Visiting, Revisited
A Threnody for Savoir Faire
To visit is to host friends at one’s home, or to go to a friend’s home, for the explicit and more-or-less sole purpose of conversing with one another in an effort to make or deepen a friendship. It is not just to go see someone or only to host someone. Rather, it is to engage in the timeless, profound (and increasingly vanishing) ritual of conversation. Dinner parties don’t count as visiting, neither do LARP parties, LAN parties, Tupperware parties (literal or figurative), costume parties, cocktail parties, kickbacks, bangers, blowouts, or barbecues. Visits with relatives don’t count either, as visits are something both parties have to want to do. At its essence, to visit is to come over and just . . . talk. And sadly, for more people today than ever that goes over about as well as an invitation to come over and smoke bath salts or, worse, play cards.
Visiting is done partly for its own sake and partly for the sake of entertainment. In the main, though, a visit is an exchange of interest in someone else and, of a piece with that, an exchange of time as well, all with the aim of fostering not only a friendship but a true sense of intimacy in an increasingly isolated and isolating world. To visit then is to listen not to talk. Earnestness is always in attendance at a visit; sarcasm is not invited. Humor is the salt of a visit, not the main dish. If sex is a bottle of champagne drunk all at once, then a visit is a hock of fine port, sapid and savored; or some delicate dessert of the soul to be indulged, not with reluctance, but with a restraint borne out of respect for its evanescence and in the joyful hope of its edifying reward. That, or visiting is stuffy and boring and pretentious and that’s why no one does it anymore.
Sanctified or sanctimonious, uplifting or unctuous? Whatever its true nature, the frequency of visiting in American social life declined by half from the mid-1970s to the turn of the millennium. Today, the art of visiting is nearly irretrievably lost, having reached a state of disinterest and anachronism matched only by that of the long-form humorous cultural essay.
But to explain why this is so requires a grasp of visiting’s basic attributes, including the the four Ws: whence, with whom, and whether. Of course, it would be utter folly to try to wholly comprehend visiting’s decline without also at least a passing knowledge of its sweeping history. Likewise, any effort to ken the demise of visitation in its full fulsomeness would be ultimately futile without, at minimum, a notional acquaintance with visiting’s current status and its possible future. Finally, a personal visiting-related anecdote or two would help illustrate things. (If you’re pressed for time, here’s the whole shebang in listicle form.)
Visits have a certain logistical choreography depending on type. You can visit someone else at their home (i.e., “go and visit”) or others can visit you at yours (i.e., “come and visit”). You might also ask someone, usually a related child, to “sit and visit.” A sit and visit is similar to a come and visit, but the visitor originates from within the same room, where they were doing something besides visiting, usually running around like a banshee.
Visiting is mostly conducted on Sundays, but evening visits during the week are also a possibility. Once the visitors have arrived, a proper visit should take place in a front room, known among those who went to colleges without football teams as a parlor. The front room will ideally be outfitted with a “davenport.” This piece of furniture is far more popularly called a sofa or a couch, though I always thought that davenport had a ring to it both more utilitarian and formal than those other terms. I was once sure the term derived from some high German name for a piece of furniture that holds a shit-ton of change and popcorn seeds. But it turns out, it’s just a genericized name for a couch built by defunct furniture-maker A.H. Davenport & Co. So, in more than one way, davenports are like Kleenex, but for farts.
A well-equipped visitation venue should also contain a walnut-trimmed cigarette lighter the approximate size and weight of a motorcycle battery. This bespoke flame-spouter should be accompanied by a couple of amber-colored glass ashtrays with little cutouts for cigarettes and larger ones for cigars. A truly sublime visiting locus will also have a table that, when unfolded, becomes a piece of furniture designed specifically and solely for the playing of contract bridge — because if there’s one thing holding most of us back from mastering bridge, it’s all the regular-ass tables. The coup de grâce of a front room that really shines in the visitation department is an upright piano. Finishing touches might include a record player hidden in a wood console and bespoke built-in bookshelves for James Michener novels with place-name titles.
