What?

My mother likes to talk. Granted, she can be quite entertaining, but having heard the story first hand, then getting to hear it again when she tells one of my siblings on the phone, I do not then need her to tell me about telling my sibling. After all, I just heard the entire conversation.

Given that I have six siblings and of a given evening she might talk to three, four or more of them, the opportunity to hear a story and the story about the story, and the story about the story about the story is …. substantial.

Pointing out to my mother that I have already heard the story serves no purpose. The telling of the story has nothing to do with my need to know it. It has to do with her need to tell it, which is large and a driving force in her life.

I reached the conclusion that we all need to express ourselves. We each have our own threshold for telling the story of a given event in our life. Mostly this works out just fine since we end up telling a variety of people over time: someone at work; someone at lunch; someone at the store, etc., until we have met our personal quota for the telling of the story.

My mother’s personal quote runs between 15 and 20 repetitions. That’s for an ordinary story. For the important things, like the garbage men didn’t come on time, or the fruit she bought at the store was not really ripe; well those things require much more telling for her to process them.

I quickly developed a technique that, as it turns out my father had mastered long ago. I only sort of listen.

Usually this is fine. After all, if I’m going to hear a story get told 15 or 20, and the cast of characters in the story is people I don’t actually know, by the time she has reached her story telling quota I’m sure to know all the salient details. Right?

Yea. Generally. Except….. My mother has this habit of tossing in a sentence here and there which is not actually a part of the story; a sentence which contains information which might be of great significance to me, like, “Oh, I made a doctor’s appointment for Thursday at 2:00 and they told me I shouldn’t drive myself.”

This is important. I’ve just been told that I need to make sure my schedule accommodates her appointment. But when those vital details are embedded in the middle of a story about what she had for lunch, with people I may or may not have ever met, at a place I’ve probably never been, and given that I’m only sort of listening, it’s easy to miss.

Especially since that particular aside is unlikely to come up in subsequent tellings of the tale.

I remember noticing that my father would occasionally say “What?”, which we all assumed was related to his hearing loss. In truth, his less than perfect hearing might have had something to do with it. But I have since come to believe that it was more likely him having noticed that my mother had just said something that was not, in fact, an actual part of the story he was ignoring, but rather one of those potentially very important, unlikely to be repeated asides which he would be held accountable for knowing at a future time.

And thus I found myself going, “What?” on a fairly regular basis.

My mother is truly amazing. If I manage to utter the magic word in a timely fashion, she will always, without hesitation, irritation or variance, repeat the last sentence she just said, thus allowing me (and my father before me) to bring to full consciousness the all important tidbit of information she had just casually embedded in an otherwise unremarkable flow of words.

This is wonderful. A second chance. A moment of redemption. An opportunity to serve my function.

And a curse. Because it also means that I can’t actually NOT listen. I must always sort of listen, or risk missing the one important thing that was most certainly buried in the storm of words, and which if not known about can not be elicited by inquiry.

If I miss the narrow of window of opportunity to utter “What?” then in order to discover the hidden gem I must ask a question. “Did you just say something about an appointment on Thursday?” is perfect. That will almost certainly elicit the necessary information.

“Did you say something about Thursday?” Or “Did you say something about an appointment?” Which question I ask depends entirely on what key word got caught by my “sort of listening” filter.

If I’m lucky the story in question had no events that happened on a Thursday, or there is only one appointment that she has not yet told me about.

Unfortunately, for a wide variety of reasons, asking “What did you say that I actually needed to know?” is not a question which will result in an answer that has value or significance. From my mother’s point of view, everything she says is of interest (if not to me, than at least to her.)

So, “What?” has become an invaluable tool of communication, and a simple way to show that I care, if not about her story, then at least about her.