Just the Normal Noises

What Counts as Quiet?

I paused in the parking lot of the suburban hotel and listened. I heard, and felt, music hurtling from a car on the street, subwoofer driving the bass beat into my bones. Somewhere on the sidewalk a woman laughed. The “Walk” signal at the intersection chirped out an audio cue for the visually impaired, warning of the coming red light and cross traffic. I heard a voice, tinny through a loudspeaker: “Welcome to Carl’s Jr. May I take your order?” A siren shrieked, closing in and then fading as an ambulance flew down the road.

It was 11 p.m. on a Friday.

Inside, the double-glazed windows muted the cacophony. “Whenever we travel,” I said to my husband, “I’m so grateful for our peaceful neighborhood.”

He nodded. “Cities are noisy places.”

Once we’d returned home, I stood and listened on our back deck. Roosters crowed. I heard our neighbor’s lamb, Avocado, who must have a speech impediment, bleating “maah, maah.” Crickets and frogs harmonized on the night air. A car crept down our narrow, semipaved, dead-end street that serves only a handful of houses; a moment later, I heard the creak of a garage door lifting on its tracks. Across the creek a dog barked, urging its comrades to join in. One of the neighborhood owls repeated its only question, “Who? Who?”  A contingent of coyotes set to howling, their cries drifting down on the night air from somewhere across the canyon.

Of all those sounds, I reckoned only the car and the garage door as “noise.” In my calculus, the sounds of Creation aren’t noise.

They’re something more like music.

I was thinking about music when my husband Rich acquired a new cell phone. Its default setting included a ringback tone. Every time I called him, a voice invited: “Please enjoy the music while your party is connected.” Then a cheesy rendition of Vivaldi’s Spring burst forth, unimproved by my phone’s small speaker. It made me snicker–or groan, depending on my mood–as I found nothing enjoyable in the digital interpretation of this masterpiece.

It annoyed me. As his wife and most frequent caller, I felt justified in asking him to reset the phone so I’d hear a ring, rather than a canned voice requesting an impossible task.

This morning, early, I sat on our deck, tuning my heart to worship God. I watched the moon slide down the sky and listened for Him as our little canyon came to life, the roosters leading the way. I imagined a ringback message:

“Please enjoy the silence as your Party is connected.”

I giggled.

As I listened to the overture of this day’s symphony, I acknowledged the space between silence and noise, and gave thanks for the quiet, overlaid with the melody He wrote, that surrounds our home.

⁷ Let the sea roar and all it contains, The world and those who dwell in it. ⁸ Let the rivers clap their hands, Let the mountains sing together for joy ⁹ Before the LORD, for He is coming to judge the earth; He will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with equity. 

Psalm 98:7-9 (NASB)