Making Some Noise

No one in my house besides me needs to get up early in the morning during the summer so I’m usually the only one up before I leave for work. I have to admit I don't enjoy summer mornings as much as I could because everyone else gets to sleep as late as they want but I still have to get up and go to work. It has recently come to my attention that I make a lot of noise in the morning. Both my daughter and my wife told me that I’m really loud in the morning while I’m getting ready for work.

I must say that I was kind of surprised by this because I try hard to be as quiet as I can in the morning. I don’t think I make too much noise in the bathroom in the morning. About the only thing I do that makes any noise is blowing my nose after I take my shower and I do that with the door shut. Due to allergies, about the only time in the day I can breathe normal is right after taking a shower, so I need that. I also brush my teeth and that’s about it. I haven’t used a blow dryer my whole life and don’t really need to these days with the amount of hair I have left. Not much noise here.

I may make a little noise when I go downstairs. I usually put away any pots, pans, utensils and the like that were hand washed and left to dry. I have to admit that putting away the pots and pans does make some noise, I mean they are metal, but even with those I try to be as quiet as possible. I tend to let the refrigerator door close itself  instead of holding onto it and going slow, but how much noise can that make when you’re upstairs in your room with the door closed? I also use a blender every morning for my protein shake (I need to eat something and regular food makes me tired, so I drink one every morning on the way to work) and that can be a little loud for about a minute. Maybe I make more noise than I think.

My mother has told me that she never had to worry where I was as a kid because she always knew exactly where I was because of how much noise I made. So if I was in the house or out in the yard, Mom knew where I was. I can kind of see that looking back now. I was a little heavy on my feet walking around and I was a bit klutzy, tripping over things or banging into things. I used to try to imitate things I heard, too, like birds, music or voices – irritating to everyone but me. I think I was kind of a yapper, always talking about something, even if no one was listening.

Outside, I would have a running play-by-play when I was playing. It may have looked like I was just throwing a ball up in the air or off the house and catching it, or just taking shots on a hockey net by myself, but there was a whole game going on and I was right in the middle of it. Of course, my team always won whatever game was being played. I guess if you can’t be a star in real life, you can still be a star in your own little world. There were times I realized I wasn’t just saying it in my head, I was actually saying it out loud. It makes me wonder what it sounded like to others in the house or just passing by the yard. I know I found it quite entertaining when my own son did the same thing as he ran around the backyard, participating in some imaginary competition when he was little. 

OK, so I probably do make a lot of noise in the morning getting ready for work. I probably make a lot of noise throughout the whole day. As much as I try, I just can’t seem to help making noise. I guess it’s in my DNA. Maybe I should start a support group, Noisemakers Anonymous (“Hello, I’m Joe and I make a lot of noise.”), so me, and others like me, won’t have to feel bad about our noisiness. There are many things much worse than being loud and making noise. My Mom didn’t seem to mind it. At least she always knew what I was doing.

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“What do you do?”

I’m asked this question a lot, mostly by other guys and mostly by other guys who don’t know me. As I’m thinking about it, I don’t remember a woman ever asking me that question. I know a lot of times it is just small talk, but I really hate this question because I feel like many, if not most, people categorize you based on your answer. What type of education you have, what kind of person you are and the all-important (to some) how much money you make are all gathered from your answer. All the assumptions are based on the stereotypes the questioner subscribes to, not necessarily fact. I don’t like to be categorized and never have.

When I was in high school I was one of those guys that didn’t really fit in with any specific group. Believe it or not, I was pretty smart so I was in honors-level classes. I also played sports, partly because I love sports and partly because I knew it would keep me out of trouble by giving me something to do after school. On top of those things, I was a bit of a partier on the weekends (sports was only Monday – Friday). The smart kids, despite my good grades, never accepted me as one of them because I played sports and there were quite a few “jocks” that gave the “geeks” a hard time in school; the sports kids, despite overcoming my lack of natural ability with hard work, never accepted me as one of them because I partied on the weekends and “jocks” didn’t hang out with “burnouts”; the party kids, despite being at all the so called big parties with some of the same kids they hung out with, never accepted me as one of them because of the double whammy of being a “geek” and a “jock”, and the only thing a “burnout” hated more than a “jock” was a “geek”.

