from: In Praise of Listening: A Gathering of Stories (Bauhan Publishing, 2023)
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from: Chapter 1: CHILDREN LISTENING Not Being Heard It may well be that things are different now. But when I was a child, the grown-ups seemed to belong to another world entirely. They had their own culture and preoccupations, their own inscrutable jokes and anecdotes, their own way of drawing back and becoming utterly, unassailably, silent. I remember trying to work out what they really meant, beyond the laughter and the kisses and the charged emphatic welcome. Did Papa like that gruff man with the mustache? Was Mama actually interested in what the nice lady at the Post Office had to say? Or were they just pretending? It was hard to tell. I longed to translate those adult words and gestures back into my own vernacular, to get at what I thought of as “the truth.”
from: In Praise of Listening: A Gathering of Stories (Bauhan Publishing, 2023)
from: In Praise of Listening: A Gathering of…
from: In Praise of Listening: A Gathering of Stories (Bauhan Publishing, 2023)
from: Chapter 1: CHILDREN LISTENING Not Being Heard It may well be that things are different now. But when I was a child, the grown-ups seemed to belong to another world entirely. They had their own culture and preoccupations, their own inscrutable jokes and anecdotes, their own way of drawing back and becoming utterly, unassailably, silent. I remember trying to work out what they really meant, beyond the laughter and the kisses and the charged emphatic welcome. Did Papa like that gruff man with the mustache? Was Mama actually interested in what the nice lady at the Post Office had to say? Or were they just pretending? It was hard to tell. I longed to translate those adult words and gestures back into my own vernacular, to get at what I thought of as “the truth.”