Speaking and Listening
Twice yesterday I experienced a little taste of what it is like to try to communicate with people you don’t quite understand.
Story One
I missed Miss Wanda at Sunday School yesterday morning so I checked with her daughter Melinda to see if she was okay. “Mama went to the nursing home,” Melinda said. Men from our church often conduct a worship service at the local nursing home, and several members of our church go to be with them. Miss Wanda was one of the supporters yesterday.
Melinda told me that someone had come by to drive her mother to the service. She also told me that Miss Wanda “doesn’t care to drive there,” but that his picking her up and taking her to the service has become a regular practice.
There was that wording again that I had never heard until we moved to the Upper Cumberland area: “I don’t care to” do this or that. I may have told you about this phrase before. It certainly doesn’t mean the same thing here that it has always meant every time I heard it before we moved here. Everyplace else it meant, “I don’t want to do that.” Here it means, “Oh, that would be fine. I don’t mind doing that at all.”
I also may have told you before about the first time I heard the phrase. It was in our early days in Cookeville, Tennessee, when Ray recounted to me what had just happened to him at Lowe’s. Ray had returned a can of paint and, after Ray explained our dissatisfaction, the clerk told him, “If you want me to give you another can, I don’t care to do that.” To Ray’s amazement, he meant, “Oh, sure. I’ll give you a new can of paint as a replacement.”
After twenty-three years, we understand what people mean when they say that now, but it still surprises us.
Story Two
Yesterday we went out for Sunday lunch with our daughter Mary Evelyn and her family. When the waiter at the Mexican restaurant said something to her husband Nate and called him “Amigo,” Nate responded with a few words of Spanish. Our granddaughter was surprised and “quoted” back to her daddy what she had heard him say. It went something like this: “Na-na-na-na-na.” That’s what it sounded like to her.
Have you been misunderstood lately? Have you misunderstood something someone told you? We mamas have been using words to communicate since we were young children, so you would think we would have this communication thing down by now. But, alas, it’s not so easy, is it?
One of our jobs as mamas is honing and honing and then honing some more our ability to listen to understand and our ability to speak to be understood — with our children, with our husbands, with our aging parents, and with other folks, too.
One person’s “I don’t care to” is another person’s “No problem” and another person’s “No, I don’t want to do that.” One person’s “esto sabe muy rico” (I speak about five words of Spanish, but a Spanish dictionary says that that means “This is very tasty.”) is another person’s “”Na-na-na-na-na.”
While we hone, it behooves us all to be patient with the folks around us — with the young and the old and with ourselves, too.
Like apples of gold in settings of silver
Is a word spoken in right circumstances.
Like an earring of gold
and an ornament of fine gold
Is a wise reprover to a listening ear.
Proverbs 25:11-12