Silence.
I live
with the noisiest man on the planet. He’s never met a volume control he didn’t
like. He plays his Les Paul or Strat in the garage, all amped up. That doesn’t
bother me much because he’s a great guitarist. But when the plates in the
kitchen cabinets start bouncing to the thump of his buddies’ drums and bass
guitar—that’s where I draw the line.
I stumble
into the garage, flick the light switch off and on, and make the “cut throat”
sign. I flash a Cheshire cat smile. Now that’s tact. Nothing, not even banging on the wall with a meat mallet or setting off the
burglar alarm, works as well.
Flipping
the breaker would be ideal—except that the electrical box is in the garage.
The man
has radios and assorted noisemakers throughout the house, and as he goes from
room to room, he turns one of them on. He never turns one of them off, mind
you, when he leaves a room.
And the
maddening thing is, since I’m now an expert at tuning out, it takes me some
time to realize my house is a jumble of noise. It’s only after I’ve read the
same sentence 15 times without making sense of it, or when I omit nothing from the chocolate cupcakes—except, of course, the chocolate . . . . That’s when I calmly, yet assertively suggest that
he “Turn It Down. Please!”
Now, don’t
get me wrong. This is not an idle gripe. S is also for sweet, which to me is
one of the most important ingredients in that weird concoction called man. The man himself can cook, and he laughs when I whistle. He’s my biggest (6 ft. 5;
240 lb.) fan. He coined the perfect nicknames for our daughters: Paddington,
Bobo, and Squonk. He’s also the world’s largest repository of whale and elephant
jokes.
He’s
sweet. Who wouldn’t love a man like that?
I could
continue, but since this post is supposed to be about silence and I haven’t
gotten to it yet, I’ll just say how grateful I am when it happens. When the man leaves the house, the silence is as refreshing as a juicy slice of watermelon on the
Fourth of July. After I’ve danced around stirring up silence (and dust) in all
the rooms, I run to my desk and let it all fall back down around me.
I write! I
read what I’ve written—out loud—and I write some more. It’s so much fun.
After a while I might even turn on Pandora—on low volume, of course. I read somewhere
that Baroque music was great to get into the state called flow. It works for
me.
Besides, by that time he’s usually pulling into the driveway.
Do you
write best in silence? To music? Or does it matter?
