I’ve pretty much always been a talker, but, at 67, I noticed that I talk in more detail than I’m used to doing.  It’s not that there is more detail, it’s just that I’m willing to share more.  I wondered about it at first.  I’d catch myself giving a rather long explanation of something that seemed rather simple.  I’d catch myself and say to myself, “Whoa, Girl!  They’re gonna think you’re losin’ it!”  I wondered if it was because I was getting older or senile or some other dreaded thing that we think about older people.  I thought about it a lot.

Finally, it dawned on me what it is was none of the things I was thinking at all.  I believe it is that as we get older, I think we realize how much seemingly random things are connected in ways we never contemplated and in order to truly understand and appreciate the beauty of how they fit together, you have to see the whole picture.

When you’re younger, you’re usually just in a hurry and want to get things done and over with and move on to the next thing.  I get it.  But, as you get older, you (hopefully) tend to grow in wisdom, in grace, and in understanding.  You realize that none of this thing we call life, in all its glory, can be taken for granted.  You realize that you didn’t do this all by yourself; you didn’t get here only by your individual efforts.  You realize that tiny little things can make the difference between you taking that trip to Africa and not doing so, but what a time you had for that ten month period with your three daughters.  Or that the trip with them to Russia could have not happened if you hadn’t happened to hear about the unbelievably cheap airfare advertised on the random radio station you were passing through on the way to your favorite one.  Or that if you hadn’t missed your confirmation call to the airline for your return flight from Egypt because you were too busy lolling by the pool contemplating the awesomeness of the Pyramids you could see from your lounge chair, you would not have needed to take the trip into Cairo from Giza and would have missed the marriage proposal you ended up getting along the way.

It happens all day, every day, and we just rush through it in the crush of life.

In the rush of getting it all done and arranged, we don’t seriously think about what it took to get to that final thing we did, or saw, or wanted, and got.  In our younger years we just talk about the thing itself.  “We went to Africa for 10 months on a Fulbright Fellowship.  We took a family trip to Russia soon after the country finally opened up under Glasnost.  I married an Egyptian I met when I took two of my daughters to Egypt (yep, true story).”  Like the proverbial frantically teenage boy eager for sex, we just get to the heart of the matter and get it over with.  As we all (hopefully) know, that changes as we get older and learn that it is much more enjoyable if we simply take the time to enjoy it.

Turns out, the same thing goes for sharing information and our stories.  It may seem like we’re older people just rambling on about some irrelevant thing or other.  We’re not.  Or, at least not all of us.  We are sharing with you the true enormity of so many things coming together to get you to the final destination of the story that are important for you to understand in order to fully appreciate it.  If I just ask you, the machine repairer, to repair this sewing machine, you will do it.  However, if I tell you that it is the sewing machine that my Grandma was given by her Grandma who was a slave for 50 years before Freedom came, and she used the sewing machine to earn a living once she was on her own, chances are, repairing that sewing machine will seem a bit different to you.  You won’t be so quick to rush through.  You will handle it with tender loving care.  You will appreciate that you were able to help make a piece of history even better by your efforts.

That isn’t rambling.  That is providing context that helps you appreciate the world a little better.  Makes you feel better about what you do.  Makes you think about the issue of slavery in a new way connected to people, not just dry facts that you had to learn because they might show up on a test.  Or worse yet, something uncomfortable that people keep bringing up and you don’t understand why because it happened so long ago and has nothing to do with today.  You now see that your standing here talking to me about it, and about my Grandma who actually lived and dealt with that person who had been enslaved makes it a bit more real and definitely shortens the time span you thought existed between slavery and today.

Yep, me yammering on and on does all that.  So, you just might want to listen a little closer the next time some older person does what you consider to be going off on a tangent or talking to you about a lot of irrelevant stuff.  Listen.  You just might learn something you didn’t expect.