Slow And Steady

Slow talkers have a tough time in our family. Even when they have important things to say, they get flattened in the verbal fast lane. True, they are rare but we’ve got a couple. My Uncle Joe, who got the double whammy of marrying a Rives girl, is great at Taboo because he isn’t full of the blurts and splurts the rest of us produce. My Uncle Doug, who married our family’s Auntie Mame, has remained virtually unscathed in our verbal-assault tsunamis by staying silently off the radar. Even my husband has the introvert’s good sense to know when to spectate rather than participate. But the verbal understatement champ is my brother, John. Since he’s now a spoken word performer, you’d never guess he was the quietest kid ever. Once he was standing by our car softly crying but we couldn’t figure out why until we realized two of his fingers were closed in the door. I can just imagine the ungodly noise my kids would have been making. And once he was too quietly trying to tell my mom something. When we finally stopped to listen to him, he told us, “Gabriel’s house is on fire.” Knowing he would have been much more agitated if that were true, my mom pulled up the window shade--to reveal our neighbor’s house engulfed in flames. You gotta listen to the quiet ones or, like in Arlene Mosel’s adaptation of Tikki Tikki Tembo, your brother might be at the bottom of a well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlene_Mosel


http://www.amazon.com/Tikki-Tembo-Arlene-Mosel/dp/0805006621