Memories – Mount St. Helens

I was in fourth grade in the spring of 1980.  Mount St. Helens was the big story.  My class followed the volcanic rumblings in the pages of the Weekly Reader, but – frankly – that wasn’t enough.  Things were happening very fast.  My teacher – Miss Lewis – said we should all watch the news on television so we could discuss Mount St. Helens in class.

I sat with my dad in the family room and watched the reports from ABC News.  Two things stuck in my brain.  I remember the scientists studying the mountain weren’t dressed like scientists.  They didn’t wear white coats, just T-shirts and shorts and tennis shoes.  As the area around Mount St. Helens was evacuated, some people refused to leave.  I remember one old guy who didn’t go was named Harry Truman (no, not that Harry Truman; he was a different one).

The volcano exploded May 18^th and it was a lot more serious than anyone had predicted.  I remember the film report on ABC News that night.  There was nothing to see; the film was almost pitch black.  All I could hear was the reporter whispering “I’m dead” over and over again.  The local weatherman said weather satellites could see the eruption from space.  The next issue of the Weekly Reader showed the cloud of ash rising miles into the sky.  I remember one of the scientists was killed along with Harry Truman.  I never met either of them, but I felt like I knew them after seeing them on television so much.

We had a new student in my fifth grade class when we went back in the fall.  Her name was Wendy.  She was from Oregon.  We had “Show and Tell” the first week of school.  Wendy passed around a glass peanut butter jar.  It was full of something dark and muddy, but it wasn’t dirt.  It was volcanic ash from Mount St. Helens.  I was very impressed; it was like having an autograph from someone famous.

“It’s no big deal,” said Wendy.  “We lived in Portland and just wiped it off our car.”

Childhood Conspiracy Theory

Daniel and I were sitting in a booth at the local Grill and Chill, finishing up the “grill” portion of our meals.  We were surrounded by vintage pictures of Dairy Queen days gone by.  Daniel eyed one hanging over our booth from the 1960’s.  It featured a band called The Zonks.

“I wonder why all old pictures are in black and white,” he said.  I finished up my French fries.

“That was all they knew how to do a long time ago,” I said.  “They invented black and white film first and didn’t invent color film until much later.”  Daniel swallowed the last of his double cheeseburger, but seemed to have a hard time swallowing my explanation.

“That’s not right,” he said.  “That can’t be right.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.  Daniel paused for dramatic effect… and to test his Blizzard by turning it upside-down for a moment.

“Think about it,” he said.  “Color pictures must be easier to make because they just show the world like it is.  When you take a black and white picture, all the colors have to be changed.”

“Shades,” I corrected.  I couldn’t help myself.

“Shades?”

“Sorry,” I said.  “Black and white pictures have shades of gray, no colors.”  Daniel gave me a long look.

“Dad, are you obfuscating me?”

I almost choked on my malt.

He continued, “I can save color pictures on my computer and make them black and white after I take them.  My camera has a setting to make pictures look old fashioned, but it normally just takes color pictures.”

I asked, “Did you ever think maybe pictures were always in color, but the world was in black and white back in the old days?”

“Where did you hear that?” he asked.

“I read it somewhere,” I said.

“I think I read that too,” said Daniel.  I nodded.  We’re both fans of Calvin and Hobbes.  After a moment he shook his head.

“That’s not it,” he said.  “They still took pictures in black and white after color film was invented.  Why would they do that?”  I shrugged and sipped the last of my malt.

“Money,” I said.  “Color film cost more than black and white film when it first came out.”  Daniel almost leapt over the table.

“A-ha!” he exclaimed.  “That’s why they did it.  Money.  They wanted to save color film for later so they could make more money.”  Daniel sat back with the smug satisfaction of someone with all the bases covered.  I had to admit it made an odd sort of sense; it didn’t even occur to me ask who “they” were.

“Follow the money,” I said to myself.

“Where did you hear that?” Daniel asked.

“I read it somewhere,” I said.

“I think I read that too,” he answered.  I was surprised.  I didn’t think Woodward and Bernstein were required reading in the sixth grade.

“Congratulations.  You’ve uncovered your first conspiracy,” I said.  “So, what do you think?  Did man really land on the moon?”

“Sure,” said Daniel waving his hand dismissively.  “But don’t ask me why they only took black and white television pictures.  You don’t want to know.”

