Silences

The guilty pleasure of a working a day without music.

As we are a retail store, we are of course supposed to keep music playing all day: upbeat but not too loud, targeted to the affluent 35-70 year old demographic, jazz and blues works well enough, or when we can't avoid it, James Taylor. Not too much classical. Classical just doesn't have that toe-tappin' spend-spend-spend rhythm. Usually we just leave the radio on WQRC, "Today's best hits and yesterday's favorites." Yesterday's favorites. No wonder I feel so much older than I am.

But with the snow still coming down and the roads marginal, with less than one customer an hour, who'll notice if I just play...nothing?

A few hours of silence is so refreshing. Even at home there is usually a TV or stereo on somewhere (as much my fault as that of the good folks I live with, of course), so it's kind of ironic that I have to head to work for a stretch of jingle-free living. When we lived farther from our jobs I used to drive with the stereo turned off in the car, tuning in instead to the purr of the engine and the hiss of wind over the frame and pavement under the tires. They weren't soothing nature sounds, by any means, but if we're going to cocoon ourselves in the artificial envronments of our automobiles, why not pay some attention to that world, now and again? In better weather I walk to work now, and am fortunate to be able to spend half of that route in the woods (wind in the leaves, a river under a bridge, a nearby highway), but when I do drive, my morning quiet time is cut down to just a couple of minutes.

The silences in the store are eerie and strange. Wheezy falsetto computer fans, the throatier blasts of forced hot-air heating, the hissing of the plumbed-in atomizers in the humidors, the mini-hurricane of the air-purifiers, the ghost-like rattle of those trucks outside which are loud enough to be heard through the plate-glass window. Fans everywhere, electric motors... when we lose power, that silence startles and refreshes me like cold river water straight off the glacier.

I've started to appreciate silences as a connoisseur appreciates fine wines or cigars. There are different qualities of silence, and I'm learning to savor them all in their place and time.

Think about it. How much time every day do you spend out of earshot of radio and television?

Yours,
Nate