There is typically no meal served at a visit, it being usually conducted in mid-afternoon. Tea or coffee are allowed. Some alcohol may even be served, but a visit is not a cocktail party. One beer, white wine, or Tom Collins per guest is sufficient. Beyond that, you’re hosting happy hour. Tea or finger sandwiches or a bowl of snack mix may be appreciated by the visitors, but are not strictly necessary, for a visit is not to feed the stomach but the soul . . . and, if we’re being honest, the ego.
Having been born before 1920 and as early as 1904, by the standards of the early-1950s, all my grandparents were quite advanced in age when my parents were born. Given their vintage, they were very much of the golden age of American middle-class visiting, that being the early- to mid-20th century, and especially the roughly 30 years after the end of World War II. Yet by the standards of the late-1970s, my parents were quite young when I was born. So my grandparents were visitors extraordinaire, yet I only recall only the very tail-end of my grandparents’ visiting days, in the early- to mid-1980s. Still, I recall firsthand some of how visiting worked in practice.
For instance, their visitors would include a number of retired couples who were referred to as “the” so-and-sos, such as the Schmidts, the McDermotts, and the Herfkins. (With respect to the latter, I don’t know if their last name was Herfkin or if it was Herfkins and my grandparents just didn’t want to say “Herfkinses” all the time.) I remember that the Herfkins(es) had a motor home and that the McDermotts had thirteen children. I also remember overhearing that for a time, at the request of his wife and the urging of their priest, Mr. McDermott was made to sleep in the garage “to give her a rest.”
Looking back it seemed too that visits were always unannounced, or at least they were talked about that way. The Herfkins stopped by to visit Sunday, my grandma would say, with a look of pleasant surprise as if, perhaps with the aid of an absorbent davenport, she’d discovered a fart to be odorless. I doubt now, however, that all their visits were entirely serendipitous. There would have been simply too much risk of ships passing in the afternoon. What if my grandparents had been out to visit someone else that day when the Herfkins-es(?) stopped by? Would they have just driven in their Winnebago past all their friends houses until they found one couple sitting in their front room with the lights on playing dual solitaire? And what if one Sunday all their friends were out doing the same thing? Imagine two dozen Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight Broughams cruising around my Midwestern home town, full of squinting old couples wondering where the hell all their friends are — the original FOMO. It would be chaos. Perhaps one of them would see another at a four-way stop and they could go have a visit at the Coney Island Grill or Skagway’s, but it seems like a long shot, even in a small town. More likely, I think in a series of phone calls over the week my grandma and the others in her circle of bridge partners and Ladies’ Altar Society members would decide who was going to stay home Sunday, who was going to go out visiting, and, most likely, who would be coldly shunned.
But why, I remember wondering, were they doing all this visiting anyway?
In its prime as now, visiting was largely a middle-class activity, an aspirational imitation by the hoi polloi of a similar practice carried out by the beau monde. Though the sans culottes surely would parlais at one another’s quartiers misérables, and I suppose the Great Unwashed shot the shit. But considering the above-described accouterments required for a Grade-A visit, such as a house large enough for a front room, extra furniture for guests, leisure time, etc., visiting has quintessentially been an activity of the burgher kings, whose sitting-room culture then became the norm for those both above and below the median in the social hierarchy, most of whom wanna be like the rich folks. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
Visiting was largely a middle-class activity, though I suppose the Great Unwashed shot the shit.
Of course, even the upper crust themselves, especially in America, could only have been imitating the visiting done by folks who were part of the Four Hundred before they were. If you cared to, I expect you could follow this chain of desideratum back to the English monarchy or even the House of Thurn und Taxis, whose couriers, beginning in Bergamo around 1290, would visitare various Italian nobles’ villas, delivering correspondence, parcels, and, assuredly, juicy Middle-Age gossip to middle-aged people. You can almost hear it now, over the clink of wine goblets and ivory dominoes:
Did you hear Bice di Folco Portinari died? She and Dante sure were spending a lot of time together. They say it was a courtly love . . . I’m not so sure. Also, the Golden Horde has reached Bessarabia! But enough of that. Tell me, how are the bambini?