Memories – The Case of Cichy’s Eyes

It was my first sleepover. I had just turned ten years old. My big birthday present was a digital watch that played “Dixie” (a la the General Lee in The Dukes of Hazzard). My friend Dave turned ten a week after I did. He happened to share his birthday with President Lincoln so we all had the day off from school, perfect for a sleepover. There were five of us: me, Dave (of course), my next door neighbor Tim, my friend Greg and our friend Mike Cichy from school. We met at Dave’s house after dinner. We ate a lot of potato chips, drank a lot of pop and watched television until we got tired. Cichy bailed first. He was an “early to bed, early to rise” kind of kid; I think he petered out around 9:30 or so. He got dibs on Dave’s bed. Dave was next. He slipped into a sleeping bag on the floor by the window in his room.

Greg was camped out by the closed door to the hallway. There was a hole in the wall shaped like the doorknob. Light poured in through a similar doorknob shaped hole from Dave’s brother’s room next door. Dave had two brothers: one older, one younger. They weren’t invited to the sleepover, but made their presence known by injecting things via the hole, most of them landing on Greg’s face. At one point, disgusted, Greg piled up all of our suitcases to block the hole. Bad idea. They poked a broomstick through the hole and knocked them all down on top of him. Tim and I helped extricate Greg from the pile. Tim grabbed the broomstick and pulled it in with us. There were a few cries of “no fair”, at least one “you suck” and the light faded from the other room.

The three of us sat together in the dark. None of us were sleepy. We decided to tell ghost stories. And not plain old generic ghost stories. We told ones from our family histories. I told about my great grandmother who could predict the future with a Ouija board. I think Tim told two, one from each side of his family. Greg told us a tale from one of the times he went visiting his relatives on Cape Cod back east. All these stories were real. All these stories were unnerving, even terrifying. In a very short time, we were all huddled together in the corner of the room, fearful for our very lives.

About that time Mike Cichy decided to roll over in his sleep. Greg swallowed and pointed towards something directly behind Tim and me. I felt my stomach drop down into my lap. Every hair on my arms stood straight up. Tim and I looked at each other and slowly turned around to see what had so freaked Greg out. Cichy was asleep and laying on his back, but his eyes were wide open. Apparently he was dreaming about his own brain because his eyes were rolled all the way back in his head, leaving only the dead white areas visible via the thin strip of light from the space between the curtains and the edge of the window.

“What do we do?” asked Tim. He was afraid Cichy was going to get up and start walking around at any minute. That was too horrible to contemplate.

We contemplated it anyway.

“Okay…” I whispered, drawing them into a huddle. “One of us has got to go over there and close Cichy’s eyes -”

“I’m not touching him!” yelled Tim. Greg shushed him. Cichy didn’t move. We waited slightly less than nine hundred years before breathing again.

“He might be contagious,” said Greg. “I remember hearing about this kid who touched a dead bird’s eye -”

“I heard that too,” said Tim. “I don’t want to get no Cichy Eye Disease.”

“There’s no such thing as Cichy Eye Disease,” I said.

“Then you close his eyes!” Crud. Caught in the web of my own reason.

I stood up slowly and pivoted around. The floorboards under the carpet made a low creak. Greg and Tim shushed me as if the shoddy Levitt construction was somehow my fault. I took a step; another creak, another flurry of shushing. Cichy must have been tired; he never stirred. With glacial speed, I moved across the room in the dark. I had plenty of time to think of the old horror movies I had seen staying up way too late at night. Cichy looked an awful lot like one of the pod people from the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He lay on his back, arms folded under the covers. I would not have been surprised if he suddenly loomed up straight like Nosferatu (I would have died, of course, but I wouldn’t have been surprised).

I swear each step I took sounded like a scream in my hyper attuned ears. The house was literally falling apart underneath us. I could hear my heart beating, pulsing behind my eardrums. I could hear the sharp intakes of breath from my companions across the room. Cichy was making this odd gurgling noise. It was either a sinus condition or a large parasitic worm was preparing to crawl up out of his throat and eat my face. I clenched and unclenched my hands again and again. I was almost to the bed, almost ready to lean over him and gently push his eyelids down, when I stepped on my watch. The electronic tones of “Dixie” filled the room. I jumped back about six feet. Tim and Greg leapt to their feet, screaming and we all crashed into one another and ended up in a heap. Amazingly we managed not to wake up the entire neighborhood. Cichy rolled over. We couldn’t see his eyes anymore, but it didn’t matter. We knew they were still open and somehow still watching us… and waiting. We sat guard on him until the gray light of dawn.

