The Time to Listen Is Now
Have you ever realized when someone gets to the end of a fascinating story that you weren’t really paying attention and now you are sorry that you missed it? It is easy to let our minds wander. Sometimes, when we do this, we miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This is true not only when the storyteller is older. Some stories only enter a storyteller’s mind because of the time, place, and circumstances of a particular situation. The story may never come to mind again. Usually, the time to listen is now.
I was acutely aware of that during conversations with my mother. She lived with us for the last few years of her life, but when she was still able to live in her own home, she and I used to talk on the phone each night. She enjoyed hearing about my day. Once I told her about a walk our daughter, our granddaughter, and I made to take pictures among the wildflowers.
I loved it when something like this prompted a childhood memory, and Mother told me a story. That night she began, “I like wildflowers in the spring.” Then she told me about Sunday afternoons when she was seven years old. When a near-neighbor’s granddaughter visited her grandparents, she and Mother would walk by the creek and see the wildflowers. I loved imagining my mother walking among the wildflowers back in 1939.
Simple pleasures were the only ones available to Mother. She was the richer for it.
While visiting with Aunt Dot and Uncle Preston recently, she told us about the weeks that she and Daddy lived with my great-grandmother, Mama Boyd. I’ve shared it before, but I love this picture of Aunt Dot, Uncle Preston, and me at Mama Sue and Daddy Leland’s house when we were all very young.
This is a later photo of Daddy and Dot with their younger siblings, Ronnie and Mary Ann.
Here are Dot and Daddy while he was in the Army and she was a teenager.
Mama Boyd and her husband Gabe were a handsome couple in their youth. Daddy and I never knew my great-grandfather because he died when Daddy was a baby, but it was he who was descended from Revolutionary War veteran Timothy Demonbreun.
Sweet, sweet Mama Boyd looked like this, when I got to enjoy her as my great-grandmother. She lived until I was 10 years old.
When they got homesick, Great Aunt Christine tried to cheer them up. Christine was the only girl in Daddy Leland’s family. He and his five brothers called her Sister, so all of the rest of us called her Sister, too. She baked Daddy and Dot big sugar cookies and played on the piano and sang for them. She sang “Froggy Went a Courtin’” and “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” This is a picture of Sister and Dot.
It is easy and tempting to tire of family stories. This is my advice: Don’t do it. Don’t tune out. Write them down.
You and your family will be the richer for it.
Listen to your father who begot you,
And do not despise your mother when she is old.
Proverbs 23:22