I am a slow talker. I often pause before responding, or at times, mid-sentence, to formulate my thoughts before speaking them. I don’t know that I can claim to be a more thoughtful person in thinking before I speak. Basically, it just takes me a little longer to spit it out.
This runs in my blood. My father is a slow talker. My son is also a slow talker, by way of a stutter. And my maternal grandfather — well, you had to settle in and get comfortable when he launched a “Have I ever told you about the time when….” His stories included chuckles, hand gestures, and…pauses. To change topics during a pause, thinking the story was over, was a mistake, leaving you to miss out on gems, details yet to be proffered.
My family valued Grandpa’s stories, and I recorded and eventually wrote them down. Now I am wanting to record some of my father’s stories. Recently he was hospitalized, and as I sat by his bedside, I was struck by how his speech seemed to have slowed down, the pauses between words noticeably longer than before. Maybe his breathing was more labored as he coped with pain. I don’t know. I realized, though, that if I was going to listen to my dad’s stories I would need to take more time out of my already full life. And it would require a lot of patience.
Listening to slow talkers can indeed be exasperating. Fast talkers sometimes try to finish our sentences, occasionally helpful when a word is hard to recall, but annoying when they are off-target and distract our train of thought.
In turn, fast talkers can be exhausting. They don’t seem to pause to even breathe and whensomeoneistalkingamileaminuteyourearscan’tevenkeepup. When they go on and on with no pauses, there’s no chance to respond beyond an “umm-hmm.” The conversation starts to feel lopsided. Without space for even polite verbal cues, I feel rude interrupting just to say I need to go to the bathroom.
I have let go of friendships with fast talkers who I otherwise liked. When I could never get a word in edgewise, not just the conversation but the friendship felt one-sided.
Just as bad as not being able to get a word in, is when fast talkers are too quick to respond. When they come back with a reply before I have even had a chance to put the punctuation on the end of my sentence, I think, “Did you even hear what I just said?”
My dad’s storytelling is not just slow, it is meandering, going off so deep into tangents that whatever point he was originally trying to make is sometimes lost, even to him. He delights in the details. Sometimes there is richness in the journey more than the destination. When he got home from the hospital he told me a story, the gist of which was that one of the volunteers at the hospital had sung him a Willie Nelson song.
Dad started by talking about the volunteer’s career ambitions, then about their conversation, including the offer to play Dad a song, followed by a detailed description of the guy tuning his guitar…what it means to tune an instrument…how Dad never had an ear for that…. Finally, he gets to the song, and starts talking about how the first few lines were recognizable, even before the chorus began. I may have asked at this point what song it was, as it was almost as if Dad was withholding that key point of information in order to draw out the story. “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” A classic. The story ended with a discussion of the meaning of the song, especially the line, “Let them grow up to be doctors and lawyers and such,” given the context of the medical setting.
This whole monologue probably lasted 20 minutes. And it felt precious. Yes, the conversation could have been over in two sentences: “While I was in the hospital someone played me a Willie Nelson song.” “Oh, that’s neat.”
But the way Dad told the story showed what it’s like to be in his head. What details he noticed. What it made him think of. I don’t know how much longer this kind of intimacy with my father will be available to me. How much longer his mind will be clear. How much longer he will have the energy to tell his stories. I know eventually the gaps between his words will lengthen even further, and ultimately the words will stop entirely.
So for now, I will find the time to sit with him. And listen. Patiently.
Julia Richards likes to write about health and environmental issues. She lives with her son in Madison. Photo by Valerie Tobias.
