The Dangling Conversation
Don’t get me wrong. Some of my best friends are cyanobacteria. I have no problem if you want to frequent a discotheque in the primordial slime or attend a rager in the ooze. Go ahead and reproduce by cellular division rather than white wine and red roses. Who am I to say?
And to be fair, cyanobacteria have their advantages. Indeed, cyanobacteria “have a long and significant evolutionary history” according to the search engine on my computer, “originating around 3.4 billion years ago and developing oxygenic photosynthesis, a key process for life on Earth.” Hey, they don’t call it the “Pretty Good” Oxidation Event, you know. No, sir! The evolution of cyanobacteria and multicellularity are intertwined with the Great Oxidation Event thank you very much. There is no greater proponent of us humans being multicellular than this author.
But here’s the thing. Whatever else you can say about cyanobacteria, you can’t say that they themselves ever said anything. Because language was several weeks in the future back when cyanobacteria were the most evolved life-form. How many weeks down the road? You know how long you had to wait for your cappuccino the other morning while the person in front of you at the coffee shop tried to figure out whether they wanted a Danish? Cyanobacteria and their cousins evolving into you and me took even longer than that.
Whereas language is only a relative blip ago. Australopithecines didn’t talk. Which is not to say australopithecines didn’t communicate. But language that we would recognize is maybe 100,000 years ago. I don’t know who put the “bop” in the “bop-she-bop.” But I do know that spoken language put the “homo” in the “home sapiens.” We may not be the only species that uses tools—chimps use sticks to get termites. We may not be the only species to recognize ourselves in the mirror—Asian Elephants, Bottlenose Dolphins, and Eurasian Magpies can all do that. But for darn sure humans are the only species to commit death by PowerPoint.
So if language is a significant distinction, separating you and me from cyanobacteria, australopithecines and whatnot, how is it possible that families in 2025 don’t actually talk much? There are words galore on TikTok, Real Housewives, and Blood, Shoot, Kill, but the gentle ebb and flow of you say something, then you wait a bit for your kid to say something, then you think about what they said, then you say something else, is no longer a thing.
The Spanish word, “sobremesa” translates into English as “over the table” but what sobremesa really means is that the gentle conversation and connection after the meal is as important as the menu. You will never be kicked out of a Spanish restaurant after you eat. There is a cultural understanding that you might have something to say to your family members.
I’m not sure it even matters what you talk about with your kids after you eat. I suppose I would be in favor of open-ended questions and nonjudgemental responses rather than diatribes and pontificating, but I don’t know everything. Communicating to your kids that you are more interested in their insights than you are in their homework or the next episode of your favorite streaming show might be a plus.
To paraphrase Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), “show me the man you honor, and I will know by that aspect more than any other who you are yourself.” Cyanobacteria didn’t talk to their kids. You can. What else is there to say?
Because if there is anything else to say—after dinner, at bedtime, when the kids come home from college to visit—you are part of the only species that can say it.
