I have a terrible memory for names.
        A while back, Joan and I were visiting with our friend Carolynn Honor. We had all attended the same church for about 25 years, when we lived in Toronto.
        At one point, Carolyn mentioned that she had the church archives stored in her basement.
        That started us reminiscing. About when the church first realized that history was slipping out of its hands as people died, or moved away. And about a woman who undertook the task of writing a history of the church.
        "What was her name?" I wondered.
        Neither of them could remember.
        "She lived with her daughter and son-law," I said.
        A whole stream of related recollections flooded back. Their house was south of York Mills Road. A bungalow. He was a lawyer. For an oil company. Chaired the industry's joint environmental committee. Gray hair. The whole family had to move out of the city. The daughter was allergic to natural gas. They went up to Haliburton, somewhere, where they heated their house with electricity…
        I could remember everything but their names.

Something goes click
        On the way home, flying across the country high above the clouds, Joan suddenly remembered the daughter's name. But neither of us could remember the archivist's name.
        Three weeks later, as I tapped out something else on my computer, a word that I had typed triggered some associations.
        I got up, walked into our family room, and said to Joan, "Ted Guild."
        She looked puzzled. Then her face cleared. "Yes, she was," she said.
        The conversation would have made no sense at all to anyone but us.
        That's how real conversations happen. They aren't linear or logical. They hop from this to that like a hyperactive bunny.
        When I was going through high school, we had to read a play in English class. "This doesn't make sense," we told our teacher, as we tried to dramatize one scene of dialogue between a husband and his wife. "They're not answering each other. He says something, and what she says back doesn't follow from it."
        "You need to learn to listen," our teacher told us. "That's how people who know each other really well talk to each other. They hear what the other person isn't saying, as well as what they are saying."
        She was right. Once I knew what to listen for, I began to hear the often disjointed but meaningful contact between my parents. I still hear it today, among couples who have long ago settled into a comfortable relationship.

Not listening
        Prayer is supposed to be a conversation too, I'm told. Maybe we don't listen hard enough for what God isn't saying, though.
        During a difficult period in my life, I kept expecting to get a message from God – through some kind of employment opening up. But it didn't happen. Then one day my friend and colleague Peter Gordon White suggested gently, "Maybe the absence of a message IS the message."
        When we listen only for what we want to hear, when we demand straight answers – when we consider prayer answered only if we get that red bicycle, that promotion, that lover, that bonus – maybe we're admitting that we only have a one-way relationship with God.
        Part of the message is what God isn't saying.