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What became obvious – even to me – was that were I to stop asking questions about her, we were going to stop talking.

I found myself at a wedding not long ago. I must say it was a refreshing change from funerals. Not that the difference between the two is always as obvious as you might think. Especially if the high church is in involved. There doesn’t seem to be a very light-hearted way to swing that incense. However, whenever I become momentarily confused about the nature of the celebration at hand, things usually become clear at the reception. If it’s a funeral, I’ll be in the company of people I saw the week before at the last funeral. We pretty much pick up where we left off. But if it’s a wedding reception, I’ll find myself seated beside someone I’ve never seen before in my life and, with any luck, I never will again.

Thus it was that I ended up attempting an impossible feat of small talk with a good-looking, if alarmingly pert young woman at a wedding reception just the other day. We had never met. Nor were we related. She had only entered my life as the result of a chance parting of the floral arrangement on the table. She was -- so I learned after I pried the information from her with the crow-bar of my idle banter -- a friend of the bride. “How very interesting,” I exclaimed, and then I went on to wonder, by way of my hammer against the piggy-bank of her dinner-table chatter, how she liked her shrimp cocktail. She liked the shrimp very much, she replied, and between mouthfuls she was able to answer the other questions with which I fanned the faint ember of our conversation. Because I asked her, she told me where she came from, and how long she had known the bride, and where she had gone to university, and how she’d quit smoking, and what she thought of Martha Stewart, and what she liked to order at Starbucks, and whether she cared whether Sammy Sosa used a corked bat, and what she thought of prospects for peace in the Middle East, and how she liked Dianna Krall, and what movies she had recently seen, and whether she ever listened to the CBC, and if she preferred soy milk to lactaid, and how far she ran on her morning jogs, and what her cat was like, and…..

I am not what you’d call quick. I am not one to leap to conclusions about people, no matter how enormous a springboard they wheel out from the hangar of their ego and place in front of me. Still, there are limits to conversational generosity. I’m not really blessed with completely unquenchable curiosity. I am not actually Hercule Poirot. On occasion, I don’t mind ending a sentence without a question mark. And anyway, as I mentioned: this young woman was good-looking and pert. I didn’t say she was endlessly fascinating.

When I sat down at the table, and our eyes met, I did not say to myself, “Ah, here is someone whose three-volume biography I’d like to write.” Nonetheless, by the time we got to the Chicken Kiev I felt I had a good chunk of the research under my belt. And by the time I found myself asking if she liked central vacuum cleaners, did crunches or sit-ups, and whether she preferred red or green Gatorade, I could not avoid the inevitable conclusion. What became obvious – even to me – was that were I to stop asking questions about her, we were going to stop talking.

Then an odd thing happened. I was, I admit, getting a little grumpy. And I was reflecting grumpily on how frequently I end up sitting beside people who would no more ask me a question than introduce themselves before I do. I blame television. More and more often I find myself stuck in the company of someone who thinks that the way talking works is this: they get to be Elizabeth Taylor and I get to be Larry King. And so, when the woman at the wedding reception, answering my question about her future aspirations, told me that she hoped to be a writer and that she wanted to meet someone who could give her advice about newspapers, and magazines, and publishing, I choked back my natural inclination to keep our conversational ball in play. As obvious as I’d like to think my profession is to you, dear reader, it was not at all apparent to her. I’d shaved that day, and I’d left my beret and my ascot and my bourbon at home.

The interest and curiosity she had taken in me over the course of dinner had its parallel in the warm relationship that develops between a tennis player and a ball machine. And so I decided to conduct a small, if churlish, experiment: I’d tell her what I did for a living, and offer to make some introductions for her, if she were to ask me a single question that pertained, however tangentially, to who I was, what I did, and how I happened to be sitting across from her.

Needless to say, she never did. And later that evening, when I rose from the table and bid her good-night, I wondered if this is what’s really going on. Whether at a funeral or a wedding, the general consensus of the reception chatter these days seems to be that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket. Films are terrible. Pop music is awful. The less said about television, the better.

But maybe it’s not things that are getting worse. Maybe it’s us. Maybe the people who produce Hollywood movies, and popular music, and mainstream television have somehow got the impression that we’re not curious enough to wonder if things couldn’t be a little better.