When you listen

 

              I guess they’d started to wonder what was taking me so long.

              It was late afternoon in Silverton, Colorado and I still hadn’t returned from a little shopping excursion.

              “Little” because it was off-season in the high mountain town and there were only maybe four stores still open, so my husband and daughter didn’t expect it would take me hours to walk the few blocks to the main part of town and find a souvenir.

              But I wasn’t just shopping. I was listening.

              It started innocently enough. In most cases, the shopkeeper would get the ball rolling with something basic like, “Where are you from?” That was enough to tell me that they were interested and that they had some time. And when I answered, they had a connection or a question or a story of their own related to the place.

              Off-season is pretty quiet in Silverton, and I was often the only one in the store at the time, or maybe the only one they’d see for the day, so it wasn’t a problem to chat while I was paying for my polished geode or my hand-made leaf-shaped earrings.

              And once the conversation started, it didn’t often stop. For quite some time.

              Maybe it’s the old reporter in me, but I find it irresistible when someone is willing to tell me the story of their life or their hobby or their town. And with just a few stories of my own thrown in here and there to keep the conversation going, I often find out more about local people and history and controversies than I would any other way.

              Sometimes it’s easier to share things with people you know you’ll never see again – and they you. It’s safer somehow. And still a release.

These conversations are a highlight of any trip, and the top reason to not be in a hurry when you’re souvenir shopping. Or just even when you’re around other people in general.

              Our trip to Maui last month was no exception. But the conversations took on a whole new weight as the people we spoke with shared their experiences with the tragic fire in Lahaina last fall.

              Everybody had a story and many were anxious to share it.

              “Can I show you a photo of what’s left of my house?” asked one young father we met in the parking lot of the condo tower that was to us a vacation stop, but to him, a place to stay until he could figure out how to rebuild his life and his family home.

              “It helps me process this to show it,” he said, and as we looked at the cluttered moonscape of ground dotted with blackened sticks that once were 60-foot-tall trees, he told us about trying to escape with his family in his truck but having to abandon it and run for their lives. They made it. Many of their neighbors did not.

              “Thank you for being here,” he said, calming our fears that the trip we had planned long before the fire would hurt rather than help. “We need you to be here,” he said. “My friends need to pay their mortgages.”

              Like many we spoke with, the woman in the art gallery had lost her job when the fire burned the store where she’d worked. She had only just gotten this new job and was grateful.

              The man selling shirts at the outdoor market had a friend who’d gone back toward the fire to help others trapped in a building. He didn’t return.

              The woman at the canoe rental said she’d just been allowed in to see where her house had been. It was the first time in five months they could have access, but her husband didn’t want to go. She’d hoped to be able to find something in the ashes, but the ashes were 10 inches deep.

              Not everyone can talk about their losses. Not everyone wants to share.

              But when they do, our only job is to listen.

There are few things as rewarding or as interesting or as meaningful as listening.

Because when you listen, you learn and maybe you start to understand.

And maybe even you feel.