When I use the terms geek, jock and burnout, I’m not trying to make fun of people (or categorize them) but I’m using them as other people did. I didn’t really subscribe to the whole categorization thing even back then. I had acquaintances from all the different groups and some were actually friends, others like me who didn’t really buy into the whole clique thing, but who nonetheless hung out with a specific group. Still, for the most part I had a couple of close friends that I usually hung out with, my best friend being Tony, the New York Yankee loving, Dallas Cowboy adoring fan I mentioned in this post. He didn’t really fit in either, for some of the same reasons as me, but also for a different reason, too. No matter. We were the 2 Musketeers until our friend Jeff moved to town and then we were the 3 Musketeers. The funny thing is we were our own small diversity group: a somewhat poor white kid from a big Catholic family of nine, a moderately poor black kid from a small Catholic family of three, and a reasonably well off white kid from a small Jewish family of two. I guess we did actually see and understand the differences between us, but we didn’t really care about them or about what anyone else thought about us. The three of us can thank our parents for that.

Why should someone who doesn’t know me care about what I do for work? I don’t really care what anyone I don’t know does for work, unless I just happen to be looking for a crocodile wrangler to remove the crocodile from my back yard. So it looks like I’m going to have to come up with some new answers to the “What do you do?” question to change things up a bit, try some of them out and figure out which ones trip up people the most. Things like:

·     I take the trash out on Monday.

·     I listen to music really loud when I drive.

·     I occasionally take the long way instead of the shortcut.

·     I root for the underdog, unless they’re playing “my team”.

·     I observe people so I can use their quirky habits in the stories I write.

·     I laugh out loud at nothing sometimes.

·     I’m a bit klutzy so I randomly trip over stuff.

·     I take the last brownie.

·     When someone says “Don’t even think about it!” I think about it.

·     I forget stuff a lot... Who are you?

·     I tell my wife and kids I love them everyday. Multiple times.

These are all things I do and there is a bunch more that are more of who I am than the job I do, even if they’re not the kind of things someone is looking to hear, small talk or not. How someone chooses to categorize me after hearing any of those lines is up to them.

Clean Does Not Equal Comfortable

I feel very uncomfortable when I go to someone’s house and the place is spotless. Not just the main room where you’re hanging out, but every room in the house. You go into the kitchen and there’s not a stray glass on the counter, there’s not even a hint of the remnants of a spill on the countertops, the stove top is perfectly clean, the sink is just gleaming and all the kitchen utensils, from spatula to ladle, are in their proper places, neatly arranged and in order. You go into the living room and there’s not even a molecule of dust or dirt visible to the naked eye, the magazines are neatly stacked by publication in date order, the coasters for drinks are all in their holder and the various remote controls are stored neatly. You go into the bathroom and you could practically eat off the floor, there’s not any toothpaste spatterings anywhere, there are decorative soaps that are never to be used and the towels are all perfectly matched, hung and clean.

These kinds of houses scare me because, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit of a klutz. When I’m there I’m always worried that I’m going to knock something over, or spill something, or worse, I’m going to break something. You know how that works; the more you worry about something, the more likely it is to happen. When sports teams play to not lose instead of playing to win, they usually lose. So as I’m sitting in the beautiful, immaculate living room and enjoying a drink, I’m afraid that the glass is going to slip out of my hand and smash on the coffee table, probably taking a divot out of the table for good measure. In reality, I’m not even enjoying the drink. While we’re eating dinner, I’m afraid that I’m going to drop my forkful of food onto the plate, breaking the plate and sending food flying across the room.

When I went over to some of my friends’ houses as a kid, they had whole rooms you couldn’t even go in. The first time I went to one of my friend’s house, we were goofing around and I ran into a room that seemed like any other. He stopped at the edge of the room and shouted, “Get out of there!” Seeing the panic in his face, I looked around, thinking his parents were in there or maybe a dead body was hidden in there. There was a couch, a couple of chairs, some lamps and end tables. However, everything was covered in plastic. I went to sit down on the couch and my friend practically burst into tears. “Don’t sit there! Get out of there now!” I loved the power I had at that point, but the sheer panic and lack of color in my friend’s face was freaking me out. He wouldn’t even go into the room. It turns out that the room was used like twice a year on specific Jewish holidays – and only on those days. He said that if his parents caught him in there, they’d kill him.