Before that, visiting could perhaps be traced to the Romans. Then to the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Hittites, the Sea Peoples, and probably the residents of Atlantis. Did the Egyptians visit? Most likely. I know visitation probably arose independently elsewhere than Western civilization, perhaps in China or the Mali Empire, or among the Olmecs. Even if not, I’m sure they had their own cultural activities similar to the Occidental sort of visit: just, you know, sort of talking, but maybe more rugs and fewer chairs (and people would probably take their shoes off).
As one might expect given its middle-class, aspirational origins, the Western visiting tradition peaked in America in the mid-20th century, as New Deal government policy, post-war global economic hegemony, and (before and after) extensive immigration, created a broad and deep middle class eager for cultural structures to which they could conform so as to demonstrate their belonging among the “right sort.”
To be sure, before the 1900s people certainly got together and talked in the United States and Europe, but given the tight quarters (to put it mildly) of typical city housing and the spread-thin population in rural areas, pre-20th century visits were usually of a communal variety, taking place at churches, fairs, taverns, picnics, schools, fraternal halls, and the like. The “front room” visit that is of concern here, on the other hand, became widespread only in tandem with more widely available housing that could comfortably accommodate sitting guests.
And in just that way did my grandparents conform to that Western visiting tradition and belong. Their two-bedroom bungalow, built in 1901, was expanded by my (architect and contractor) grandfather in fits and starts from 1937 to 1987 into a five-bedroom house, replete with a living room, a basement rec room, a dining room, an enclosed “rumpus room” patio, and, just off the main entrance, a “fancy” front room complete with a bridge table, an upright piano, chairs galore, and built-in bookshelves for James Michener novels. In this room every Sunday the so-and-sos would come and visit, except when my grandparents would go and visit, and everyone kept their shoes on to show them off. And, de rigueur for central Nebraska then, there was a painting of the Virgin Mary above the davenport, gazing down at the popcorn seeds and lost quarters, reminding everyone not to gossip and blessedly ignoring the well-filtered farts.
But so much for its history. How, you might ask, would one carry out a visit in the first place, if one were so inclined? In that regard it is well to remember that in its essence, a visit is an act of friendship that is mutual and giving, not self-centered and taking. Having someone over to your house to let them watch you do something else, like play Fortnite, is not a visit. Neither is having someone over for you each to do something else, like pickle radishes or swipe through Pinterest or Tinder for an hour. You might visit during such an interaction, and such activities aren’t necessarily bad or without merit, but they are not “visits” as such because learning about someone else and showing them you care about them is not the core purpose of the event. In sum, just as tragedy plus time equals comedy, visiting minus talking equals time. (Though someone will have to double check my algebra on that.)
To explore the equation, as for time a visit is to show how much someone else means to you by taking time out of your day to spend with them — that is, time away from yourself, your spouse or S.O., your family, your phone and your PS4. That time has intrinsic value because it is, by definition, both needed and scarce. Thus, in giving your time freely to someone else by visiting with them you are necessarily showing them in a most essential way that you care about them — and vice versa — even if you both are scrolling through Instagram while the other is in the bathroom. As for talking, while looking at an infinite scroll of labradoodles and well-plated entrees is admittedly far easier, any vital visit requires a sure grasp on an elusive and arduous art, one that today largely arcane: conversation. You simply cannot visit without knowing how to converse, and that is something that most of us, myself included, were never taught and have never had to learn.
So, how is it done?
