Last week, the windshield in my wife’s SUV was pinged by a rock kicked up from a kid cutting a lawn in our neighbourhood. My wife didn’t stop. The kid — who was wearing big noise-dulling headphones — didn’t know or didn’t hear the rock shoot from the mower’s blades ... probably.
Just bad timing, my wife said. Not the kid’s fault, she said.
I was mad. When I cut the grass, I stop if a car or pedestrian is walking by ... just in case there’s a rogue pebble that gets kicked up. It’s what you do, I said.
But as every angry, short-fused man should know ... usually after you’ve made a fool of yourself by storming over to a dumbfounded-looking kid pushing a lawnmower and yelling at him while waving a tiny pebble around in your hands ... you have to walk a mile in their shoes — in this case, noise-reduced shoes — to fully understand.
So I did. I grabbed some big headphones, put them on and fired up the lawnmower. I normally go bare-ear when mowing. I like to take go au natural. So this was something new ... and magical. The mower howl is gone, the sounds of dogs, planes, birds ... and traffic are gone too. Wow.
- Now I get that the kid might not be completely in the wrong. I also get why people who work with large headphones on can look startled or dazed when you suddenly appear in their view waving your fist because they were driving their steamroller too slowly, or their weed-whacker was kicking up dust on my freshly washed vehicle, or you thought they had knowingly sent a rock at your loved one’s vehicle.
Wearing those headphones was quite literally mind-altering.
It’s heaven to be in there; in your thoughts. I was thinking about birthday present ideas six months down the road for family members, I successfully recalled the full names of the 39 newsroom staff who have come through the Lac La Biche POST’s doors in the 27 years I’ve been in the office — even that kid who spent the night of his first assignment sleeping in the parking lot of a Rich Lake rodeo and then said he couldn’t remember what happened to him for three days after he was bartending at a bush party near Plamondon. He only worked for four days and then never showed up. The headphone silence didn’t really make me wonder what happened to him ... I guess I should have thought about that ... but hey, at 50, I was really happy to have remembered his name. While I was in my little cocoon of quiet, I also finally figured out why the top draw in our downstairs bathroom’s storage unit won’t fully close.
I expect too that the young man who sent a rock flying towards my wife’s vehicle was also enjoying such serene and uninterrupted thoughts. It’s much too late for me, finding out about the serenity of headphones this late in life, but perhaps he will devise the future’s first non-bladed lawnmower or develop a gel compound to replace “chippable” windshields, or an app that teaches young millennials how to actually ‘be’ sorry instead of just saying it to stop the crazy man from yelling at them. OK, perhaps I’m still a little miffed about the windshield.
But if you don’t already use headphones for noisy projects. Give it a go. That lawnmowing kid knows. It stops getting an earful when you don’t want it.
