Tag Archives: Listening

Midnight’s Children: Half-Time Report

30 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by in Good Reads

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Half the words without half the story.  That’s my quick, half-time recap of Salman Rushdie’s hard-to-put-down novel, Midnight’s Children.

How tempting to leave it at just that.  I can’t say why, but I’m not ready to talk of what I’ve read quite yet.   But ready or not, it’s time to share notes with read-along partners — and any other who desires to listen in — though to react at all, feels plain premature at this point of the tale.

In this month’s reading, the spotlight shifts from the narrator’s holey grandfather to the young narrator himself.  It’s a story about growing up, endearing as it is universal.  I like this narrator.  No, I love this narrator.  Snot-nosed and ugly and misunderstood he may be, but how can one not admire his youthful idealism and brutally honest self-assessments?

Rushdie’s story just grows and grows, making it hard to point a finger at any thing in particular.   It grows like the young babe Saleem — and it grows like the population of India, too — though, thank God, it does not grow uncontrollably.   But at this point of the story, I wish I possessed greater understanding of how the young narrator, Saleem Sinai, is a mirror of India’s own young life.  While I sense that child and country are inextricably linked, for better and worse, I don’t yet understand HOW this is.  Yes, both experience growing pains from internal turmoil and blood-letting.  But surely there is more to their common ground than the story has currently revealed?

I’ve glimpsed three great religions and God-knows-how-many-languages and voices influencing both India and Saleem.  I see both growing up under the watchful eyes of an expectant world, waiting for a sort of payback on investments and loans.  And unlike the country of his birth, I’ve watched a young narrator become absolutely consumed with need to understand his larger purpose in the world. So much so, that Saleem is in constant need of a hidey hole to escape the pressures of his world.

Hiding that begins in the physical world — from a washing-chest in his mother’s bathroom to a clock-tower next to his parent’s home — becomes mental, growing out of Saleem’s interior world and a couple of physical blows to the head.  The last, a childhood mishap, finished the work of his father’s hand and “wild anger,” which left Saleem’s left ear permanently damaged.

So what words could beget such parental violence?  I’ll only share that Saleem was premature in his conclusions.  That Saleem was wrong.  That his parents more wrong.  And that maybe there’s plenty of wrong to go around whenever any of us fail to listen to others as fully as we can. Or ought.

But lack of listening isn’t Saleem’s problem.  Not at all.  Because, much like a radio, Saleem is gifted with a fantastic ability to tune his mind into other minds, to eavesdrop on real-time thinking of friends, parents and politicians.  What begins as simple mind-reading soon mushrooms into a type of telepathic communication center — where Saleem’s mind becomes much like an internet server, allowing Midnight’s Children — those uniquely gifted Indian children born in the first hour of Indian Independence — to communicate with one another.  There he meets scary Shiva — the true son of Saleem’s parents born at the same time as Saleem and India — who is dark to Saleem’s light and pessimist to Saleem’s idealism, hinting of conflicts to come.  What grows from this conflict is for the second half of the book to reveal.

But what, I wonder, will grow from all I failed to mention? Evie Burns, for example?  The Brass Monkey of a sister?  And all those with bald heads that keep popping up from time to time, on the pages of this book?   Who can say, at this point, whether any and what and who are the red herrings of this story? Who knows but what may ultimately become important in this fabulous tale?

Especially, with a narrator who laments, in the final paragraphs of this month’s section of reading, this bit of wisdom to fly off the page…

“Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.”

With words like these, I can only conclude I don’t know the half of it.

Telling Stories Ripe

30 Friday Jul 2010

Posted by in Life at Home

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“Do you recall when Dad shared this story with you?”

I was glad to hear Jon recount Dad’s sad tale.  Without knowing it, Jon had confirmed a missing piece to the puzzling last day of our paternal grandmother’s life.