How to Not Talk Good
To begin your lucubration, first commit yourself to learn the thou-shalt-not commandments of yim-yam. These include, but are not limited to, the following: Do not spend the time prattling on about yourself — if you are going to begin a sentence with “I,” don’t, unless you’ve been asked. Do not top or one-up your host’s stories — if your story is that much better, keep it to yourself to save your counterpart embarrassment; if it’s complementary, wait until the host is well and truly done before offering your riposte. Do not proselytize — this is not limited to religion, but includes politics, economics, labor theory, Marxist philosophy, Hitler (natch), Objectivism, and, at this point in our country, even the Civil War — you will not change their mind if they don’t ask you to. Do not try to sell your host makeup, or, for that matter, that show on Hulu that they have to see, or the private school you think their kids should go to — like proselytizing, this is doomed to failure unless your advice is sought. Do not talk about things about which your conversational antipode has no interest — this includes anything except those things in which they obviously are interested in, and does not include anything you assume they will be interested in, or that you think they should be interested in — in other words, don’t push your interests on your fellow visitist. Do not start sentences with, Actually…. And, finally, don’t point out negative aspects about your fellow converser, or someone else even, or anyone’s friends, possessions, or beliefs; nor is it acceptable to draw out such things in questions under the guise of such things being true (E.g., Do you like the low ceilings in here? So, do you plan on rehabbing all your old furniture? Do you think Alan and Emily should go to counseling? Have you already finished your wine?)
Again, the above list is not all inclusive. For further guidance on how not to converse, consider paying attention to the body language of your partner in persiflage. If they are curling into a ball, staring at the ceiling, staring at their phone, painting their toenails, surreptitiously masturbating, or doing anything other than nodding and looking at you in at least half-rapt attention, then you have failed at conversation. Stop what you’re saying and ask them a question.
[Some slack should be given for the fact that most other people today do not adequately know how to converse either, even if you do or are trying to learn. So even if you’re avoiding all the verbotens, your counterpart might just be waiting to top your story, or to gabble on about themselves, or to show you a picture on Instagram of a labradoodle or an F-list celebrity’s birthday-party-sponsored-by-Cîroc. This is part of why visiting is dying: it is a social art form, and if you’re the only one practicing it, it falls on deaf ears, almost literally. In such situations, the best advice is to soldier on and hope your friend catches on. Or, even, explicitly ask your friend if they would be interested in joining you to learn how to better how to converse together. {Maybe forward them this essay! — ed.}]
How One May & Ought to Convivially Converse
Yes, you might say, but what about the shalts? Well, for a start, consider practicing the following: Asking questions, waiting your turn, talking about yourself only when asked, truly listening/not interrupting, telling stories (only upon request or during a lull or appropriate segue in conversation) that you think may be of real interest to your visitor, and generally being agreeable, i.e., letting differing opinions be different and not correcting what you believe are errors in beliefs or understandings. (This is admittedly difficult for those who came of age in an internet era defined by correcting all wrongs.) As part of this practice, ask yourself how often you actually think about doing any of these things when you converse with other people? If the answer is never, ask yourself how interested the people you know seem to be in what you have to say. You will likely notice a strong correlation.
When all else fails, remember, the First Commandment of conversation is: Ask questions designed to elicit joyful talking from your fellow visitor.
Ask questions designed to elicit joyful talking from your fellow visitor.
People like to talk about things they like and things they believe. If you get them to talk about those things, they will like talking with you, you will learn about them, and they will return the favor. If they don’t return the favor by asking the same things of you, after a while perhaps seek out someone else to visit with. Don’t seek to “even the score” by unsolicitedly talking more about yourself as this will only make the conversation worse for everyone involved by turning it into a death-spiral of two people talking about themselves in parallel, something that often passes for conversation today.
And it really is that simple: get the person you’re visiting with to talk about themselves. This general idea is long- and well-known, but is sometimes forgotten as it isn’t really taught anymore. Moreover, pop culture is soaked in an idea of conversation based on one-upping, insults witty and dull, and self-absorbed twaddle. This kind of pseudo-conversation may be common among cynical, sarcastic, over-educated television writers, but when it is transported into real life, it is repulsive and, sadly, all too common.
