My Grandma taught me to listen

My grandmother probably noticed how different we were for the first time during our prayers in our old mountain chapel. She used the Lutheran form for the Lord’s prayer, I said it the Catholic way I had learned in the German bonding school, and each time she heard it, she shook her head in annoyance.

A photo shows my grandmother at a young age in her Sunday dress, protected by an apron she wore every day. She was born in 1901 as the daughter of a strict school principal. She grew up in the North of Germany until she was forced to flee during World War I that’s how she ended up in Austria, where she met my Grandfather.

She was almost my age when she took me in. It was right before my 7th birthday when I entered her farm and stayed with her until the day she died.

I often wondered where she got the stamina from to take care of a young child. Now I know we all have it. It’s a mix of love, will, and discipline that gives us strengths beyond what we thought was possible.

In general, she was often disappointed in her granddaughter. She didn’t understand why I never dressed up, why I spoke so flippantly, or why I wasted so much time listening to the ‘crazy monkey music’ on the radio, or on sleeping. The way I dressed irritated her the most. The ‘horse blanket’ a red quilted, Asian-looking jacket I had bought in England during my summer vacation, made her laugh. My first Levis jeans I brought home from boarding school, a trade bargain I had made because a girl needed a tutor, which in boarding school meant that I did her homework, made her frown.

A Late Friendship

Today, at the age of 60, I look back on eleven years of close friendship with my grandmother. Over the years, we discussed life at the old farm table in the kitchen. We rarely agreed. While we were talking, she was drinking coffee or tea, and I was drinking homemade lemonade. The conservative older lady and her granddaughter, who like most teenagers, thought she knew it all.

I often thought, “How can two people think so differently and talk for so long?”

To talk about everything, to ask the right questions, and more precise questions, to question everything, and to share, all this comes from her. My grandma taught me to respect other people’s opinions, she guided me through our talks and made sure that I didn’t end up wasting too much time with polite small talk, that very seldom gets you anywhere.

Later on, as a young adult, I often had the feeling that the men of older generations were simply not interested in my point of view. From more life experience, they derived the right to more speaking time. Older women often disappeared in the kitchen or didn’t get involved in discussions at all. I was disappointed when I wasn’t asked what was going on in my life and how I felt about some things, so I kept my distance and left parties early -I still do.

I recently read that I am not alone in this experience in an essay by John Bowe in the New York Times.  He attests to a “crisis of disconnection” in American society and he also looked for responsibility for this with the younger generations –or rather, with what he thinks they have not learned. Bowe recommends: “So let’s put children together and teach them how to talk, how to listen, and how to be heard, without outbursts, ruptures, and insults.”

I think he is right. During my school time, we had debate teams and we discussed topics. Today I feel most of us don’t know how to talk and listen anymore. Now it’s all about being heard, not about being understood. It’s about talking, not communicating.

I think it is wrong to hold only the young to account but I agree with Bowe on one thing, we should learn to listen to each other again –even if it is often tedious. 

An unequal conversation

My grandmother was a perfect listener. She is the only person I’ve never argued with. Her strength was not the big words, she asked a lot of questions. What do you learn at school? What are you reading right now? How does it make you feel to live with so many other kids? What do you think of Hundertwasser? What’s happening in Germany?

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In conversations about religion, she saw me as a representative of an unbelieving generation. In conversations about love as a representative of a society in which one enjoys freedom, instead of marrying.

She told me she wanted silverware in her coffin and explained to me why. She also told me that I should make sure that my bra and panties always match. When I thought she talked about man and that we now would have THE CONVERSATION, she smiled, “Do it for you, for nobody else but you.”

My grandmother was not a feminist, not a rebel, not a world traveler. She sat in her armchair most of the time in the evening and read Scandinavian crime novels or made her cold-stirred raspberry jam, which she stored in old jars in the cellar. It would have been so easy not to find this reclusive Lutheran-Jew interesting, to dismiss her opinions as dusty.

But she endured our difference in all these things. She wanted to understand how I thought. So I did the same.

Over the years, I learned a lot from a life that was foreign to me. A life in which she hid in basements from American bombs. A life in which she hid in the mountains from the German and Austrian soldiers who were searching for people like her.

A life where there was still a German King and an Austrian emperor.

A life of a widow. A life full of loneliness and hard work, which she forgot for a short time through my visits from school. I often tried to imagine her world. My young grandmother, walked to the next village for over an hour at six o’clock in the morning to work. In photos, she showed me the mailroom, where she was sitting with other telephone operators in a cramped room full of cables after the war. Maybe that’s where she learned to listen.

She showed me pictures of her as a young woman, a bride and I met my grandpa Paul in photographs.

Until the very end, that’s exactly what she wanted – to listen. Even though at some point she couldn’t anymore. “Grandma, do you hear me?” I often said in her last months. She seemed absent-minded like she looked into a future only she could see.

She spent the last two months of her life in a nursing home. Nevertheless, she pushed her walker wildly determined down to the cafeteria, because she refused to eat in the room where she slept.

Toward the end, I stayed with her because I didn’t trust the nursing home to get it right. My grandma was a proud woman, she didn’t like to depend on strangers. We talked a lot, to the very end. “See the world, child,” was one of her last wishes.

We talked, we listened.

To this day, I can’t keep my mouth shut. I still don’t understand the habits of some older people, and neither do I understand everything about the younger generations, but my grandmother’s indomitable will to take an interest in other generations rubbed off on me. I can’t help it!