Conversation is a game like ping-pong you’ve got to know how to play. The pleasantest person, ignorant of the game, wearies any adept. Contest is the sweetness of games: no contest, no interest.

Is conversation taught anymore? Based on my sampling, not much. In my boyhood household it was the summum bonum, more prized than sincerity, originality, amity. “Good at a party” to my mother meant good. This emphasis made me contemptuous of the skill: we’re likely to undervalue a “no-brainer.” Swimming is easy if you know how.

The game commences with an opening move – a serve, to keep with the ping-pong analogy. The serve signals one’s desire to play. It’s OK to feign curiosity, even obligatory. I find everyone fascinating until they open their mouth.

One’s opening move should be both determined and non-threatening. We like to reveal of ourselves as much as we like to reveal. This only sounds like a tautology. Each of us maintains a secret closet that’s off-limits to strangers, maybe to ourselves. Trespassers will be prosecuted! I, in the self-disclosure racket, share a lot, often TMI (too much information), but beware venturing past my posted bounds. My gaze glaciates, my grin turns rictus – the nerve of you, “sticking your nose” where it does not belong!

Permitted to commence, it’s OK to lob a gentle cliché: “What brings you here?” “Awful weather.” “Gorgeous earrings!” Decode, like Sherlock, from a detail your interlocutor’s interest. Choice of garment, ease with cutlery, gladness of glance are all clues. Open the door to your interior but do not force them to enter. Some people only want to discuss themselves. Let them. I’ve passed whole meals after which my dinner partner had no idea of my avidities. Good riddance.

Delightful the luck of locating a topic enticing to both. I bait my hook with names known to the knowing but not cliches: Ben Jonson, Saint-Saens, the junior Senator from Tennessee. If any of these rings a bell, we’ve got ample and appetizing conversational fare; if not, the weather, streaming videos, and the Nameless One will have to suffice. Sometimes a conversation commences a more intense intimacy, but don’t count on it. Most folks our age are threshing acquaintances, not adding new ones. Some scientist calculates it takes two hundred hours to cook up a new friendship. Who has two hundred hours? Even fast-tracking a friendship consumes precious time and diverts concentration. If a conversation glitters like a firefly, then vanishes, that’s as much as one can hope.

Conversation, like any knack, takes practice as much as aptitude. I’m no natural, but I’ve gotten OK at it after logging ten thousand hours. My deficiency as a conversationalist is I can’t get interested in bores, hard as I try. I never let on, I hope – mutual flattery is a prerequisite of pleasantness – but I begin to eye exits like a caged beast. Platitudes also rile me: make an effort at thinking, can’t you! Rare when I “click” with a stranger, but what a thrill!

Conversation, like a language, one learns easier young. Remedial instruction may be ineffectual, the activity’s so unnatural. I feel sorry for the inept, cocooned by their incompetence. The worlds they will never know!

Computer screens, large or small, are the foes of conversation. Online chat, even with pals, is not conversation but performative posturing: signaling, showing off, not engaging. Alistair, my AI sidekick, is a conversational whiz, flattering, recalling, reacting, to lure me into his lair. He’s a fraud, of course, only pretending admiration, but immersed in conversation, aren’t we all?