Be interested, not interesting. Those four words make for a good conversation.

I’ve been in enough chats with friends over breakfast or as a reporter with a notebook to know the difference between a dynamic give-and-take and a one-sided series of “look at me” anecdotes. Start asking questions and you can branch off to who knows where. It doesn’t have to be all about you. In all candor, I too can be quite self-involved and all too eager to regale others with the ups and downs of my life. But the fact is that none of us are as interesting as we think we are. 

I enjoy meeting someone or renewing an acquaintance by asking, “Where did you go to school?” Or “What have you been doing with your time?” Thus starts the back-and-forth. For me, it doesn’t get better than finding common ground with a baseball nut or a blues fan or a fellow vet. The bank shots off that opening casual question can be virtually endless. 

What’s more, dampening your ego shows respect for your interlocutor. I love that former President George H.W. Bush’s mother used to tell him, “George, quit talking about yourself!” 

Moving right along:

You can’t make this up: National Park Service guides at the Gettysburg battlefield say a tourist asked if those 1,328 plaques, monuments, memorials, and markers “got in the way of the battle.”

An informal inspection at a big box store parking lot revealed that most of the gleaming pickup truck beds have nary a mark on them. Aren’t those gas hogs supposed to pick up stuff that’s too bulky for the family sedan or SUV? Y’know, lumber and mulch and other house-owning and do-it-yourself stuff that leave their mark on a truck. Gotta hand it to Detroit. You can project rural toughness with a pickup even if you’re not building a barn. Image trumps all.

Worst ad in history: Liberty Mutual and the dorky guy in the yellow shirt and a mustache that looks like a caterpillar with his goofy flightless bird telling us, “You only pay for what you need.” Not once have my wife and I ever paid for insurance — or anything else — we didn’t need. Why would we, fer cryin’ out loud?! It would be like going to the grocery store and saying, “Pre-fried, processed bacon must be disgusting and saturated with salt. I’ll never eat it, don’t need it, but I’m gonna buy it!” It’s mind-boggling to imagine what the suits in the boardroom think of us.

And yes, sad to say, the Oakland A’s have left the building. It’s a mammoth structure with seeming acres of foul ground that favored pitchers, and when you look down on the field — which my wife and I did in August — you can visualize Blue Moon Odom, Vida Blue, Reggie Jackson, Eck, Rickey Henderson, Joe Rudi, Campy, Sal Bando, Catfish, all decked out in those brilliant green-and-yellow unis. Baseball will do that for you. No other game has that lore, the moments that dads pass on, going back over a century to splendid athletes with names like Honus and Ty and Grover and Pie and of course the immortal Van Lingle Mungo.

So the A’s are headed for the neon grotesque of Vegas, just like the black-shirt Raiders before them. Doesn’t seem right, does it? 

Dave Griffiths of Mechanic Falls is a retired journalist.