I'm laughing about the fact that I suggested this drabble topic and now haven't a clue what to write.

erika, you just made me think of a guy named Brian Evans, a Mormon lawyer I knew (he came out here to be junior partner in the regulatory law firm I worked for when I first came back to the States).

He was not yet thirty, he had five kids, plus his wife was a musician. Their house was never quiet.

And he once admitted that he was terrified of silence. I remember that once, his wife Terry and all five spawn were visiting her grandmother, sicknes or something, for a week. And Brian admitted that every night, when he got home from work, he would turn on appliances, radio, TV, anything at all, so that he didn't have to listen to his own thoughts, in all that silence.

Personally? I like silence. But like you, I have trouble with deep meditation. I don't hold still very easily. Neither does my mind.

I've gotten better at it, but I'm not a born contemplater, for sure.

[not a drabble; just me shooting off my mouth....]

I can't stand silence when I'm with another person. By myself, I'm cool with silence. But even with people who I'm close with, I can't abide silence. I interpret it as a sure sign we've run out of things to talk about and therefore the friendship is over, because how lame would a silent friendship be? (The silent Marx brother would have driven me INSANE. The episode of Northern Exposure where the weird circus comes to town, and the silent dude falls in love with Marilyn? Creeped me out. Silent Bob? Way too disconcerting.)

Either that, or I interpret silence from another person as a sure sign that they hate me and are cold-shouldering me.

These are totally my issues, I realize, and pretty classic ACOA traits.

When I was a kid, some book I read had the narrator saying, about her best friend, "We didn't say much, but that was okay, because friends can be quiet together." I freely admit that I have never, not even at the age of 33, understood that concept.

I love Silent Bob! And crap, what's the name of the quiet guy on Northen Exposure? His actual name was Bob...

Poem is about 140 word, so over 100...sorry...still very much in progress.

My Father’s Silence

There is something essential
about my father’s silence.

I have heard him recite Chaucer
from memory, his tongue curls round
whan Zephayrus eke with his swete brethe
inspired hath in every holt and heath,
and the words come easily,
naturally.

He can talk forever about work,
about thought and theory;
his wit is as sharp as that Middle Age coot,
with an eye for the absurd and the hypocritical,
the gross and the awesome.

But
simple words,
get caught in lips pressed
suddenly together

I
me
my

cannot escape;
he has a terrible aversion
to first person.
Desperate jokes stand guard, terrible
in their nonchalance.

I wonder if he would answer
if I asked in
Middle English,
if I poured through his textbooks
to translate each word

to ask in a language he speaks:

Who are you?
Speak to me.

Kristin! That's so beautiful! And poignant.

I am Teppy. I have to fill every silence. I'm also the person in class who can't let the teacher's question hang for more than 30 seconds.

Kristin, lovely lovely lovely. But one thing:

if I poured through his textbooks

Is that "pored"?

Is that "pored"?

um. yes.

oops! I would like to say it was a clever metaphor, but no, just a typo.