Yet don’t be mistaken to think that a visit is mere small talk, superficial chit-chat, fake compliment-trading, and patronizing question-asking. Rather, visiting can and should include deep conversations about personal topics that leave the visitors feeling after a good visit that they know the other visitors better than they did before, and hopefully, that they like one another more. Asking questions that get your friends and acquaintances to talk about things they like to talk about only serves to draw out, over time, those deeper topics. Also, visiting should be fun, cathartic, joyful, arousing, educational, entertaining, edifying, or something else most worthwhile for all involved. At least, it should be better than spending two hours alone — a task that, I will concede, was much easier to accomplish in an era before Netflix, Uber Eats, 4K television, and legal marijuana. Nonetheless, if you follow the basic don’ts and dos above, you should find them reciprocated — or, if not, at least you can start to find some new friends.
It could be confirmation bias, but another thing that stays in my mind from my visits with my grandparents, and my memories of their visits with others, is their skill at conversation. They were of a generation that read their Dale Carnegie. Of Carnegie’s seminal book on conversation, Sinclair Lewis said it taught people to “smile and bob and pretend to be interested in other people’s hobbies precisely so that you may screw things out of them.” I will not argue that this is true if you read the title of Carnegie’s book to completion, i.e., …and Influence People. But if you stop after How to Win Friends… then I think Lewis’s scolding is sophomoric. You can influence a friend more than an acquaintance or an enemy. Is that a reason not to befriend someone? If you are not setting out to defraud them, and, in fact, want to befriend them, is there any reason not to use tactics that are proven by trial and error to win friends? Is Lewis really advocating not using someone’s first name from time to time, asking questions of them, and listening to what they have to say? Note to Sinclair Lewis: Concern trolling neck-beardery — it can happen here.
I don’t remember the specific dialogue of my grandparents’ visits, but I remember enough of my own conversations with them generally to carry a clear mental picture of what it was like to talk to them. And what I recall mostly was never really hearing my grandparents talk about themselves if I didn’t ask. Instead, my strongest memories of talking to them are them getting me to think about myself, and my strongest memories of them talking to others is learning more about the other people, but not much about my grandparents. That is not to say that my grandparents were stereotypical, old, closed-off, brusque, stoic, Midwesterners (though my grandfather probably was to some extent). To the contrary, I eventually did learn a lot about them. But what I learned of them was by asking them questions, which I learned to do by picking up on how they always asked me questions. And I think that is the cardinal rule of conversation: The point is to learn about others by getting them to talk, not to teach others about yourself by talking.
The point of conversation is to learn about others by getting them to talk, not to teach others about yourself by talking.
Moreover, the introspection and monologues that my grandparents got out of me never seemed like boasting, the announcement of my opinions, or simple reportage about my life. Instead, looking back, what they drew out of me seemed to be aimed at getting me to learn about myself or to decide or question something about what I thought and believed. This is another worthwhile conversational guideline: Aim to not only learn something about your fellow visitor, but to have them learn something about themselves. There is probably no better two questions in conversation than, What do you think about that?, and then, Why? Probably as a result of the foregoing, my memories of my grandparents’ conversations are of not being bored, but of seeking them out and actually enjoying them. I wonder if anyone thinks the same about conversations with me?
Aim not only to learn something about your fellow visitor, but to have them learn something about themselves.
Looking back now, I like to think that a lot of my grandparents’ selfless conversations stemmed from their thoroughly-absorbed Midwestern Catholicism. The Catholic Church actually has a lot to say about conversation, albeit, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the form of prohibiting certain of its less savory elements. Nonetheless, I think some of this guidance is often overlooked and difficult to disagree with. The three sins most intertwined with conversation, stemming mostly from the Eighth Commandment, are bearing false witness (lying), detraction (revealing another’s faults without sufficient reason, a/k/a gossip), and calumny (spreading lies about another). But these extend to rash judgment (assuming the worst about another), flattery and adulation (positive exaggerations or lies about another for selfish reasons), complaisance (going along with these “sins of the tongue” to be agreeable or popular), tale-baring (telling someone what others have said about them behind their back, especially the bad things), boasting or bragging, pretense, hypocrisy, idle speculation, and even irony and sarcasm if done with bad aims.
I like to think that my grandparents, hard schooled in the Baltimore Catechism as they would have been, would have understood, as was taught in that Catechism, that a Catholic should “speak only good and necessary things, thereby assisting the elevation of our neighbors’ minds and hearts to higher things.” And I think they tried to do so, and that that is as good a summation of my grandparents’ conversations as I can think of.
