maniac magee

last night i was laying on the floor and trying very hard to figure out where this faint rumbling sound was coming from. it wasn't the air conditioner. there isn't an air conditioner here. it wasn't the refrigerator. i already knew what that sounds like. it wasn't the space heater or the dripping in my bathroom. it wasn't coming from the place next door because it's been vacant all month.

after five or ten minutes of laying absolutely still and concentrating on this sound, i wasn't any closer to figuring it out until i heard a train whistle. it must have been a train passing by. i have no evidence but that's the only way i can explain why it had the same sound for such a long time. the closest train tracks to me must be more than a mile away. they run next to the freeway. in between here and there is a university, a park, and maybe ten blocks of neighborhood streets with large two story houses or churches.

it's kind of amazing how a sound that can travel so far is so ignorable and undetectable until you sit and concentrate on it for a few minutes. even then, i needed the hint of a train whistle. airplanes are the same way too. i was in utah a few years ago at arches national park and i remember the blue sky filled with vapor trail crossings. i remember hearing five or six planes in one afternoon and watching each of them add their mark to what should have been undisturbed sky. in cities, i guess this sort of thing is part of our aural vocabulary and is undetectable or otherwise unremarkable, but was inescapable being out in a national park. i imagine if i were a fish in the middle of the ocean with no shores for waves to break on, the passing of oil tankers and cargo ships would be even more invasive unless fish have the same ability to filter things as background noise that we do.

i was reading my book this afternoon at a coffee shop and two different women walked past me wearing heeled shoes. the earth moved as they walked past me in those shoes. i felt the sky tumbling down... just kidding. they were tall but they couldn't have weighed much more than me and i don't make the ground shake when i walk. i'm actually pretty careful when i walk. i don't like the sound of shoes scraping on the sidewalk. i try to walk so that the only sound is a little creak from where my shoes bend. i wonder if there's a quiet graceful way to walk in heels or if the point is to stamp the ground and attract attention. i guess men's dress shoes are the same way. i've never found a quiet graceful way to walk in those. i imagine women's heels must be much harder. three cheers for tennis shoes.