Song of Silence

I’ve tried, without success, to institute a “one source of noise in a room at a time” rule in my house. This rule comes from my middle age onset disability – the inability to bear chaotic noise, defined generally as “more than one non-harmonic sound at a time.” I don’t mind the sound of most television shows, and goodness knows I love the sound of my children’s voices, but if they are talking with the television on, it is like my addled brain can’t handle the competition of two completely different sound waves trying to squirm into my head. In the car, we can listen to the radio, or we can talk. Not both. If both happen, I swear to you that you can hear the gears in my brain grinding to a halt. The sounds, which seem random, come into my ears each like a little hammer, as if my ear canal was being pelted with birdshot.

I’ve gotten so bad, that I cannot bear the flipping of TV channels, a habit of all the people of the male gender in my family, or the flipping of radio stations, a habit of everyone I’m related to, except my parents who these days keep their car radio exclusively tuned to the XM Elvis station.

In the car, my kids love listening to lousy, generic, auto-tuned pop music. Which I can handle, for the most part. Apparently, everyone else likes to listen to this mess, because there are forty thousand Atlanta radio station clones that play this music, and an equal number of XM channels. Whenever we are in the car, the kids will fight over who gets to sit shotgun, because whoever sits shotgun controls the radio. They flip stations until they find the last few bars of a song they like, decide they don’t like the next song, and flip flip flip until they get to the middle/end of the next song they like. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the beginning of a song, except a song they don’t like, because heaven forbid a radio station should play two songs in a row that my kids like – not that I can even tell most of the songs apart, but apparently there is some big qualitative difference between the electronic beeps and boops that Matters Greatly. I have started limiting the number of “flips” per car ride. Ten per short ride, twenty for longer. Sometimes, if I’m feeling large, I will give the child in the back seat two ‘veto flips.’ Rarely does this number of flips even get us out of the driveway.

I don’t know exactly how I lost control like this. When I was a kid, I listened to thousands of hours of AM sports talk radio in the car, because my Dad was usually driving, and it was his car, and we could just suck it up until we bought our own cars. Sometimes we’d have to listen to the Mets game, or maybe the Jets game, punctuated by my Dad yelling colorful advice at the radio. Once in a while it would be 1010 WINS news – “You Give Us 22 Minutes, We’ll Give You The World.”

So I sucked it up, and worked hard in school, and got a good job, and now I own a car with a good radio, and somehow still I only listen to what I want to listen to when I am alone in the car. Often I want to listen to nothing piped in – the hum of the tires on the pavement and the rhythmic bumps in the road are usually enough for me. The song and sounds of silence is one of my favorites. Both the Simon & Garfunkel version, and the literal one.

The truth is that it is never silent. You can always hear traffic noises, or airplanes, or the icemaker in the freezer, or the climate control system, or even bugs and frogs and birds and other critters if you are outdoors away from other people. If it is quiet enough, sometimes I can even hear my own heartbeat. Most often, though, I hear the shouting in my head. There’s a lot of shouting and chaos in my head as thoughts and information clang up against each other. I think of it like a filing system. Every piece of input is like a piece of paper flying around in there. I picture the neurons, which look like creepy disembodied hands with skinny wrists if you have some imagination, filing all that information into neat places so I can retrieve it later when I need it. Useless stuff gets metaphorically shredded. I guess as I am aging the neuron-hands are either less efficient or less plentiful, and if too many pieces of information are flying at them from too many different directions, the whole system just shuts down and the emergency siren blares. When that happens, I just want to sit in the corner with my eyes shut and rock back and forth until the noise dies down. In actuality, I may close my eyes to block out at least one form of input, but mostly I just smile and soldier on, because this is a pretty noisy world and if you want to survive in it you have to deal with it.

Really, for maximum efficiency, I need to get in there myself and go through the filing cabinets to see what is in there and reorganize from time to time. It’s the only way I can make sense of any of it. The older I get, and the more archives are in there, the longer it takes.

So how about this: for just a few moments every day, let’s all be quiet. No noise, no talking, no radio, no outside input. Starting … now.

Lori B. Duff is the author of the Amazon ‘Hot New Release’ Mismatched Shoes and Upside Down Pizza, a collection of autobiographical humor essays. You can follow her on Twitter at @LoriBDuff and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/loribduffauthor. For more updates and the latest information on Lori and her writing, please visit www.loriduffwrites.com