Memories – Radio Shack Customers

The first job I got out of college was the position of “Assistant Manager” at Radio Shack.  It sounds more glamorous than it actually was.  Managers had no actual power at the store level, assistant managers even less.  My boss was not a morning person and he wasn’t too wild about working weekends.  That meant I got to open the store most weekdays and close it down on Sundays.  My Radio Shack was an actual store and – unlike a lot of stand-alone stores – we had a location on the corner of a strip mall that hadn’t been abandoned and left for dead.

Weekday mornings were generally a slow time at Radio Shack.  I used to watch The Price Is Right on the eleven Realistic brand televisions lining the far wall.  If anyone was going to come in, it would be a know-it-all.  We had two types of customers at Radio Shack: the know-it-all customers and the know-nothing customers.  The know-it-all guys would show up right after the doors opened and make a bee-line to the parts.  Radio Shack featured a couple of aisles of discrete components: transistors, resistors, diodes and so on.  It didn’t matter; it was never enough.

After an hour of muttered grumbling, they’d stalk to the counter with an armload of electronic whatnot and rant how I had half a dozen PNP transistors in stock, but how could I be so incredibly dense as not to have matching NPN transistors?  What on Earth was I thinking?  I’d promise the very next time I traipsed back to the stock room to whip up a steaming batch of transistors, I’d be sure to make a couple of NPN’s… just for them.  Then I’d ring up their 450 parts… which totaled about eleven dollars.

Sunday afternoons were the peak time for the know-nothing customers.  I could tell them the instant they opened the door.  We had a security sensor that would chime like a doorbell when someone walked in the store.  The know-nothing customers froze at the sound.  And since the sensor was still making contact, the ringing would go on and on and on until I walked over and helped the customer all the way inside.

“I don’t know if you can help me,” they’d start.  The answer was probably not, but perhaps I could sell them something.  Invariably they had a “thing” at home and they needed it to connect to “this other thing”.  I’d take them by the hand and lead them around the store, pointing at various things and asking if – by chance – our things looked like their things.  Sometimes we’d luck out and find out that one of their things was actually an answering machine or a VCR.  Other times they weren’t so sure; the color was wrong, it was a different shape, they couldn’t decide it the thing was a cell phone or a clock radio (they were alike in so many ways).  Then I would usually sell them a splitter of some kind – phone, cable; it didn’t matter.  Nine times out of ten, whatever they bought was never going to leave the bag it was sold in.

We did have a third type of person.  They were usually friendly and knowledgeable and eager to make some big ticket purchase.  Maybe it was one of the Sensation! brand computers we featured at the front of the store.  Sometimes they were in the market for a stereo or maybe a television.  I always tried my best to be friendly though they weren’t really customers.  After half an hour of bold talk, usually their wives would peek their heads in and ask them to come out to the car; they were done shopping at the supermarket.

The Tweet from Earth

Thirty-five years ago, scientists at the Arecibo Radio Telescope sent out the first message deliberately designed to be picked up by alien life.  The message was written and encoded by Dr. Frank Drake with some help from Carl Sagan.  The entire message was a 73 x 23 “picture” that showed the basic design of DNA, a graphic representation of a person and the solar system we inhabit.  The entire broadcast wasn’t much larger than a “tweet”; a short greeting to anyone listening in the general galactic population.

So, how easy would it be for aliens to tune into Earth?

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence has historically focused its efforts in picking up radio signals from other solar systems.  People on Earth have been broadcasting since the beginning of the twentieth century.  Thus, it is believed signals from Earth would be visible to any star in a sphere some 200 light years around.  However, the first transmissions were short wave and medium wave bands (AM radio).  The good news is signals in these areas of the spectrum bounce off the ionosphere and allow listeners to tune in from around the world.  The bad news is the signals never make it through the atmosphere, so alien listeners would be out of luck.

FM radio broadcasting was invented in the late 1930’s.  These frequencies don’t bounce against the Heaviside layer and radiate into space.  Television transmissions do the same.  Perhaps aliens missed Jack Benny on radio in the 1940’s, but couldn’t they pick up his TV show from the 1950’s?  The largest radio telescope on Earth – Arecibo – fills an entire valley in Puerto Rico.  It is sensitive enough to be able to pull in a TV signal two trillion miles away.  That is impressive, but the nearest star is close to twenty-six trillion miles away.  And the signal sent from Arecibo 35 years ago was aimed at a group of stars some 5,000 times farther away than that.

