The Honeymooners
A scene from a Hollywood classic? No, it's only Mom and Dad.
On September 27, 1952, a young couple from Lima, Ohio boarded a Pennsylvania Railroad Company train bound for Chicago to celebrate their honeymoon. Mature enough to marry yet still literal teenagers, the 19-year-old newlyweds must have felt very grown up as they sped toward the big city. They had reservations for seven nights at the upscale Conrad Hilton on Michigan Avenue, from where they would be free to set forth and explore any Windy City attractions that caught their fancy.
Back then, they were just Frank and Jackie, she an only child and he the youngest of six. In less than four years, they would be the parents of two toddler girls and two newborn twin boys. Their productivity would decrease with the birth of just one more son at the end of a further four years. Then, like a surprising afterthought, they would add yet another boy eight years later. Little did they know in 1952 how short-lived and unique was the whirlwind freedom they were to experience on honeymoon in Chicago. Soon they would no longer be just Frank and Jackie; they would adopt the permanent monikers of Mom and Dad, and as those are the names by which I have always known them, that is how I shall refer to them here.
Cold Call Curmudgeon
Some thirty years ago or so, long before the establishment of "do not call" phone registries, I was taught by my parents how to respond to unwanted contact from telemarketers. The moment I realized I was on the other end of a sales pitch or consumer questionnaire, I was to interrupt the speaker by stating, "I'm sorry, but we do not accept solicitation calls." Then I was to hang up without bothering to use the polite formalities we would extend to all other callers.
Their strategy was a revelation to me, as up to that point I had always felt obligated to wait until whomever was speaking to me came to a pause before I interjected any sort of response. Furthermore, I had naively assumed that I was required by the laws of general politeness to hear out a caller and respond to all questions until the conversation was logically exhausted. I certainly didn't want to be rude. The very idea that I could simply cut off phone solicitors was liberating, and my conscience was unshackled by the realization that my right to be left alone superseded the demands of telemarketers.
Alice in Limaland
"We kept getting jostled from all the kids dancing with wild abandon."
This Monday will be the tenth anniversary of one of the most improbable and unusual adventures experienced by my parents, and I am the one to blame. By the time it was all over, our quirky story had been covered twice by the local newspaper. Mom and Dad became small-town celebrities for a brief time, recounting the incident for everyone from fellow church parishioners to Dad's doctor. They came across favorably as loving parents who gamely went along with a bit of outrageousness solely to indulge their youngest son. I was 32 at the time; they were 67.
The story began more than 20 years earlier, though none of us could have known that at the time. Who would have thought that a few nonchalantly expressed words from my father would have such a long-range impact? Who could have foreseen how the longevity and vicissitudes of an aging rock star's career would one day illuminate those forgotten words with the intensity of an enticing marquee? But that is what happened, and Dad saw to it that he was a man of his word, even if it meant fulfilling a casual promise decades later.
Noise
Thomas Edison is said to have been unfazed by his hearing impairment, which worsened as he aged. In fact, the great inventor apparently saw the bright side of limited audio input. It freed him from distracting sounds that might otherwise have broken his concentration or interrupted his sleep. Who knows how the course of technological history might have changed had the Wizard of Menlo Park possessed perfect hearing? Perhaps Edison might have added noise-cancelling headphones to his extraordinary roster of patents.
How ironic that the man who brought us the phonograph should have been easily distracted by extraneous noises. Were he able to walk among us today, he would find that his invention has spawned an incessant cacophony of disembodied voices and music, a commercial din that is nearly impossible for us to avoid. But the sounds that are broadcast and replayed all around us represent only one segment of our aural environment. Contemporaries and successors of Edison have given us the throbbing hum of gasoline engines, the clicking and whirring of hard drives and computer fans, the buzzing of fluorescent lights, and the annoying high-frequency standby pitch of many electronic devices. I appreciate the technology, but I could do without the noise.