Tuesday, September 14, 2004
The Oh-so-Strange Sensitivity Factor. Living on a main street for fifteen years, one adapts in one's own way to the incessant sound of cars driving by at 30-mph-plus speeds 24/7, 365 days a year. There are all kinds of tricks people on main roads try. They plant evergreen hedges, erect fences, install triple-pane glass windows, and insulate their walls; but at the end of the day nothing really helps. If you go out to your garden to entertain, you have a main street's worth of traffic and all of the deafening noise that goes with it on your dinner plate. And sadly all the Martha Stewart ambiance you might want to conjure up for the evening can't make the bad noise go away....
The exception to all of this is of course children who have grown up on a main street e.g. our kids. They simply never heard the noise we complained about for years.
Now that we live on a quiet street, sound takes on new meaning. And how quickly doth the body change its sensibilities! Take the computer fan, for instance. In our old house it served as 'white noise.' To some extent it drowned out the un-rhythmic whoosh of a car or truck going by every few seconds or minutes. But now I hear the fan and it is a noise that absolutely has to be turned off before I go to bed. Now the occasional car that drives up our road is an event that makes you look up from your work. The soon-to-be replaced refrigerator is noisy but never a noise I noticed in the old house.
And now the quantum leap to politics... 1,000 soldiers-plus dead in Iraq and a constant onslaught of media spin and I find myself feeling a bit like the person who grew up in the house next to the train station....
The exception to all of this is of course children who have grown up on a main street e.g. our kids. They simply never heard the noise we complained about for years.
Now that we live on a quiet street, sound takes on new meaning. And how quickly doth the body change its sensibilities! Take the computer fan, for instance. In our old house it served as 'white noise.' To some extent it drowned out the un-rhythmic whoosh of a car or truck going by every few seconds or minutes. But now I hear the fan and it is a noise that absolutely has to be turned off before I go to bed. Now the occasional car that drives up our road is an event that makes you look up from your work. The soon-to-be replaced refrigerator is noisy but never a noise I noticed in the old house.
And now the quantum leap to politics... 1,000 soldiers-plus dead in Iraq and a constant onslaught of media spin and I find myself feeling a bit like the person who grew up in the house next to the train station....
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