Listening

My family is loud. On Christmas or the Fourth of July we might have 20-40 people over, everyone over the age of 20, (which is most of us) are downstairs in the kitchen/dining room/den that encompasses the entirety of the first floor of my house. The younger cousins hang out downstairs playing ping-pong or video games. My Uncles and older cousins stand or sit around the marble island drinking beer. It is the center-point that everyone struggles and jockeys to claim a small bit of counter space as their own. My Aunts all sit around the table with their color-coded wine glasses. My Dad is in the kitchen cooking, an Aunt here or a cousin there flitting in to talk to him. I have to stay close in case he needs something, so it is hard for me to be apart of a conversation. This makes for an ideal listening situation though.

After aiding and abetting my Father for a while with the night's main course I stop outside for a beer and listen to the dulled roar of my family on the other side of the glass. Animated shadows writhe in the yellow light below me as the the occasional car or bus whooshes by in the street and somewhere, not too far off, just faintly I can catch the static droning of the ocean. Shouts of my name inside breach the din and I go back into the roar. Stories and jokes whizz past my head as I make my way pell-mell through the human obstacle course. After my latest drop off with my Father I settle in for some listening; stories about the lives of my parents and their friends in the 70's and 80's, updates on which of my elder cousins are getting engaged or married, where the littler ones are looking at for college. Around the 8x4 island there are a dozen different conversations, nearly all in different times.

I run downstairs and listen to all the lates high school drama, my brother and sister and their friends all flashing each other phones and grins. I think about how recently that was me. Now, at the wizened old age of 20 it is nearly non-sensical, and the parts I do get don't seem to be worth mentioning. Back upstairs my Aunts and Uncles are well into the wine by now and the same seven or eight stories are starting to be re-told. The stories make them want the music that accompanied it, so the drunkest two or three take turns trying to yell at poor Alexa, Brooklyn drawls becoming more pronounced as their teeth turn purple. "Uhlexa, play sum Bob Seegah!" Is the usual ask. I huddle around Alexa, coaxing her to begin the playlist I made for them. Once the music is on the stories of their childhood come out. The one about my grandfather hustling my dad's friends in poker so he could go to the bar for his twice daily sabbatical, or the one about my uncles throwing flower pots at each other after fighting over a girl. And there I am, listening, and loving my family more and more every time.