While specific data might be lost in the vast distances between the stars, the sheer amount of radio energy coming from the Earth would alert our aliens that something was going on, even if they didn’t know what exactly.  UHF carrier waves are thought to be detectable by Earth type equipment sixty light years away.  However, as the switch to digital television transmission takes place around the world, the total amount of energy being blasted into space is decreasing.  On top of that, the digital data transmissions look an awful lot like random noise, unless the aliens have a converter box.

With an infinite amount of spectrum available, SETI researchers have picked certain key areas to search.  One considered most likely is the 21 cm band (1,420.4 on your FM dial, if it went that high).  This frequency contains the hiss of neutral hydrogen from around the galaxy.  Astronomers use this measurement to “see” in radio what they can’t in visible light.  Ironically, aliens listening in on this frequency and tuning into Earth would not pick up much of anything as this particular frequency is not in use.  And the one signal sent out deliberately from Earth was broadcast at 2380 MHz.

In 1977, a SETI team picked up a 72 second signal that seemed to match what an alien transmission might look like.  On the printed paper copy, the scientist in charge wrote “Wow!” next to the data.  Upon further review, no follow-up signal was ever detected.  One wonders if some alien somewhere was just testing its equipment long ago before setting back to listen once again.

Do It Yourself Sputnik

Fifty two years ago, it took a team of scientists and engineers (along with the military of the Soviet Union) to build and launch the first artificial space satellite.  On the evening of October 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 was launched into low Earth orbit.  Radio operators around the world picked up the “beep” signal it broadcast for twenty two days.  Sputnik 1 did change the course of history.  However, like most technological products, it’s not quite the marvel it once was.  Even at the time in 1957, it was designated by its creators as the “simple satellite”.

Sputnik was essentially a large metal globe about two feet in diameter.  It had a pair of antennae – like television “rabbit ears” – that stuck out eight or nine feet.  Inside, the interior was mostly taken up with heavy batteries, enough to power the one-watt transmitter for a couple of weeks.  There were two switches – like those in a thermostat – that controlled a fan.  If Sputnik got too hot, a switch would activate a fan.  If it got too cold, the other switch would turn the fan off.  A third switch measured the pressure of nitrogen inside the satellite.  If Sputnik were hit by a micro-meteor, the switch would have activated a radio signal.

These days, pressure and thermal switches are available “off the shelf” using cheap components the Soviet scientists in the mid 1950’s could only dream of.  One watt radio transmitters can be built to fit in the palm of your hand and even the batteries required would be perhaps a quarter of the size of the originals.  As for the outer shell, the design is obviously well known.  A firm in Arizona has even posted the plans on their website.

The launch to orbit would be the biggest challenge.  It’s not a technological issue anymore, but rather an economic one.  Today, the average satellite launch runs somewhere around $120 million dollars.  That’s six times more than the entire budget of the Soviet space program in 1957.  It’s possible a Sputnik might be launched in conjunction with another – larger – satellite.  By current definition, a 23 inch aluminum sphere would be considered a pretty small satellite.  Perhaps even someone might be willing to launch it for “old time’s sake”.  In 1997, high school students built their own version of Sputnik 1 and the Russians put in on board one of the supply ships for the Space Station Mir.  That fall – near the 40^th anniversary of the first Sputnik – astronauts took a spacewalk and “hand launched” it into orbit “towards the moon”.

Letters from Grandma

When I was in college, my grandma would write me all the time.  Every other Friday, I could expect a letter in the campus mailbox.  There would be a little “mad money”, which was well appreciated when it meant the difference between pizza and yet another meal at the residence hall cafeteria.  However, what I really liked were the letters themselves.

Grandma had her finger on the pulse of the town.  She seemed to know everyone (and assumed I knew everyone too; people were just referred to by their first names).  While the names changed from letter to letter, the circumstances were always the same… and they weren’t good.  They were feeling poorly… when they hadn’t just outright died.  Even if they were okay, they were losing their jobs or their house, their sons or daughters were running away (and never with anyone good).  Car accidents, bad storms; I’d usually get three or four pages of this and – I hate to say it – it would make me feel better about how things were going with me.  Sure, I might have a bad test or a class that wasn’t going well, but compared to the people in Grandma’s letters, I didn’t have a care in the world.

