My Secret Vice

“I LIKED it all right, but what was that whole thing at the end?" This is me after most movies, because I just MAY have been talking.Just a little of course, but about almost anything: the popcorn I spilled when I fumbled the giant-sized tub that’s as big as your chest, or the raw carrots I slipped into my back pocket that were now digging painfully into my backside. Or maybe I was asking my friend beside me, “IS THAT THE GUY? Isn’t that the same guy from the beginning?”That person generally just stares straight ahead, like a man waiting for a bus. This talking when I shouldn't be talking: it's been a problem for me in life.I talked to my best friend all through worship services when I was 12. Who wouldn’t talk, with the whole parade of humanity passing by? How funny they all looked to me!But then everything is funny when you’re 12.  And I just wanted to share the joke.This ‘sharing’ started when I was in Second Grade at the nun’s school where I whispered so much in class that one day Sister Mary Suffering went red in the face, shouted that I was expelled and put me out, all alone to wait for my mother, at the remote edge of the convent property.There I stood by the box of textbooks she also put out with me, because in Catholic school you have to buy your books. When you go, the books go.“What will I do NOW?” I’m too little to get a job!” That was my first thought standing out there as the El screeched by overhead.My second thought: “Mom is going to lift Sister Mary Suffering clean off the ground for this.” And so she did, or almost did.My mother was 50. I was seven. And poor Sister Mary Suffering was barely 20, with scant experience in the classroom.“You EXPEL a child for talking?” Mo=m bit each word hard as it left her mouth. “Don’t you know that a child who is talking is a child who is bored?” And so on.Poor Sister Suffering; she wasn’t our teacher anymore after that. We were told she had gone away for a rest somewhere.So I was off the hook for that crime anyway.It was different later when I got all those detentions for whispering in 7th grade: detentions and punishments like having to write "I will not talk in class" ten thousand times. And one memorable demerit which made me feel so ashamed.Luckily, I grew up. I became a teacher myself and so got to talk for a living. Hurrah!Then I turned to writing and tending babies and things got quiet for a while - until I began getting asked to give funny speeches and even workshops.More talking! Double Hurrah! It was such fun making people laugh. Seeing them come alive like that.I did this for three decades, and then…Almost overnight…I went quiet.I’m quiet still.Used to be, in book groups or at community board meetings I talked my head off. Now I say hardly a word.It’s not that that I’m sleepy, or that that I have no ideas. It’s certainly not that I’m uninterested in what’s being said.It’s just that all these year in, I find I would rather hear what others have to say than talk myself.All these years of being in “Transmit,” I am finally, gratefully, on “Receive.”Respite for all!