Are you listening?

James 1:19--¹⁹You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger;

When I read this scripture I am reminded of my best friend’s grandfather, Grampy Toumajan, he was a very slow speaker.  As we follow the lectionary for this Sunday the Gospel of Mark reminds us of all that is and isn’t important about tradition.  The Tomajan house was full of tradition one being Grampy’s long slow talks.

                Every Sunday we would arrive at Grammy and Grampy’s ready for the homemade rice pilaf and boereg (bear-egg…the best!).  After every meal we would go into the living room with Grampy and he would tell us stories of life.  The truth is that he spoke so slowly that we often missed his message.  We were teenage girls after all with a lot to do.  We had places to go, people to see and while we would never be disrespectful to him, our feet would tap eagerly, we would look at each other with unspoken questions in our eyes such as “Is he done yet?” or “Can we go now?”  Today when my friend and I meet we often ask “What was he saying?” and then we quickly follow with “I wish we had listened.”

                Why do we wish that we had listened?  Because everything about Grammy and Grampy’s life has led us to believe that they had something valuable to share.  Their life, their traditions, their love was worth passing on.  I was not a blood relative of these people but loved I was.  Their eyes lit up every time we showed up on their steps, which was often and most times without warning. 

                As my friend and I would head out to run with our phys-ed class for a morning run, the class would go one way and we would head another.  Our jog would take us to Grammy and Grampy’s and Grammy in her robe with her long morning braid swung to one side, would open the door with a delighted exclamation of “Girls!” and then breakfast would follow, English muffins with cottage cheese.  It strikes me that they never asked us why we weren’t in school, they just opened the door.  If we were bored, hungry, happy, sad, their home was often the place to be. 

Pictures from the past surrounded us in every room. When their children and other relatives visited you here could hear English and Armenian being spoken at the same time.  There were stories from their past that I did not understand until I got older, we do not teach about the Armenian genocide in high school.  As a 50 year old woman I can better understand why Grammy had a hard time sleeping, I can still picture her sitting looking out the window late at night. Given an opportunity I would love to ask her what were you thinking, remembering?  I would also thank both of them for holding on to their traditions; they mattered so much to me.

Visiting Grammy and Grampy remained one of my traditions until Grampy passed and Grammy moved south to be with her family.  My husband and I, and eventually our daughter, would come from Maine to N.H. and a trip to the Toumajan house was always on the schedule.  We would arrive to hugs and food and then the long slow talk in the living room, if there was a baby in tow Grammy would be rocking and singing to her in the other room while we listened.  Because if it wasn’t stated before, often Grammy was out of the room for these talks, my husband would often be tapping his foot looking at me with eyes that asked the same questions my eyes once asked, but on these visits I never felt rushed, they were the place I wanted to go, the people I wanted to see. 

My children have never had homemade pilaf or boeregs, we did not do a traditional Armenian dance at our daughter’s wedding, these traditions were not my ancestral inheritance, but they have their own memories of the people who have loved them well.  And isn’t that the point, the miracle is not in the actual food but in the love behind it.