I can tell you we had no such room in my house. Every room in my house got used all year round. There were no off-limits rooms where everything was cover in plastic. Our house wasn’t the nicest, nor the neatest, but what can you expect with nine kids? As Mom used to say, we lived in our house. I guess that’s one of the things I remember most about our house. It was never spotless and things weren’t just so, but it was comfortable, homey and lived in. When my friends came over, they didn’t care that we didn’t have a brand new living room set or that all the magazines weren’t in perfect order. No, they were there to hang out and do what kids do – have fun. My kids have had to remind me of that on occasion when they had friends coming over unexpectedly. I’d look around the house and go into a little panic because the house wasn’t perfectly clean. When I’d start to tell them all the things that needed to be done, they’d just say that their friends didn’t care what the house looked like. It took a few times of this happening before I realized they were right. Kids don’t look around and make mental notes of the condition of a house or judge a person or family based on their house.

So come on over to my house, sit down, relax and have a drink without worrying about spilling it. If you’re expecting to see a perfectly clean, spotless house like you see in magazines, you’ll be disappointed. But if you’re expecting to see a house that looks like people live in it, and a house that is warm and comfortable even in the middle of the winter, then you’ll feel right at home. Besides, even if there are a few stains on the couches, they are much more comfortable without a plastic covering.

Smooth Operator

Since everyone in the family has an iPod, we bought a connection cord for each car so we can listen to them through the car’s stereo system. As happens with so many things today, one of them is broken and the other one is falling apart but still works. On a recent Saturday I needed to drive my son to a friend’s house and was taking one car but had to get the working iPod connector out of the other car so we could listen to the music we wanted to. As I got back into the car I went to lean my arm on the center console like I always do when I get into the car. However, for some reason my son had opened it, so expecting something solid to lean on and finding nothing, I kind of stumbled into the car leaning over to his seat.

My being a klutz is nothing new to my kids as I do things like that a lot, which usually garners a few laughs, so of course my son laughed at me. He commented on how coordinated I was sometimes and how that particular incident was quite elegant. Actually, what he said was that it was “like a swan”. We both laughed and I mentioned that both he and my daughter got some of that DNA in them, because the both of them do klutzy things all the time, too. I won’t tell you how well my daughter wears her food sometimes or how my son knocks things over or trips on things because I don’t want to embarrass them by going into the details. Suffice it to say that we’ve all had our not so shining moments.

As we drove, I told him how when I was a teenager I could be walking through my living room and trip over nothing. My Mom once asked me how I could play sports and have such good balance but then walk through a room and stumble when there was nothing near me. The only explanation I have is that I had this special super-hero-like talent that only worked playing sports; at other times I was just like everybody else. When I was in school, I never ran up or down stairs because I knew there was a good chance I would fall on my face or my butt right in front of everyone. So I took it slow and played it cool – all while holding onto the railing. Heck, I could do the opening theme to the old Dick Van Dyke Show without trying.

My wife loves to tell the story about an incident that showed how much alike my Dad and I were. Here’s the setup: We were at my parent’s house, sitting in the living room, which was by no means small, and which had a coffee table that Mom kept some plants on up against the wall. Dad left the room for something and on his way back banged his leg on the coffee table. He basically walked right into the table. Of course, we all laughed. You would think that after seeing that happen I would be a little more careful, but a few minutes later I went to the bathroom and on my way back, you guessed it; I banged my leg on the coffee table. I basically walked into the same table that was in the same place in the same room that Dad had just moments before! Like father like son, I guess.

So we get to my son’s friend’s house and he gets out of the car to go up to the house. I always wait until my kids get in the house before I leave because you just never know what may have come up in the time since they spoke to their friend. This particular house is a two-story house and he had to enter on the second floor, which required him going up a set of stairs to the door. I’m sitting in the car watching him and all of a sudden his foot caught the step wrong, he stumbled and went down. If I hadn’t been watching him the whole time, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed, because he was up in a flash. As soon as he was back on his feet, he looked over to check if I had seen what happened. I just pointed at him and laughed as he laughed, too. I then took out my cell phone and texted him a very simple message: “Like a swan”. Like father like son, I guess.

You know, it’s great when your kids say or do something that is intelligent, creative or just plain nice, and people say “Your son is just like you!” or “Your daughter reminds me of you!”. Those are the kinds of things I hope I never forget as I grow older. Walking into a table two minutes after my Dad did the same thing or watching my son trip going up the stairs after telling me how uncoordinated I was, those are things that I know I’ll never forget. Those are the things that make us who we are – real, klutzy and human.