The Next Page: Notes of a Native Son -- a Pittsburgher in exile, always from here
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Consider the weather, ice cream, puppies, reality television and, possibly, lasagna: These are all what you might call "safe" topics of conversation. Not that everyone will necessarily have the same opinion -- although anyone who doesn't like ice cream or puppies is obviously not to be trusted -- but for the most part we can all express ourselves honestly without worrying about upsetting our fellow listeners.
Or upsetting them too much.
Like when you announce why you're voting for so-and-so at the Thanksgiving dinner table.
And add that anyone else who does otherwise is "probably an idiot."
Well, we've all been there.
The point being that some topics are more dangerous than others. Here's another one, for example, perhaps less obvious but that can still leave you feeling like you're all of a sudden walking over a thin, groaning sheet of ice over a deep lake on a warm day in March: namely, talking about where you grew up. By which I mean not just the basics -- "I was born in Pittsburgh" -- but offering up heartfelt opinions about what you liked or didn't like about a place, how it "shaped" you.
It can be a daunting, precarious prospect, but why? For starters, there's the question of accuracy, which is always an issue with memory, not to mention an emotional component that's more or less a constant when relaying any kind of meaningful information about the past.
It gets even harder when you move beyond say, describing a house or a school and refer to specific towns and cities (or icons within these towns), and start to make observations that may or may not apply to others who grew up in the same place/same time.
Like the time I met someone who grew up in Pittsburgh and claimed to "hate" Kennywood: I felt almost offended, as if the person were judging me, even though I could logically acknowledge that there are a million reasons why someone might not have liked Kennywood. Like maybe they got trapped in the Salt and Pepper Shakers or sprained an ankle on those moving floors in the Noah's Ark. As we all know, stranger things have happened.
Add in the fact that our feelings tend to get magnified as time passes and we fixate on what was relevant to us then -- or a further complication -- what's relevant to us now, and you have a minefield of potential conflict and ambiguity.
First Published April 17, 2011 12:00 am