My grandparents were not alone. Though certainly not universal, conversational skills were far more widespread forty and more years ago than they are today. Part of this was due to those pre-television, pre-internet circumstances: There were a lot more waiting rooms, lines, sales clerks, tellers, cashiers, waiters, and dates to deal with in the days before electronic bill pay, e-mail, Amazon, Doordash, Stripe, GrubHub, and Japanese sex robots. In those daily environments of analog yore, one would have to engage in small talk many times a day with people one had never seen before and would never see again. And that small talk and conversation was necessary to sand down those little annoyances and boredoms in life. One learned how to more smoothly and engagingly talk with people — friends, acquaintances, cohorts, contemporaries, neighbors, or strangers — because one had to.
My grandparents were in their 40s when TV went mainstream. That meant for their entire youth there was no TV, even when you went to a bar! Think about what that was like, going to a bar without television, without 100 televisions. Without 200 smart phones. Darts, pool, shuffleboard, cigarettes, bad regional beer, and conversation. That was it. No scrolling through Twitter. No staring at the game on TV. Sure those can be a great activities, communal or solitary, but without such distractions, those types of social venues would have been an absolute flood of chit-chat, jokes, stories, pickup lines, and just shooting the breeze.
I imagine too my grandfather’s fraternity house in the late-1920s at the University of Minnesota. Not one TV. I think of the nightly bouts of cards. The joke-telling, the story-telling, the listening that had to have gone on over the poker games and drinks. Its no wonder that people who were in their 70s in the ’80s seemed to be able to talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime for hours and to also seem be genuinely interested in what the other person had to say. It was totally fascinating to me as a kid, whatever “it” was, but I didn’t spend enough time around it to learn to do it myself.
I contrast the professional-grade persiflage of my grandparents’ generation with the movie references, Seinfeld quotes, and “did you see”-s and “are you watching”-s that pass for conversation today among me and my otherwise well-educated and sociable friends and it really makes me feel like something invaluable has been lost forever.
Certain skills, such as golf, sailing, skiing, and visiting, lay outside of a gravity well of sorts. Inside that well is utter ineptitude. Outside it is a sublime geostationary orbit at the confluence of confidence and proficiency. Once there, you can effortlessly coast on in orbit forever, excelling at the object of your youthful passion and pursuit. To reach that destination, however, you have to achieve escape velocity. This requires the fortune of talent, the benefit of a teacher, the luxury of spare time, or, ideally, some mix of all three; but also, critically, the inexhaustible energy of youth, for some things may only be achieved when young. Putting aside proficiency, you can reach some degree of basic competency in visiting and other such skills as an adult, but that Point of Partially Passable lies well inside the gravity well. Thus, even it can be reached later in life only by replacing the energy of youth with massive expenditures of fuel in the form of time and money (if required). What’s more, if you run out of such fuel at any time, you will crash back toward planet Ineptune, burn up on reentry, and never be able to reach passable prowess a second time. If you doubt this analogy, note that no one ever learns to sail again.
Unfortunately for me, my parents, having come of age in the time of television and middle-class teenage freedom, were among the part of their generational cohort, the one after my grandparents’, who didn’t visit once they didn’t have to. So I had no teacher. I also lacked the talent of confidence that it takes to be a natural visitor. And the spare time of my youth was not spent learning to visit (or much else, sadly). Thus, having never reached escape velocity in visiting skill when young, I was forced as a adult to expend a lot of fuel in the form of time to try to stay even competent in the good art. The result is that today, at my best, I’m fair at play-acting a visit. At my worst, I just go along with what everyone else is doing. Luckily, I am alive at a time when to be a barely competent lifelong apprentice of visiting makes one a veritable Charlie Rose (minus the sexual harassment) because most people I know and see today are, through no fault of their own, utterly hapless at visiting and conversation. Accordingly, I only rarely have had my ineptitude exposed by the lurking, anachronistic raconteur — usually a former drama student who dresses as if, and wishes it were, 1925, or a friend of mine who is the “voice of” a local high school football team.