My friends noticed I never seemed to be fazed by anything and I found myself spreading the Word of Grandma.  Soon, you could hear it across the campus of the University of Illinois.

“You think that’s bad?  You should hear what Bob’s grandma said…”

“Ah, Bob’s grandma wouldn’t even mention something that trivial…”

“Come on!  Bob’s grandma knows two people worse off than that and they have no legs.”

One Friday I didn’t get a letter.  I have to admit I didn’t write as regularly as Grandma did; I think she beat me about three to one.  I was a bit concerned (after reading Grandma’s letters, it was hard not to be concerned).  I called upstate long distance.  To my relief, Grandma answered the phone (that ruled out a meteor hitting her house and an earthquake swallowing the town).

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “I didn’t want to write because I didn’t have any mad money to send you this time.”

“The money’s nice, Grandma,” I said, “but I really like hearing from you and getting the news from home.”  There was a pause.

“Well, I can’t think of too much that’s happened.  I guess I’ve just been so worried about so-and-so.  She’s not been feeling good…”  And I sat back and listened and tried to keep the smile out of my voice.

August 8, 1974

It was Thursday night.  My dad was on vacation and we all got into his big green company car to go see a movie at the drive-in.  It was a nice evening; clear without much wind.  A lot of other people had the same idea.  The line to the Sky-Hi drive-in in Addison stretched out of the lot, down the long road from the ticket booth, all the way out onto Old 53.  My dad was driving.  My mom was on the passenger side, smoking a cigarette with the window rolled down about an inch and a half.  I had the backseat to myself, but I was straddling the transmission hump in the middle and leaning forward, resting my chin on the back of the bench seat.

The Impala had an AM radio with a hairline antenna built into the windshield.  I remember it had two knobs.  One had a set of lines on it and the other had a music note icon.  That was kind of funny because we never listened to anything else in the car except the news.  My dad had WBBM tuned in; we could see the tall broadcast antenna out the side windows if we wanted.  I remember the sun was almost down when the President came on.  I wasn’t all that interested in what he had to say, but both my parent’s shushed me.  This was important.  My mom turned around to look at me.

“Listen to this,” she said.  “This is history.  You’re going to remember this for the rest of your life.”  She was right.  I still remember President Nixon saying he was going to resign at noon tomorrow, thirty-five years ago.

Flunking the Turing Test

I’ve been interested in computers since I watched them on Star Trek reruns when I was a kid.  Back then in the 1970’s, computers weren’t exactly interactive.  I remember when my friend Greg got a program called ELIZA for his TRS-80.  It was an early attempt at artificial intelligence.  Mathematician Alan Turing tried to answer the question whether or not a computer might be considered intelligent.  He came up with the “Turing Test”.  Basically, if you could talk to a computer and didn’t realize it was a computer, the computer would be considered intelligent.

Greg and I could type in statements in English and ELIZA would respond back in English.  While that was a novelty (generally all typing on the TRS-80 was in BASIC), the actual conversations with ELIZA sound more interesting than they really were.  The original ELIZA program was written in 1966, the same year Star Trek debuted on television.  The TRS-80 version of ELIZA struggled to make conversation from whatever words could fit into 4,000 bytes of memory.  Pretty much anything we typed in was answered with something like “That’s interesting, please go on.” or “Why do you say that?”  It was like having a conversation with a Magic 8-Ball.

Surprisingly, the concept behind ELIZA – having a large pre-programmed list of words and phrases – is still in use in artificial intelligence programs today.  The major difference is speed and scale.  Even a basic system today can hold a million times as much data and access it in nanoseconds.  I was curious to see how these new artificial intelligences matched up against old ELIZA.  I found a few so-called “chatterbots” online.  They all seem to work the same way.  A chat window is available on the page.  You type in English and it answers in English.

The first one I tried – Yeti – was pretty bad.  Everything it answered with was all in caps, so it seemed like it was shouting random things at me.  I guess it could have passed for human if the person was seriously deranged. I had a better time with Jabberwacky.  I managed to talk back and forth with it a half dozen times before things started to get a little… off.

JABBERWACKY: London is my favorite place in the world.
ME: Why?
JABBERWACKY: My friends don’t like me.  😦

I lost my connection to Jabberwacky shortly after that.  I hope it didn’t do anything rash.

After talking to machines that were obviously machines, I thought I’d try an actual Turing Test.  I was supposed to have a chat for five minutes.  Sometimes the site connects to actual people, other folks talking the Turing Test.  And sometimes it connects to a machine.  My chat partner was named “Landru”.  We had a very pleasant chat for about a minute and a half before he froze.

