The visitor was worried that we might not find enough to talk about.  My son, who knows me well, reassured them.

“Oh, you won’t need to worry about that.  My dad always has things to talk about.  It won’t be quiet at the table.”

I didn’t hear the conversation, but I learned of it later.  With a smile playing at the corners of his mouth, he related the words he had said.

I’m not sure whether I should be proud or embarrassed.  Is he saying I’m a good conversationalist?  Or is it just that I talk too much?

I didn’t ask him.

Recently I saw a quote, attributed to an obscure person I’ve been unable to pin down in my searches, that caught my attention.  Actually, it grabbed my heart (and, to be honest, my guilty conscience).

“So, if you are too tired to speak, sit next to me, because I, too, am fluent in silence.”
(R. Arnold)

I guess it’s appropriate that this R. Arnold character can’t be found.  It reinforces the veracity of the words—at least, to me it does.

No biography.  No social footprint.  No online following.

Just fluency in a language I don’t understand.

I could never make his claim.  I don’t understand the inflections, the accents, the syllables, of silence.  Because I fill the air with words.  Thousands of them, perhaps, in the course of a day.

I’m less proud of my son’s words than I was when I heard them.

I want to be a person who can sit in silence with a friend who is hurting.

I don’t want to fill the air with empty noise.  I don’t want to see friends’ eyes glaze over as I tell another story they’ve heard before—or worse—one they have no interest in, whatsoever.

And yet, the Lovely Lady and I often sit in silence, sometimes for hours at a time.  The old preacher who married us would have laughed to see it.

He thought he could tell who the old married couples were in any setting.  They were the ones who had nothing to say to each other.  In a restaurant, he loved watching the young couples excitedly yapping to each other about every detail of their day—of every new sensation they had discovered—reporting every word their friends had said in an embarrassing situation.

Then, almost gleefully, he would point out the couple nearby who sat silently, drinking their water and eating their burgers.

“They’ve run out of things to say to each other!”

And often, he might be right.  But, not always.

Not always.

Silence can bring us closer to each other than conversation.  There is a bond in quietness.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a coffee shop surrounded by people.  People talking. They are conversations about faith—about children’s activities—about professional matters.

There is nothing wrong with communication using words.

But, silence…

Silence is a language in itself, one learned by long practice; a language mastered by the heart and not the tongue.

I sit quietly (for once) and realize that I want to learn this language.

Perhaps, the dinner table is not the time to practice my mastery of it.  But, I’m going to work on that, too.  Others might want to (as the red-headed lady who raised me would have phrased it) get a word in edge-wise.

Mr. Carlyle was right in his assessment:

“Speech is of time; silence is of eternity.”
(from Sartor Resartus, by Thomas Carlyle)

It’s time to get started on eternity.

Silence, they say, is golden.

I wonder if there’s a Babbel course to help me learn faster.

 

 

“Here lies as silent clay Miss Arabella Young,
Who on the 21st of May 1771
First began to hold her tongue.”
(Epitaph on a grave marker in Hatfield, Massachusets)