When viewed broadly, what visiting was, what happened to it, and what it is today, is the story of the decline of American civic society. As such, it is more broadly the tale of dehumanization at the hands developing technology and the insatiable maw of late-stage capitalism. Therefore, it is also, in its essence, the account of the rise of the billionaire donor class of the Republican party and their handmaidens in the conservative media, the neoliberal/libertarian think-tank ecosystem, and the captaincy of America’s relict, fundamentalist, Protestant, Christianism. Correspondingly, it is, beneath it all, the saga of the political institution of racism, greed, and chauvinism. In sum, it is, in the end, the foundational narrative of fear and hatred. Finally then, it is the chronicle of original sin, death, and nothingness, a mythic redemption from which is the driving and unattainable goal of our very consciousness. It could also be mistaken for treacly nostalgia for “Good Ol’ Days,” which never existed, though this, of course, would be wrong.
As chronicled by Robert Putnam in his book, Bowling Alone, “visiting” declined in the United States beginning along with many other hallmarks of our once communal civic society, such as card-playing, adult fraternal organizations, bowling leagues, and unions. Though it is hard to explain precisely why, there are many reasons for this phenomena: Baby Boomers rejected “bourgeois” traditions with the effect that their children and grandchildren no longer even know of them; the electorate took for granted an economic life for our nation that had actually been wrought by collective hard work and interpersonal effort spawned in large part by spending time face-to-face with one’s neighbors and coworkers; new technologies and the corporate entertainment complex gobbled up our collective free time with cheap, saccharine, and passive pursuits; political greed manifested itself in insidious policies that goaded on the atomization of culture and the demonization of everyone “else” beyond the self; and the cult of privatization and supply-side economics gobbled up what remained of our financial and temporal leisure.
Just as visiting began to decline for society in the ’70s it begins to decline for individuals in their 70s. This is simpler to explain, given the incessant, limping march of time, bad hips, dementia, and generally just no longer giving a shit. Just so, as my grandparents got older, their visits waned. Usually, it only takes one of a couple to get seriously ill or pass away for the visits to stop. Or they move to Arizona. Or someone goes “on oxygen” and can’t go out easily any more. Or they move to a nursing home and its not the same. The McDermotts went first, around ’86, the same year my grandfather’s company went bankrupt (I know he didn’t talk as much after that). Then Kenny Herfkins died in ’87 and his wife didn’t come visit any more. We moved to California in ’88 and were rarely able to go and visit. My grandparents couldn’t come and visit us much either after that, and didn’t have really anyone left to go and visit back home.
Still, my dad told me that my grandfather used to go to breakfast every Saturday with Ken Schmidt, one of his last-added business partners. My grandfather was in his late-80s and Ken was in his late-60s. Every so often, the Schmidts would still come and visit my grandparents in their front room. Then, some time around 1990, Ken had a heart attack and died. He was probably my grandfather’s last friend. Ken’s wife then moved away to be closer to their kids. The Schmidts were probably the last people to visit my grandparents. My grandfather passed away a few years later and my grandmother a few years after that, in a nursing home. We visited her when we could, but it was over pretty quickly.
Visiting, for me, died with them.
I have some aunts who still visit, maybe an uncle or two who could in a pinch. There are some relicts among the Baby Boomers who still can; their parents were the original practitioners of visiting, and they grew up when TV was still in its infancy — off the air a lot of the time, and filled with boring adult stuff a lot of the other time — so they saw a lot of visiting firsthand and had time to practice the art in their youth and even later (one of uncles told me how he and his college fraternity brothers all played bridge during the day most every weekend and at night during most of the week for wont of anything better to do between parties and tests, and this was ‘68-’72). Like the visit-capable aunts and uncles of mine, the remaining visitors among us, now pushing 70 themselves, are mostly well-to-do country club types, ones who had and still have the leisure and, perhaps more importantly, friends with the leisure to just… sit and talk… frequently. Not coincidentally, often these are also the kinds of people who are known to occasionally do a jigsaw puzzle.
