pain, all of which will inevitably overshadow your own remembered sorrows. And this above all: Never turn a narrative into a sermon or an object lesson. No one really wants a message these days, least of all from his or her seniors.
Since the world, demographically speaking, is growing older, the proliferation of bores, and the ennui they create, is becoming a serious problem. Nevertheless, once you are conscious of the awfulness of being a bore; once you can recognize the deadly fatigue inherent in twice-told tales; once you decide that you do not want to be a twaddler, then this oh-so common affliction can finally be avoided. Which reminds me of this marvelous collie I had in 1938. . . .
