The Seventeen Traditions Read Online Free PDF Page B

on the matters at hand.
    My inclination for listening was a boon during the tens of thousands of miles I covered while hitchhiking. Half a century ago, hitchhiking was far more common—and safer—than it is today, and plenty of cars and trucks stopped to pick me up as I thumbed my way around the country. After a few introductory words, their drivers probably expected me to doze off for the balance of the trip. Instead, I saw every driver as an expert on some subject in his own right—whether he was a bricklayer, teacher, tree surgeon, factory worker, waiter, salesman, or a rug cleaner—and after asking an opening question or two, I just sat back, listened closely, and got a dose of enlightenment about each driver’s life’s skill or passion. My only regret is that I didn’t carry a diary to write down some of the things I heard on these trips; still, what I did learn added up to a free extracurricular education—one that helped me interact with and understand a far broader selection of people than I would ordinarily have encountered as a high school, college, or law student.
    Listening didn’t always mean remaining silent. I learned early that good listening meant asking leading questions, and inserting verbal nudges that would tease out what you were reallyinterested in learning. That early training helped me develop both my interviewing skills, which helped me throughout my career, and my patience in the long, often contentious, question-and-answer periods following my lectures and speeches. After sitting through one of these sessions, some reporters have written about what they call my “remarkable endurance.” To me it has never been a matter of endurance, but rather the fruit of my family’s tradition of listening in an effort to understand where other people were coming from.
    As we grew older, we learned to listen and respond to the arguments of others who disagreed with us. Especially when we were young, Mother and Father made it clear that incessant talking obstructed the mind from receiving new information and improving itself. She encouraged us, in the fullest sense of the phrase, to keep an open mind. “The more you talk, the less you’ll have to say,” she would remind us. “The more you listen, the more sensible will be what you say.”

2.
The Tradition of the Family Table
    T he Wall Street Journal once devoted an entire editorial to the subject of my mother. After another paper ran a story noting that she sometimes sent us off to school with a handful of chickpeas—instead of candy, presumably—and scraped the sugary frosting off of birthday cakes, the Journal took my mother to task for her “puritanical” ways. We did not take exception to my mother’s attitudes toward food; in fact, the cake-scraping eventually became a family joke. For some bizarre reason, though, she evidently got under the skinof the hidebound reactionaries at the Journal. (Maybe they’d just run out of complaints against me.)
    My mother was highly amused by the screed. She was so far ahead of them and their adherents regarding what food is all about. And what it’s all about is not just food. For Mother, the family table was a mosaic of sights, scents, and tastes, of talking and teaching, of health, culture, beauty, history, stimulation, and delight. For Dad, it was a time to pepper us with questions, never thinking for a moment that they might have been over our heads. So what about the leader theory of history? he would ask. Do leaders make changes, or do they largely reflect dynamic pressures on the ground? Or: How did the Treaty of Versailles affect the economic conditions facing a devastated Germany after World War I? Much of our upbringing happened in our compact kitchen—tucked between two pantries in our Winsted home—and at our family table.
    Mother invented a wide variety of recipes, using her own intuition and judgment, the