The rest of their generation fell behind and worked longer less regular hours for less. The fewer remaining odd, free hours were most easily spent with TV, then cable, then the internet, then Facebook… They forgot how to visit if they ever learned. Or, just as often, they simply didn’t have anyone to visit with as they all moved around the country in search of the fewer remaining jobs with benefits, settling into anonymous-but-identical cul-de-sacs in anonymous-but-identical suburbs, then exurbs, next to anonymous-but-identical neighbors.
Then you have my generation, including even the kids of the affluent Boomers who can still visit. We never learned nor were taught to converse, let alone to visit. Our childhoods were too planned and too ambitious, and/or too soaked in postmodern, ironic, self-referential pop culture to just sit around watching our parents visit (thew few that did). So not only do we not know how to do it, we don’t know that we don’t. And even if we did, why bother when we can trade pop references that perfectly encapsulate whatever we might be feeling, or, even better, pithily convey whatever is just apropos, or even “inappropes.” What’s that from?
And beyond that/our/my/your generation? This isn’t a “kids today” lament. It’s all of us. We talk, but do we listen? Do we know how? Do we “have the time?” One the phrases I hate to hear, one that makes me absolutely shudder in revulsion, is “sounds like you’ve got too much time on your hands.” But it encapsulates what happened to visiting. You’ve probably heard it. Some Monday someone asks you how your weekend was, or — without planning to listen — asks you what you do for fun. You respond with anything besides watch a certain show or follow a certain sport, and you get, with only enough plausible-deniability wryness: “Sounds like you’ve got too much time on your hands.” As if you’re being accused of the crime of not being too busy to live. That I can imagine such a response when reporting that I spent part of a weekend “just” visiting tells me that it, the quintessential and literal pastime of pastimes, is well and truly gone and lost.
I got the savoir faire with the unique rhymin’ / I keep it on and on, it’s never quittin’ time and . . .
— Adam “Ad-Rock” Horowitz
What we’ve lost is important too, because visiting goes beyond chit-chat. It’s more than conversation. It’s not a means to an end. It’s about sometimes — just sometimes — valuing others more than ourselves. It’s about making others feel valued and at ease. “Savoir faire” is a phrase that comes close to this. It means a knack for knowing what to do in any situation, or, more simply, tact. And tact connotes more than knowing what to do to make one’s self at ease in a situation or how to best manipulate a situation to create the best result for one’s self. Rather, it is about maneuvering in social situations so as to sincerely (that part’s important) maintain good relations with others (contra, cunning or conniving). A good visit is that. But a good visit is about more still. It is about learning about our friends, our acquaintances, our coworkers, our fellow citizens, even mere strangers with whom we’re called upon to share a space. It is to learn about others instead of about ourselves, instead of bolstering our own opinions, instead of generating flattery, instead of getting a chuckle, instead of demonstrating our own wit. In other words, to visit is to create fertile ground for empathy, and, perhaps only coincidentally, that is something largely gone from our culture as well.
To visit is to create fertile ground for empathy, and, perhaps only coincidentally, that is something largely gone from our culture as well.
As those of us lucky enough to have really known them do, I miss my grandparents. I miss visiting with them. And that makes me miss visiting itself. I am well over forty now and I can probably count on two hands the number of times I have well and truly visited with friends in a purposeful and undistracted way. And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe visiting could make a comeback. But if it does, it will probably be in some ironic, hipster way, a ersatz reminiscence for some bygone analog age we all missed out on, like pickling or craft cocktails or vinyl. I’ll take that, I suppose, if it’s all I can get. But I hope it comes back in a truer, more meaningful way. I hope we all start to put our phones away, and do with less of peak TV, and turn to our neighbors and friends and former friends, even the ones who don’t just so happen to look and act and believe and earn and spend just as we do, and have them into our homes, or go to theirs, and visit. Because right now we don’t and it is doing us all harm, individually and as a society. And I think we would miss it more than we know, if we only knew it was gone.
