The Gift of Listening: No, No, No on Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

I'm doing it, although I swore I never would, that insidious thing where halfway through someone's sentence, I say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah . . ." to signal my understanding of his or her point.

I've also begun to check my e-mail messages at long stoplights and DVR "Grey's Anatomy," not to avoid commercials but to skip to the story lines that interest me most. Add some holiday-induced freneticism into the mix, and I'm yeah-yeah-yeahing like I've tethered an invisible remote control to my palm.


My recent encounters with a few members of the listener hall of fame have inspired me to break this nasty habit.

Recently, I reconnected with Joanne Rudof, archivist for The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. I hadn't seen her since 1996, when I was a television producer with the ability to nod silently while interviewing my subjects so my voice wouldn't appear on tape. I worked with her on formatting videos of Holocaust testimonies collected by interviewers trained in a non-directive style, through which, according to Joanne, "the witnesses are the experts in their life stories." This non-manipulative approach yielded testimonies that haunt me more than the images of yellow stars and barbed wire.

In the Washington Post, novelist Ann Patchett wrote of her most cherished Christmas gift. When she was a young girl, her absent father, unskilled in the fine art of gift giving, called her one Christmas Eve to read her a short story over the phone. She listened, the phone against her ear "like a conch shell," exhilarated by the possibility that she could become a writer and "cut new stories out of whole cloth . . . that spoke to the depth of [her] emotions."

My mother gave me such a gift this Hanukkah. I'd just completed my first novel, and I read her the whole thing over the phone, all 95,925 words. My mother grew up listening to the radio instead of watching television, and she can practically hear a typo. I was humbled by the hours she gave of her undivided attention and her willingness to enter my parallel universe and walk beside me when the fatigue set in.

A few days later, I had the chance to co-teach a creative writing workshop with a first-grade teacher I consider the gold standard of educators. She can simultaneously corral 18 six- and seven-year-olds while engaging fully with their comments and stories, often told in real time.

Letting people, little and big, finish their thoughts is powerful stuff. While not malicious, the yeah-yeah-yeah conversation tic tells family, friends, students, and colleagues not that you understand their point, but that you no longer want to hear it.

I think I have an idea for a resolution for 2010.