Hints between the lines of what my paternal grandfather didn’t tell and what made print in two newspaper accounts of the fatal car crash allowed me to piece together the why.  What came as a surprise were the two extra jigsaw pieces Jon threw on the table I hadn’t known were missing.

But isn’t this just how stories are put together?  One person receives part, another deduces some other detail, both keep what they know until one day, they sit down to compare parts and piece the story together.  Of course, we never know whether we’ve gotten the story right since much gets lost in history and in our own and others interpretation.  But it doesn’t stop us from trying, especially when the story concerns one we love.

When it comes to Daddy and his story, there are many missing pieces and lots of room for interpretation.  There is a period of Dad’s life — two years, maybe more — that I’ve come to regard as the silent years.  His sister Carol once asked Dad about this period of his life but Dad declined to talk about it.

Some can’t wait to tell what’s going on in their lives while others keep their stories to themselves.  Dad told his story as he felt the need, or when he hoped something good might come from the telling, which is how my brother came to know what he shared.  Yesterday made me realize some stories are better kept in reserve until ripe for the telling.

The Nature of Listening

31 Monday May 2010

Posted by in Life at Home, Prayer, The Great Outdoors, Writing

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Thunder awakes the night sky.   Heavy raindrops come.  Then the wind.  Last of all, lightening.

I should be asleep right now but I’m glad I’m not.  I’m glad I’m up to listen to this final rainstorm of May.  Yet how long will I listen?  All too soon, the sounds will fade into the background.   I will become immersed in my writing.  In spite of good intentions, I won’t listen.

I confess to being a lazy listener.  It comes from thinking I know what will be said.   My husband was guilty of this crime yesterday morning – I told him I had fed the poodles before coming back to bed at five a.m. – he thought I told him to feed the poodles.  So making like hobbits, the poodles enjoyed second breakfast.

In my online writing class last month, I learned that listening is the most important thing I can do to write well.  In fact, my teacher stressed that listening is more important than writing everyday. Taking her words to heart, I’m trying to listen a little closer to my world these days.

Yesterday afternoon, while walking from our car to the Paseo Art Festival, I enjoyed a frolic of a conversation between a black woman in a wheelchair and her chatty male neighbor.  I needed pen and paper to get the proper nuances of speech down.  So foreign were their expressions and words, it was like listening to a different language.  Just like when I travel abroad, I heard music rather than lyrics.   But even without the actual words, the memory of  their cadence is richer than a hot fudge sundae.

Walking behind the fast-moving power scooter, the woman appeared to have lost her legs.  Maybe that’s what I expected to see. When I caught up with her at the corner visiting a few more neighbors, I saw her legs were intact.  Sort of like my ears, her legs weren’t working as they ought, doing their intended job, though they were there all the same.

It’s still raining, but just barely.  In spite of good intentions, I’ve missed the heart of this quick, not quite summer storm.  But I enjoyed what I heard of it.  I need to tune into life more often.

I need to tune into the source of life more often too.  Of late, listening to God is the hardest work of all.  I don’t want to be still.  I don’t want to think.  I just want to do.  Keep my hands busy so my mind doesn’t have time to think.  And what am I avoiding?  Well, the hard work of grieving of course.

Grieving is the worst sort of listening.  One wakes up to realize that we don’t have forever in this world, that we are strangers speaking a strange tongue in a world that is not ultimately our own.  We wake to find we’ve no more opportunities to hear that much loved voice and the stories it told.  We wake to see we’ve taken for granted our loved one’s life and their presence in our own.

We wake to see that we let too many raindrops slip through our fingers without ever attempting to hold them in our hands.  Our hands are dry rather than wet with failed attempts.  My hands should be wet with failures.  My  hands should be wet with life.

I should be wet behind the ears.  Being wet behind the ears — that is, to take in everything as a young child —  is not necessarily a bad thing, though we speak of it as if it were.  Being wet behind the ears goes hand in wet hand with the nature of listening.