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“Let’s go have a good day,” was the last thing I heard my wife say before I heard her scream. We were planning on a Saturday afternoon of adventure, our 3-year-old son in tow. But life had other plans. She received the news that her father, who had been in hospice for quite some time, passed away.
You can know someone is near the end of their life, but you can never prepare for losing them. Such was the case for Jeffrey Sherman, a West Coast dharma bum living a hillbilly lifestyle in the Ozark Mountains.
When I first met him, my wife told me he respects a strong handshake. He was 66 at the time, long-haired and lanky. We sat at a pizza joint in Rogers and talked about the stuff you aren’t supposed to talk about in polite conversation: Politics. Jeff was never afraid to tell you what he thought. Better than that, he was never afraid to hear what you thought, even if he disagreed. That was the timely lesson he taught me. We live in a world of anonymous know-it-alls, closed to all discussion and all ideas that don’t fit their predefined world view.
We should all strive to listen like Jeff. If you just nodded your head and agreed, but failed to turn your eyes inward at your own ability to hear your fellow humans, then you must strive to listen like Jeff. If you believe there is no wiggle room between the right and the left, then you must strive to listen like Jeff. If you think “I’m right, and they’re wrong,” then you must do whatever it takes to learn to listen like Jeff.
Countless times, I busied myself by noodling a guitar in the corner of his home, or out on the porch while he sucked down another cigarette or slurped coffee. If I stopped playing, he’d turn to me.
“Play that thing,” he’d say. Jeff was listening.
Once, after listening to me improvise to a jazz backing track, he plopped down next to me. “I kept hearing this music, I thought it was coming from the T.V., but I look over and it was you. I kept thinking, ‘That sounds pretty good!’” Jeff was listening.
I heard him countless times on the phone with his daughter, my wife, her telling him about her life in Russellville, her life with me, about our kids and our dogs, telling him her worries and troubleshooting mechanical problems around the house. Jeff was listening.
At night, when my wife is muttering his name from her craft workspace in our bedroom or in our prayers before bedtime, I have to believe he’s still listening.
I’m listening, too. I hope you are, as well. To everyone. And everything. It is so important.
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A version of this post was previously published on CourierNews.com and is republished here with permission from the author.
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