On Slow Listening

This morning I bought bread and could not hear the shopkeeper. He said something — I think he was asking whether I wanted it sliced — and I smiled at him the way one smiles at people one cannot quite hear, and said thank you, and left. Only on the way home did the shape of his sentence reach me through the bag rustle and the slight rumor of traffic and my own preoccupation with whatever I had been preoccupied with. By then I was a block away and it was too late to go back; the bread was wrapped, the man was elsewhere in his head, the moment was finished.

I think about this kind of failure more than I should. I am a slow listener — slow in the way the books I love are slow, slow in the way I am with her, slow in the kitchen when she is telling me about her day and I am chopping something and the knife and her voice take the same long pace. But the slow listener is bad at counters. Bad at the quick exchanges that move the city along — the man at the till, the woman at the bus stop, the friend who passed in a hurry and said something I should have caught. By the time my attention focuses, the question has long since been answered by someone else, or by my silence.

I do not mind it, mostly. The slow attention is the one I have built my life around; the quick kind would be useful, and I can see in some other man the value of being briskly present, but it is not the one I have spent the years on. You cannot have both kinds in the same body, I think — the one rules out the other.

Still, the shopkeeper was kind — he did not push, he let the silence between us mean what it meant. And the bread, when I got it home, was the way it always is: unsliced, which is the right way, even when I could not have told him so.