A friend of mine called recently to offer Sound as the topic for this column, and since she suggested it, I have been unable to think of little else.
Thinking, after all, is what we humans do—and overdo. We look for patterns, and from these repetitions, we develop expectations of what it means for us to feel safe and comfortable.
Our first stop on the journey of internalizing sounds we consider to be normal is sensing our mother’s heartbeat and voice during gestation, of course. This sound library continues to expand during childhood, and as anyone who has read Aesop’s fable “City Mouse, Country Mouse” can tell you, where we live definitely impacts how we experience the world, and even whether we can sleep when things don’t sound “right.”
It is not news that we are now assaulted by artificially-generated noise, and that many people don ear buds, if for no other reason than to choose the sounds they hear, and drown out the ones that they cannot control.
I smile when I recall from my childhood the bubbling of a coffee percolator, and the sucking sound made by a tube of frozen orange juice concentrate as it flopped into the pitcher, on its way to reconstitution. The clunk of the garage door hitting the floor after it had been pulled down by its rope meant my father was home from work, and the scrape of a metal snow shovel signaled we might have a day off from school—or maybe get to build a fort.
These quaint sounds have been supplanted by others, yet each will become our own children’s and grandchildren’s building blocks of normal.
It is a lot of fun to compare the way things were with the way things are, with the little ones in tow. This dialog is what we used to call The Olden Days, when we were young.
The Olden Days: any era when great memories were made. ©