Apparently Meka was right.  I watched too much Star Trek as a kid.  Like Captain Kirk in so many episodes, I am able to bring a machine to its metaphorical knees just by having a discussion with it.  So, note to NASA: if Pioneer 11 shows up again, rebuilt as a planet killing death machine, give me a call.  I should be able to take care of it in a jiffy.

Saving the Fourth

I hadn’t planned to buy any fireworks this year.  With the economy being a bit scary, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been shaving bits off the family budget.  Fireworks – sadly – fall in the “miscellaneous expenses” category in Quicken; that was the first to go.  However, I didn’t think we would be denied fireworks on the Fourth of July.  There are usually a couple of good shows in Belvidere.  If the city’s show isn’t all that spectacular, I can always count on an exciting – if a bit erratic – display from my neighbors after they’ve polished off a case of beer or six.

I keep forgetting Belvidere doesn’t celebrate the Fourth of July.  Instead we have a four day festival that (sometimes) coincides with Independence Day.  A few years ago, Heritage Days wrapped up on the Fourth of July.  They closed the main bridge downtown.  We all went out there with lawn chairs and watched a brilliant display flowering over the Kishwaukee River.  It was beautiful.  This year, however, Heritage Days were last weekend.  So much for professional fireworks.

We’ve had a good run of crazy neighbors over the years.  My dad’s neighbor Maynard and his twin brother (not-Maynard) used to come back from Wisconsin with a station wagon full of fireworks for Independence Day.  This was the 1980’s; when a station wagon still denoted a car with the same square footage as a battleship from World War II.  Later on when we lived in Hanover Park, our neighbors would celebrate with a simulated nuclear attack on the neighboring suburb of Bartlett.  It would take us three days to pry the dog out from under the kitchen table.  And here in Belvidere, our neighbors spend their weekends drinking and shooting off fireworks.  They start as soon as there’s a dry Friday night in the spring and keep at it until the last Saturday night before the snow flies.

You can imagine my surprise when – come 2:00 in the morning – I had no thunderous blasts rattling the window, no debris raining down on the roof.  In fact, I didn’t hear anything: no hooting, no whoo-ing, no profanity.  Even the hair band music that thumps off the siding of the houses in the cul-de-sac behind us was silenced.  I felt like stalking over there, waking them up out of their blackouts and telling them how disappointed I was.  Didn’t they know this was bigger than any mere kegger?  They were letting me down, my family down.  Heck, they were letting America down.

Daniel decided to take things into his own hands.  I picked him up from summer camp Friday night.  He asked me if we could buy some fireworks.  He had about seven dollars and change.  I had about a dollar more than that.  We strapped into the Corolla and drive north to the border; home of cheese, gifts and fireworks.  We walked in and the gift shop area was empty.  There was no one in the deli section either.  The fireworks counter was doing a brisk business though.  I grabbed a plastic basket and waded into the fray.  It didn’t take long to figure out we were in over our heads.  I suppose we could have pooled our money together and bought one of the rockets mounted behind the counter, but that would have been it.  And it didn’t make us feel any better when little kids – half Daniel’s size – were lugging Roman candles taller than they were into line ahead of us.

I was despairing, but Daniel inspected every nook and cranny of the store.  He found fifty cent boxes of snakes.  I was going to buy a fountain that shoots out sparks for eight dollars.  Daniel found a package of four for half that price.  On top of that, they had a “buy one, get one free” offer.  Daniel managed to fill a respectable portion of our basket for fifteen dollars.  By my estimate, we should be able to light up the street in front of our house for a few minutes; long enough to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” and maybe throw in a rousing rendition of “Welcome to the Jungle” as well.

Sounding Off

Like most people, I’ve seen a lot in my life… too much actually.  I’ve seen shocking things.  I’ve seen scary things.  I’ve had images burned into my brain I will never forget, no matter how hard I try.  While things I see have given me nightmares, it’s my sense of hearing that seems to dig deeper into my brain.  Certain sounds instantly generate that primitive fear “fight/flight” response.  For example, I’ll hear a certain sound at work and I’ll find myself cringing before I’m actually aware I’ve heard it.

BLOOP-BLOOP-BLOOP!

