I sat on the deck enjoying the last of the day’s warmth while I sipped a glass of wine. The lake was calm with small ripples and was quiet with the exception of the sounds of duck feet skittering across the surface as they landed.
I enjoyed the solitude until it ended.
My reverie was disturbed by the very abrupt and loud sound of a saw starting up. It was not a chain shaw, but one of those with the round blades. It fired up and then went off. Then I heard an aged woman’s accented voice:
“Why did you turn it on already, Carlo?” she asked.
It was the female half of the elderly Italian couple who live across the lake.
“Just to see if it was working.” Carlo replied.
“Oh, I see. Well I wasn’t ready for your help yet. You’ve come out too soon.”
“Well you said you wanted to get started on it,” he replied.
They bantered back and forth and I could hear every word. It is not uncommon for me to hear one of the lake neighborhood’s founding couples conversing. I’m told they are in their 80’s, and both are hard of hearing. And because they also had the saw on, they were speaking even louder.
I heard her give him heck for pulling at the boards in a way she clearly deemed incorrect.
“We need to work together!” she chastised but he just mumbled and fired up the saw while she started to say something else.
Next I heard her telling him to be careful of his knee and he barked he was fine and was always careful. Back and forth it went until she reprimanded him further:
“I don’t want to hear you swear like that.”
“I don’t swear!” he shot back.
“Well, what do you call it when you say those words then?” she asked.
“Which words?”
“Well I don’t want to REPEAT them” she barked.
“Then he said something in Italian which I didn’t catch but I assume was something like ‘you’re making it up’, (but probably less polite,) because then she fired back in a louder angry voice,
“Bastard. That’s what you said.”
“Oh. Did I? Ok, yes, well…” and he trailed off.
They continued to saw and move wood and every time he stopped, she repeated that he had made the task that much more difficult because he had come out before she was ready.
“I didn’t call you yet” she said. “But you came out on your own, so whose fault is that?!”
The saw went on and he grumbled a reply I couldn’t discern. (The saw paused…)
“Ok! Well don’t tell me! That’s why I didn’t want you to come out until I called you….” (The saw switched on again…)
“You didn’t wait for me to call you and that just makes it harder for both of us. It seems like I’m not helping because I have to do this stuff over here and so I can’t be over there holding the wood for you. And it’s dangerous. You could hurt your knee.”
“I’m not going to hurt my knee!” He retorted. “I’m being careful. I don’t need you to hold it.”
After about the fourth time of her tirade about him having come out before she was ready, he relented, “Ok, My Love. Ok.”
The ‘My Love’ caught me off guard and struck me as a sweet capitulation. But the tender moment didn’t last.
I suddenly heard the sound of a massive crash and a barrage of angry sounding words in Italian from both of them and then I could hear her tell him to just go inside and let her do it. The sound of him stomping inside was punctuated by the sound of a door slamming.
It went suddenly quiet and I was grateful because until that point I had been failing miserably at ignoring them.
I thought back to a scene in a tv show I had just seen which depicted a family argument around the breakfast table, and the father was deaf so as the mother and teenage kids yelled back and forth at each other, they also aggressively signed.
I chuckled because it was comical to see three hearing people simultaneously yelling and signing while the deaf father chose to stay hidden behind his newspaper. And even though the father wasn’t ‘listening’ as he wasn’t looking at them signing, they all continued as was clearly their habit to always sign and speak simultaneously. I thought that was so amazing, and it also dawned on me that deaf people can entirely ignore someone simply by not looking at them.
I haven’t known any deaf people and I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in continual silence. I wouldn’t want to give up any of my senses but the more I contemplate it, the more I value my hearing.
If I lost my hearing, not only would I miss the dulcet tones of my Italian neighbors conversing (wink, wink), but I would miss all the actual JOYS that come in the form of sounds. If I could never smell bread baking, or heavenly scented flowers, or the warm sweet head of a baby it would be an immense loss, but to lose the ability to hear birdsong and joy and laughter, and MUSIC?!? Losing music would be deeply life affecting for me.
I’m not a musician or any kind of an audiophile but I am madly passionate about music. I think listening to music is one of my biggest and certainly healthiest coping strategies, even if it occasionally is to the annoyance of others.
Now that I live outside of town (on a small lake in the country), I have a ‘drive to town’ which I say to myself in a Texan accent because it seems fitting in that context and because I love accents…which is something else I wouldn’t get to enjoy if I couldn’t hear, but I digress…
Anyway, my drive to town is on a winding pretty country road and I always listen to music. Like so many people, I love listening to music in the car because it’s an amazing acoustic chamber.
The other day I was driving home and when I turned off the highway, I had to stop at a light. A truck stopped beside me and I had the feeling of being observed. I had the top down, the music was on, and my son’s dog sat in the passenger seat looking generally pleased with the state of affairs. The truck beside me crept forward and the driver leaned out his open window and said,
“That’s a great song. It sure looks a lot more fun in your car, my son thinks.” (The song was Iko Iko featuring Small Jam.)
And it’s so true that music goes so far to create an environment. Music can really make a movie and we are all familiar with those montage scenes when clips of usually some kind of work or activity is set to uplifting music. The Top Gun, Footloose and Flashdance movies all used music to such amazing effect that so many of us see scenes from those movies in our heads when we hear the music from those films.
