Suffice to say that I did not spend Black Friday shopping. It would be difficult for me to find a more unappealing way to spend the day after Thanksgiving than rising before dawn and joining hundreds of others in a mad rush for bargains.
But that’s just me. As a rule, unless I am buying food at the supermarket or looking at tools at a home improvement center, I hate shopping with a passion.
Then I read about another way some people were observing Black Friday that was a lot more appealing to me than shopping. StoryCorps billed the Friday after Thanksgiving as a National Day of Listening.
StoryCorps suggested spending the day recording the oral histories of family members, and there certainly is value in that. I know that my mother, 92, and my wife’s mother, 91, are among the few members of their generation in both my wife’s family and my family who are still around, and there would be great value in having them tell stories about their lives before it is too late.
But beyond simply declaring a day to record oral histories, it seems to me that — in a time when the nation seems so divided politically and complete strangers seem to be angry at each other because of their different views — we could all benefit by spending a lot more time listening to each other and a lot less time expressing our own views.
If we did we may just discover that we are not as different as we think we are — that we share a lot of the same beliefs and values.
One of the best lessons on listening that I ever received came from an unexpected source: Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.
While delivering Meals on Wheels a decade or so back, I happened to hear a speech Marsalis gave before the National Press Club in Washington. Although he was talking about jazz, the speech was really about listening to others.
Marsalis said that he often visits high schools and colleges, and when he does, the school’s jazz band — if it has one — usually plays for him.
Most of the numbers played by the band feature several soloists. After each performance, Marsalis says he never asks the soloists about their performance. Instead, he asks each soloist to talk about the soloist that went immediately before them.
Almost without exception, Marsalis says the next soloists cannot accurately describe what the instrumentalists who went immediately before them played. That’s because they are concentrating so much on what they have to play next that they lock out what is being played before them, Marsalis said. In other words, they simply do not listen.
Yet, Marsalis insists that until the band members begin listening to each other, they will never function as a unit. Instead, they simply will be a bunch of individuals who happen to be playing the same song.
Well, the same things happens outside of music. In my nearly 40 years of being a professional journalist, I have attended dozens of public meetings where there has been a lot of talking but little listening. People are so busy saying what they came to say that they never bother to listen to what others are saying.
I did not record any oral histories on the National Day of Listening, but my wife and I did spend most of the afternoon and evening listening to each other.
I took a vacation day Friday. I do not usually take my vacations one day at a time, but the year is quickly drawing to an end and some of us here at the newspaper have too many vacation days remaining to take more than one or two days at a time and still keep enough people on the job to produce the newspaper each day.
With both my wife and I free for the day, we decided to “go somewhere.” After much discussion, we took a leisurely drive to Augusta, a beautiful little town along the banks of the Ohio River about 90 miles from Ashland.
My wife and I had a wonderful dinner at a restaurant on the banks of the Ohio River that had opened in 1795, and we enjoyed strolling through the historic downtown.
My wife and I enjoy listening to books when we travel, but we didn’t have any books for this trip. On the way down, we listened to “Science Friday” on NPR, but on the way home, we did something really radical: We turned off the radio and spent two hours actually talking to each other.
And it wasn’t just idle chatter. Well, some of it was, but we also talked about matters of the soul and other serious things. And we listened to each other.
It wasn’t exactly what StoryCorps had in mind when it declared the National Day of Listening, but it was time well spent. If all of us spent more time listening to each other and less time yapping away, I do believe this old world would be a better place.
JOHN CANNON can be reached at jcannon@dailyindependent.com and (606) 326-2649.