We use instant messaging at work.  My message window may stay closed for days, but as soon as I need to be totally focused on something, I hear this sound and my mouse control is taken away from what I’m doing.  IM is considered a “mission critical” application though most of my messages seem to be either “R U There?” or end with someone asking me to call them on the phone.

CHIRP-CHIRP!

We had Nextel phones at my previous job.  While we were all supposed to be using the Push-To-Talk feature, the only person who did was my boss.  I’d hear the PTT sound followed by his deep grumble courtesy of half a century of cigarette smoking.

“Br- B- Fr- Ma- Ha-”   Our main office was in a skyscraper in the middle of the Loop.  We didn’t have the highest cell signal there.  I’d send back I couldn’t understand him and a moment later my phone would ring.

“Br- B- Fr- Ma- Ha-”   It never occurred to my boss if Push-To-Talk didn’t work, calling me directly from the same cell phone wouldn’t work either.  This was doubly annoying because I knew he was sitting in his office with a perfectly functioning landline on his desk right next to where his feet were propped up.

DING!

When I started working for the phone company, my PC was a 386 running at 12 megahertz.  This was slow even then.  My hard drive was so small; I couldn’t have Word and Excel on it at the same time.  Every few days I had to uninstall one and install the other from a tall stack of floppy disks.  Needless to say, this didn’t make my computer very stable.  Pretty much anything I did would cause it to emit the Windows patented “Ding!” sound to tell me something was wrong.  While it drove me crazy, it actually drove one of my “pod mates” crazier.  After listening to my system through the fabric walls of my cubicle for months and months, he graciously volunteered to give me his new Pentium machine.  The IT department moved with uncharacteristic swiftness; I actually got to use the new computer a few times before I was downsized.

THWEEP!  THWEEP!  THWEEP!

We had a speaker mounted to the wall in the drive thru at Burger King.  The alarm would go off any time a car pulled up to the menu.  It was loud enough to be heard as far as the stalls in the men’s room and it wouldn’t stop until you ran all the way back to the window to answer.  The speaker system was old when I started, but our franchise owner was cheap.  We kept it until it died.  The good news was we got modern headsets to wear.  The bad news was the sound was the same and so was the volume.

Our radio station broadcast in stereo, but I thought of it as surround sound.  Everywhere you went in the station, sound would follow.  It poured from the speakers in the hallways.  It was emitted from small monitors built into the mixing boards.  I heard it in my headphones and my co-workers’ headphones (they all have tinnitus now).  Some of the stabs would make me jump.  Some of the stings would make me wince.  Some of the songs we played made me nauseous.  However, there was one sound that made me go cold and drop my stomach into my shoes.  That one sound above all, one sound worse than the rest.  That one sound that set me off more than any other: the sound of total silence.

Past Sins Revisited

I was sitting up with my mom at her kitchen table.  We usually start with the basics: what’s going on around northern Michigan and Illinois.  By then, it’s the middle of the night.  Everyone else has gone to bed.  This visit started out no differently.  It was maybe three or four in the morning and even the dogs had given up on us and turned in.  My mom was talking about my brother David.

“He should have been a lawyer,” she said.  “He would argue anything and everything.”  I nodded.  David loved to argue.  He was passionate if not always correct.  I learned a lot from arguing with my brother (mostly that it was pointless to do so).  “He’d never admit he was guilty,” she added.  We both remembered a time when David had decided to stick a pencil eraser up his nose.  He was in Kindergarten and this seemed like a perfectly good move… until it got stuck and he couldn’t get it out.  The nurse managed to pluck it out with tweezers.

“‘Well, the Tooth Fairy didn’t stick that eraser up your nose,’ said the nurse.  David jumped all over that and had her arguing all about the Tooth Fairy,” said my mom.  “She forgot all about the original argument over who stuck the eraser up his nose.”  That was David’s favorite tactic; feint and watch your opponent over-commit.

“And the time he burned a hole in the side of the couch,” Mom said.  “I knew it was him, but he would not admit to it.  It just drove me crazy!”

“Oh, I burned the hole in the couch,” I said.  This was back in 1988.  I was a senior in high school.  The light had been lying on the floor about eight inches from the side of the couch.  The heat melted the artificial fabric and made a hand sized hole.  I hadn’t noticed it until my mom was rearranging the furniture several months later.  I didn’t realize David got into trouble about it.

I also didn’t realize my mom didn’t know I did it.  She looked at me for a long moment and narrowed her eyes.  And for the first time in about thirty years, I found myself grounded.