Relevance

My father was the product of a generation that didn’t put a premium on men being close and connected to their children. It was a different era. His focus was being the protector and provider for the family, and he did that job exceedingly well.

My father was preoccupied, reserved, and seemingly indifferent. He was an exceptionally busy man, pulled in many different directions, being asked for help from all kinds of people and organizations. I shouldn’t be surprised that involuntarily he was who he was because of the world that engulfed him.

I never doubted his love for me. That was a given for his entire life. He supported me the best he knew how – attending my school and church activities, celebrating my birthday and other milestones, giving generously at Christmas, being present when his hectic schedule allowed.

Yet, our worlds were different. His world was intellectual and physical. He excelled at the practice of law. He was an outdoorsman when he was younger, and when he was older he delighted in cutting wood for his fireplace. He was an avid sports fan, especially when it came to the Iowa Hawkeye football team, of which he was a member when he was in college.

My adolescent world was tiny by comparison. As a boy it didn’t overlap at all with his. I didn’t share his interests. Unlike my two brothers, I didn’t like killing animals or shooting a shotgun, and I had very little interest in sports. The distinctive world I carved out for myself was more introverted, focused on music, books, the arts, contemplation, and later history and theology.

The distance that existed between my father and me when I was just a boy later morphed into the grownup version. Year after year our conversations seldom entertained subjects that originated somewhere in my life – my job, my opinions, my stories, my family, my future. These parts of my life weren’t unimportant to him. On the contrary, I believe my life and all it held meant more to him than did his own. Yet, he didn’t know how to poke and prod another human being to listen and learn. As an attorney, he spent most of his life telling other people what to do with the problems they faced, and he spent none of his life telling anyone about any of the problems he faced.

It didn’t take long for me to understand that if I were going to have a conversation with my father that went beyond superficial greetings and dispensable chit-chat, I would have to probe him with questions about his law practice, requests to retell his stories, and inquiries into his opinions about current events. A sure barn burner of a topic was cropland drainage on which he was reputed to be the state’s leading expert. He had been involved in drafting the state’s long and complex statute on the matter and for that he became known as Mr. Drainage. He never shied away from admitting that even the likes of the state attorney general and the governor routinely deferred to him when it came to this topic.

I was not an attorney and I didn’t have much interest in learning about the peculiarities of drainage law, but when we were together I never failed to initiate a question about his current issues or litigation. With the smallest of prompts my father could embark upon a one-man show detailing step by step every single facet of a particular case. My interest was not held by the facts he recited but by his liveliness in the storytelling and by his confidence in the correctness of his interpretation of the law. All I had to do was listen carefully enough to keep asking questions, and for him those questions were like logs on the fire.

I had to do the same kind of connecting with my grandmother. We’d been born in different centuries and into different worlds. She was twelve years old when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were killed in Bolivia. Sixty-one years later I was twelve and watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. When she was a grandmother, she still called her refrigerator the icebox and could vividly remember the delivery man lugging a block of ice on his back up the walk and into the house. Our worlds didn’t intersect except for the fact we lived only one block from each other.

The age difference between us didn’t deter me from spending time with her, sometimes eating lunch together in her breakfast nook – a lunch of fried Spam and potatoes with Bubble-Up and an Eskimo Pie for dessert – or sometimes sitting in wicker chairs in her front parlor watching the traffic go by. It didn’t really matter where we were so long as I could get her to tell me stories of what it was like to live in a bygone era. It seemed like ancient history to me – hearing about horse-drawn trolley cars, train travel, wood-burning stoves, and mud roads. I asked questions and she talked and talked, just like my father would do later in my life.

I did the very same thing with my father-in-law. Here was a man who had grown up in poverty during the Depression, finished the eighth grade in school, served in the Philippines during the war, and farmed until his death. He and I shared nothing in common and had no mutual interests. I was a Republican and he was a Democrat. I was an evangelical and he was not. This meant that if there were going to be any discourse between us the responsibility was mine to ask him questions about his life, and he loved nothing more than questions about his time in the army during World War II. Not surprisingly, over the decades that I knew him, I heard the same war stories over and over again.

