Garbage Truck Morning

Every Wednesday morning Sammy hears the garbage truck beeping and banging along our street. I never hear it until he runs to the front window and tosses back the blinds. Sometimes he ducks his head back under to find me and jabbers excitedly, pointing, then goes back to watching.

Sam also hears traffic helicopters thumping overhead and dogs barking in distant yards. “Woof,” he says, and cocks his head. I do not hear these sounds unless Sam draws my attention to them.

This morning I heard our van honk out on the driveway. This usually only happens when I hit the “lock” button twice on my key chain. After about 5 beeps, it occurred to me that Sam must have found my keys. Sure enough, I discovered him near the window punching the lock button over and over while the van tooted loudly for the enjoyment of the whole neighborhood. Because I threw out my back, I can’t bend over to Sam’s level so I held out my hand and said, “Sam, give me the keys.” Despite the enormous silence of the house, Sam was apparently unable to “hear” me. The van tooted again. “Sam, I happen to know that the hammer, anvil and stirrup bones inside your ears are perfect. So fork over the keys.” But Sam had become mysteriously deaf. Toot, toot went the van. At this moment Danny appeared and took the keys from Sam, who protested at an impressive decibel level.

Danny and I hear differently too. For a very long time, we could never hear each other apologize, though both of us claimed to do it regularly! Now whenever one of us feels we have apologized, we follow it up with, “Did you hear that I just apologized?” This way the other person has to pause and notice what their ears took in. We soon discovered that different words trigger the awareness that an apology has occurred. Danny simply needs to hear, “I’m sorry, it was my fault.” He zooms in on words that communicate personal responsibility. For me, such words are not very “loud.” Anyone can say “I’m sorry” after the fact. I need to hear how the grievance will not happen again. “Next time I will check the lock on the gate so the dog cannot get out” registers in my ears like a true apology.

Despite our age gap, Sam and I agree on hearing certain sounds though—like music. We are both also sensitive to the thump of Danny’s car door slamming in the driveway, and the jingle of his keys in the front door.

Even when Sam and I hear the same thing, we have different opinions about it. For example, one recent spring afternoon, a thunder clap rumbled down our street sending thrills up my spine. A few feet away, Sam’s calm face crumpled up like a wad of paper and he began to howl, his lower lip jutting out a mile.

At his age, Sam can hear an extraordinary 10 octaves. The thin membranes of his toddler eardrums mean he can capture frequencies between sixteen and 20,000 cycles per second. As humans age, their eardrums thicken and high frequency sounds don’t pass as easily between the miniature bones of the inner ear. Yet more significantly, aging can thicken the mind and render its ideas stale and brittle. This has the potential to reduce a person's "hearing" more than anything else. Sam, aged 28 months, hears the telephone ring two houses down, but he cannot hear me ask for the keys. Is this a symptom of aged eardrums or mind!?

Both Sam and I have perfect hearing, yet we can’t—or don’t—hear what the other hears. We tune in to different frequencies. Our dissimilar aural landscapes are mapped out less by the apparatus of our ears than by grids of meaning in our minds. What we hear is determined more by our worldview than the quivering hairs inside our cochleas. Our personalities and priorities act as a kind of zoom lens over the biological anatomy of our ears. It causes certain sounds to blur and others to jump into sharp relief.

There was a time when Sam’s entire world consisted of the soothing, surf-like thump of my heart. Afloat in the womb, my heartbeat was his first cradlesong. But I am less and less the only sound in Sam’s universe. At night I sing to him in Hausa and French so that his ears learn the tones and textures of other languages, but by day he is increasingly limited to the phonetics of English and Spanish. As the universe ladles out enormous helpings of noise into his eager ears, the thumping of my heart will become fainter and harder for him to perceive. This is bittersweet; but it can also be okay. It will be part of growing up (for both him and me).

What I hope for most is that he would be able to hear the most important sounds. I pray that even as his eardrums loose some of their extraordinary 10-octave range, that his mind and soul would only increase their range of perception. I hope that he will learn to hear whispers of grandeur in a stormy sky and shouts of joy in the common daysong of a North Carolina wren. I hope that he becomes fluent in the emotional dialects of music. I hope he learns to hush the Niagara of noise produced by cell phones and Ipods in order to create quiet cathedrals of inner worship. I hope the silent suffering of the poor becomes louder to him than the babble of advertisements and entitlement propoganda. I hope he develops a keen capacity for listening to nuance in relationships because such fine distinctions give dignity to others. I hope that amidst the broken cacophony of the world, he would learn to amplify justice and still ignorance. I hope that the thrill with which he now greets the garbage truck would grow into the delight of a lifetime of listening to the love of God.