I remember a conversation that I had with my mother back when I was in high school and was mourning the fact that all the other girls seemed to know what to do
to make friends. Worse yet, many of them had boyfriends—football players, no less. Mother said, “You know you really have grown up with a handicap because your father doesn’t carry on a conversation. He says what he wants you to know and that’s it.” I wasn’t sure where she was going with this. I knew that my dad was quiet but I didn’t see how it affected me. Then she went on, “Having a conversation is like playing ping-pong. You throw out a thought and the person across from you makes a comment about your comment. When it gets back to you, you add something or ask a question and the other speaker responds. In this family one person speaks until they are done and then someone else talks about what they want to talk about. We don’t play ping-pong.” I can remember thinking, “She’s right!” But I didn’t know how to take it from there.
I still struggle with this handicap but with years of therapy training and living I know that talking and communicating is the start of relationship. Some people find it
easy to talk while others are very guarded in their conversations. It is the person that can open up, share their thoughts, insights, and deepest feelings, that tend to wind up in the relationships that last. Somewhere recently I read that the way to a man’s heart was not through his stomach. What would draw a man close to a woman and hold him there was her ability to be vulnerable. It isn’t thoughts that tie us to one another it is emotions, the sharing of feelings and our deepest needs.
There are some relationships that seem to thrive on an almost unspoken level of communication and an understanding of what makes the partner happy. In my third
book, Hunt the Beloved: to Find a Heart, if I ever get it finished, you will get to read about Tino, my high school sweetheart. Tino was a swarthy American Italian with gorgeous dark brown eyes hidden behind thick glasses. He came with a bad reputation and a bit of a swagger when it was beneficial. But under all that was a boy who could and did share intimate and painful feelings. And he knew what made me tick. One day in the spring he came to pick me up for a date. He is standing at the door to the back porch and he asks, “Are you ready to go?” I spot that he has something behind his back. “Tino, what are you holding back there?” I ask. He pulls out a sweet smelling, single, pink Peony and presents it to me. “Oh, it is so gorgeous, Tino!” I exclaim. “Where did you find it?” He ducked his head slightly and said, “I stole it from the neighbor’s garden. They had a lot of ‘um. They didn’t need this one.” In that moment there were levels and levels of communication.
In a later blog I will write about more of the qualities that are necessary to make a family run smoothly but the first is respect and then communication. When Tino handed me that flower he already knew that I would love it and he also already knew that I would frown on the fact that he stole it, yet he told me the truth just the same. That was the level of respect and communication we had established.
When you read my first book, A Bird and the Dragon: Their Love Story: A Memoir, 
you will find that by the second date Sy, my second husband, shared a very personal fact about himself with me and I was taken aback but also flattered that he trusted me with such personal information so soon in the relationship. It is that level of respect and communication that is necessary to grow a marriage to its full potential. No games. No coy conversations. Just telling things like they are.
And thirty years later when Tino looked me up in the bookstore my husband and I owned, Merlin Books, to tell me that he had cancer of the throat and didn’t know if he would make it through the chemo, nothing in the level of communication or connection had changed. I was leaving the store at the time he arrived so I invited him to step outside with me. As we stood beside my car catching up he finally said, “Jess, please, I have to hold you one more time.” Tino gathered me into his arms and the thirty years dropped away.
As we drew apart I said, “Tino does your wife know you are here?”
“Yes,” he responded. “When I was eating breakfast this morning she looked up at me and said, ‘You are going to find her today?’ I told her yes, and then she said, ‘That’s good, but you are coming home to me tonight!!’”
Tino and I corresponded through his treatments and then I didn’t hear anymore. That was alright. The relationship had been there when he needed it. I learned that he had beaten the cancer and then three months before Sy passed away I learned at a class reunion from Tino’s sister that he had crossed over two years before Sy. His wife passed the following year.
It is not thoughts that hold us together. It is our feelings: emotional ping-pong anyone?
My Little Bird 