Eventually everyone becomes irrelevant when they become older and contemporary culture moves too far beyond their everyday experience. My father-in-law never asked me anything about anything, and my grandmother wasn’t much better. The same was almost as true for my father. It was easier for them to relive their past than it was to learn about my present. It was easier for me to ask them questions about their lives than it was for me to explain much about my life to someone whose interest was difficult to gauge.

The truth of elder irrelevance hit me painfully one day when my then enfeebled father came to visit. Some collection of the family was present outside in two separate conversation clusters. One group circled up towards the south end of our house while the other gathered farther east into the backyard. At some point I glanced towards the house and saw my father sitting alone by the backdoor. No one was even close to him. I felt sudden sadness as I realized my father had nothing to say to any of us. There weren’t any new stories because by then he had retired from the law practice. Perhaps we assumed his opinions about the world didn’t matter anymore because he was too old to relate or understand. We all got up and regrouped around him even though we were at a loss at finding something to talk about or something meaningful to ask him.

A few years ago, three of our children and son-in-law joined my wife and me at the dining room table to enjoy a big dinner she had prepared. Not long into the meal the four young people began to banter among themselves on topics about which my wife and I knew nothing. They told jokes about people and events that were foreign to us. They threw out one-liners from movies we hadn’t seen. They sang lyrics from songs we’d never heard. They were laughing at all kinds of things while my wife and I were in a polite state of bewilderment. All six of us were at the same table but my wife and I were culturally absent. At that moment I realized I had begun being irrelevant to my children.

With my father, grandmother, and father-in-law, I put in the work to make them feel relevant far into the nightfall of their lives. Sure, that exertion became more determined as they grew older and were less connected to modern society. Yet, I wasn’t pretending they had significance even as I listened to stories I had heard before or regarded opinions with which I didn’t agree. My listening made them relevant. It was my responsibility to mine the gold they had to offer and to make it mine.

Most of the people in my small-world orbit don’t have to listen to me because they don’t ask me anything. That indifference may reflect the relational superficiality that pervades a culture obsessed with scrolling its way through social media. Or a society where interpersonal engagement lasts only seconds. The less we know about each other diminishes the need to ask those awkward questions about the deeper strands of life. And since depth carries with it the requirement for greater commitment, time for which we don’t have, to say nothing of heartfelt curiosity, it’s best to remain shallow and evasive.

Consider the friend who is the anomaly. He never takes I’m fine as the final answer. He searches until he’s satisfied the artful dodger has answered honestly. And then he hunts some more to give him standing to listen intentionally. In a culture where the loudest voice is the most valued, he prefers the muzzling needed to hear and understand. In a world where the debate is more important than the endpoint, he grapples to gain insight rather than to score points or prove he’s a worthy opponent. When everyone is right and no one stops to wonder how or why, he takes the time to ask questions and ponder. And in a climate where every position is an offense, he’s adept in the art of differing politely.

I suppose I could say I acquired a listening ear growing up at family suppertime, a ritual which was of paramount importance well into high school. As a young boy my job was to listen to my parents and older siblings talk about their worlds, and ask questions when needed. My father was a man full of stories. Through the listening I learned about values and convictions, about morals and meaning, about living well and giving, striving, and winning. I could not have conceived at that young age that my father would someday become irrelevant to anyone. Yet, that is what happens when we stop listening to someone, when we stop asking questions of another, when we start thinking that other person, though altogether alive, is so out-of-step with life that he is as good as dead to us.

What happens to relevance when the person no longer speaks very well? Where’s the listening when there are no questions that can be answered quickly or cogently? Does that person who can’t interact to our expectations become unconnected from worth? Or is that out-of-reach person like a precious metal – having natural value based not on utility or function but on simple existence? The presence of the human soul, even without the ready outlets of emotion, speech, or action, is its own preciousness. When the eyes of that soul look at me it’s as though they’re saying I am not who I used to be, but I am what I am, and I am all I can be. Surely that is enough life with which to bond and learn. Whether elderly or infant, whether fully alive or barely aware, whether in the present or lost in another time, relevance is found by the seeker who makes the effort to see what had been hidden only one moment before.