 |
| Contradicting the title (There is no quiet!), a solo turkey walks across a park meadow with a tree backdrop |
I’m quoting Ovid as the title to today’s post, and as a descriptor of today’s experience. Truly, truly, “There is no quiet, no silence anywhere within!”
Silence is golden, or so the adage goes. But does that really hold? Maybe not so much on a holiday day! The Thanksgiving holiday for us is combined this year with a 90th birthday celebration for Grandpa Jack, our “walking talking medical miracle” who had had a whole host of reasons that walking around for a birthday party event is truly cause for celebration.
With 4 kids in each of two families and 2 in another – TEN children -- plus all (and I do mean ALL) of the adults, we have a whole array of stimulating wave-forms going on in a relatively small livingroom-dining room area. 86 decibels worth, on average. Yikes!
As is typical, I have grabbed my corner, and I expect that the seltzer water cans will pile up with me over the next several hours. The twins and the dog are doing something involving going in and out of the sliding door, there’s laughter in the kitchen and a bunch of bossy instructions about how better to do things, and the alcohol is abundant. Prosecco comes by the case in my in-laws’ household.
You can probably predict the noise of the TV, and the almost-drowned-out conversations, and the quick volunteerism of taking out the trash. Outside, the volume is diminished, the sheer chaos of the landscape shifting out toward calm.
And yet, to have quiet and silence on a celebration would be at odds with the spirit of the day. The noise – the energy, the conversations, the out-talking, out-competing, and out-maneuvering – IS the point of the gathering. Because that noise causes memories.
Sound is the substrate for recollection. Just like the clink of glasses reminds of a former toast, the iPad a source of merry memories, or the snickering of cousins suggest that the cheating (ahem) just got out of hand in that game of Monopoly, sounds are Proustian prompts to our remembrances of yesteryear.
So us? We will look back and remember that Susan won the temperature battle on cooking the dressing, and that Griffin was feeding the Molly the Dog tidbits under the table, and that Ray and Rachel had stories of the city to share, and that Grandpa fell asleep during the football game. And that the singing and icecream cake woke him for another round of happy togetherness.
And our memories will be good.
My wish for all of you who celebrate:
May the noise and energy of your holidays echo in your memories for years to come.!
REFERENCE
Ovid Metamorphoses, vol. 2, transl. Frank Justus Miller, The Loeb Classical Library (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926): vol. 2, pp. 184-185.
