Small Listening

          I have never been good at small talk.  I am, however, excellent at small listening.  It is as if the entire world is a sweater, and I am a hangnail.  I catch key words, the odd phrase, or facial expression and snag them into my mental web of comprehension.

          Conversations, for me anyway, lay captured as a fly tangled up in the spider’s web, waiting for me to return - to dissect sentences, drain verbs of their action and leave passing clichés as empty, broken fragments, drying in the Sun, eventually blowing away with the slightest punctuation.  

          I surround myself with words.  I’m soaking in them right now.  They are my fishing trip, minus the flies and mosquitoes.  They are my golf game that I hope nobody ever captures on film.  My adventures span the distance from exclamation point to page down, and they are all adventures that remain relegated to this keyboard. 

          For the past several years, I have checked books out of the library, only to read two or three sentences and return them.  Captured by a cleaver title, like a raven to a shiny object, I pluck them from the shelf and cart them home.  Almost instantly, upon reading, I’m bored.  I’ve neither been hooked nor drawn into the story or character and so I close it and pick up the next in the pile.    This is not something I would recommend.  I am sure that I have missed some good stories by not hanging in long enough and I could not really tell you what I am hoping to one day discover by engaging in this behavior.

          My latest discovery is a small book entitled Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, by: Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein.   This book immediately captured my attention when I read the dedication page.  

        It contains a quote from Groucho Marx.  “These are my principles; if you don’t like them, I have others.”  Any book that can make me laugh aloud in the library gets checked out and carried home.

          The problem, as you know, with armchair adventure, is its limitations with respect to life.  Life should be experienced outside, with wind, noise, and blinding Sunlight.  It needs to be breathed in and it should make us sweat, and shiver.  Even if we have to grab the big hand and let it drag us around the face of the clock, scraping our knees across the five, and snagging our shoelaces on the eight, we should never let go.  It is a journey taking us nowhere, while simultaneously pulling us through time.

          It is the small listening that causes me to pay close attention to the dedication page of a book.  It is there that the author steps out of their author persona, and stands facing the reading public, and speaks from the heart, not from the dust jacket smoking a pipe and attempting to look regal.  The dedication page is the tree that we ran to as children.  As long as you are touching the tree, you can’t be tagged.  Someone else remains it.