Music makes most things better….it sets the tone in almost any scenario, and can be inspiring when exercising or doing many kinds of work. And as many scenarios as there are made better by music, there are kinds of music from which to choose.
I love music with good bass and when I was pregnant I used to play it a little louder than usual in my car to try and maximize my enjoyment before I had a baby and thought I should no longer do that. I would love the feeling of the thumping stereo reverberating through my body.
I think, however, all I did was instil a deep love of music in all three of them in utero. They are all crazy about music and two of them write their own and sing.
Musical enjoyment is very personal though and one person’s taste is not for everyone and as innocuous as it hopefully usually is, sometimes it can go wrong.
A few years ago I had a studio in a building that came with an underground parking spot. I would pull into the down ramp and have to wait 30 seconds or so until the gate opened. I never sped down the ramp and was surprised one day to see in my mirrors, the building manager running down the ramp behind me.
My car had darkened windows so she couldn’t see inside. I parked and got out as she ran up.
“CARTER!?! That was YOU?!?”
‘Uh, that was me who what?’, I thought, but said,
“That was me driving in? Yes.” Had I run over a basket of kittens without realizing? I had no idea what the problem was.
“OH!!! So that was YOU playing that music?!?!”…she asked sounding incredulous.
“Ummm, Yes….” and at this point it dawned on me that maybe my music had been a bit loud.
“Oh Carter! It’s SO LOUD!!!! I had NO idea that was YOU!?!”, she continued, her doubt still palpable:
“When you stop at the key pad to buzz the gate open, the bass in your music rattles ALL the windows on the WHOLE FIRST LEVEL!!!!! They ALL shake and rattle!!!!! I MUST ask you to turn it off when you come and go. Someone told me it was a darkened out, dark colored Land Rover so I gave the lovely young man in 603 a lecture but his car is light green and that explains why he was totally confused. I never imagined it could have been YOU!?!”
Hahaha. I found that whole scenario hilarious. It really appealed to my sense of humor that I am clearly regarded as such a goodie two shoes that even the cranky building manager couldn’t believe I could behave ‘so badly’. And for that, I’m a little mortified, but mostly proud. When I relayed the story to the kids, Georgia giggled and said,
“Wow, Mom, you are such a baddie…”
Thankfully, I’ve mostly moved on from the gangster rap vibe. This is relief to all, not just my kids, and is especially good now that I’ve got a car with no roof. Now I usually have something more sedate playing.
But a few days ago, on the way to dance class, I was driving and went past a lady weeding at the side of the road, and as I drove by, she shook her hands in the classic ‘you-crazy-kids fist shaking hand gesture’ and as I looked in the rear view mirror she covered her ears with her hands and made a face.
HAHAAAAAA. I had to laugh again. It has been a number of years since my last incident of getting ‘in trouble’ for having my music on too loudly, and those years have been some hard ones so I decided to take it as a good sign.
I was further amused by the fact that I was listening to a song (with fantastic lyrics as an aside) called “Bad Child”. (Video here.)
So you can be a bad child at any age but I guess I should turn my music down a bit. I know the saying ‘Dance like nobody’s watching’, but i guess that’s different than ‘Listen to music as if no one can hear it’.
As I pondered this. I heard Carlo’s voice again. I looked across the lake and could see him standing at their bedroom window, with it open and him leaning sightly out. His wife was still below working on the job of organizing the wood.
“Coco!” he called.
No answer…Just the sounds of wood planks getting shifted around.
“COCO!”
“Are you calling me?” she called out at the same time so neither could hear the other. Then she added,
“I can’t hear you,” at the same time he called her a third time and added
“Can you hear me…?
Silence. Then he tried again: “COCO-OHHHHHH’
Then I heard her voice in a very slow and very grumpy tone reply:
“WHAT……DO……YOU……NEED?…….I……CANNOT……HEAR…..YOU….”
“I need the Detol, Coco….Where is the DETOL?…”
Then her reply:
“The WHAT?!?!………I can’t HEARRRRR you!!!!!…..OK…..I’M…..COMING…..”
(And then she lowered her voice, presumably to a level she thought he couldn’t detect, but still loud enough so I could hear her grumbling about how if he had just waited to come out when she was ready then it would have been SO much easier for both of them.)
She disappeared into the house and wasn’t gone long before she reemerged and I heard a third voice enter…(from stage right). It was Kenn, another neighbour, who lives directly across the lake from me.
“Hi Doris. Just thought I would pop over and see if you could use a little help.”
“Oh, Kenn!….Hello! Well that is very kind. We were just trying to tidy up the wood pile here but Carlo came out before….”
But Kenn cut her off:
“Before you were ready?…. Yahhhh. So we gathered….”
HAHAHAAAAAAA omigosh, nicely played, Kenn, nicely played.
I couldn’t help but chuckle watching this unfold because as side-by-side neighbors Kenn and ‘Coco’ and Carlo couldn’t see each other, but from across the tiny lake I could see and HEAR them both.
I just had to smile and find the amusement in the humanity of it all.
So three cheers for our ears! May we all be thankful to hear!!!…..Even things which we may prefer not to!