The Sound of Much Ado about Nothing — and Nothing Worthwhile
It is the fourth of October, and I write to you from the window of my bedchamber, where I have been awake since half past two, not by choice but by decibel.
On a typical evening: Pickup trucks, each one a thundering confession of some private insecurity, rattle the china in the cabinet. Then there are the Harleys, belching and loudly passing gas. Then the shabby little cars, backfiring and sounding like their mufflers are hanging on by duct tape and prayer.
And at three o'clock in the morning, when the taverns have closed and all decent noise has gone to bed, the indecent kind comes out to play. Somebody is yelling on the corner about a person named Kylie. A door slams, a dog answers, a second dog answers the first, and the whole neighborhood becomes a choir that never rehearsed and never will.
But I confess that none of these troubles me half so much as the noise of the season, for it is election time, and the politicians are out strutting in the streets, each one more certain than the last and none the wiser. I have read the mailers, I have heard the speeches, and I have concluded that a politician's promise is merely a lullaby sung in the key of a favorite Tuesday.
There is, as the pundits say, no there there. It is noise with a campaign slogan, and there is more of it each year, as though volume might be mistaken for virtue.
And yet, here is the lyric side of it: Somewhere beneath all of it, in the small hours, when even the screamers have gone to bed, there is a sound I have come to treasure. It is the sound of a single leaf letting go of a maple and finding the ground. It makes no speech. It requests no vote. It simply falls, when the whole town, for the length of that fall, is quiet enough to hear it.
On a typical evening: Pickup trucks, each one a thundering confession of some private insecurity, rattle the china in the cabinet. Then there are the Harleys, belching and loudly passing gas. Then the shabby little cars, backfiring and sounding like their mufflers are hanging on by duct tape and prayer.
And at three o'clock in the morning, when the taverns have closed and all decent noise has gone to bed, the indecent kind comes out to play. Somebody is yelling on the corner about a person named Kylie. A door slams, a dog answers, a second dog answers the first, and the whole neighborhood becomes a choir that never rehearsed and never will.
But I confess that none of these troubles me half so much as the noise of the season, for it is election time, and the politicians are out strutting in the streets, each one more certain than the last and none the wiser. I have read the mailers, I have heard the speeches, and I have concluded that a politician's promise is merely a lullaby sung in the key of a favorite Tuesday.
There is, as the pundits say, no there there. It is noise with a campaign slogan, and there is more of it each year, as though volume might be mistaken for virtue.
And yet, here is the lyric side of it: Somewhere beneath all of it, in the small hours, when even the screamers have gone to bed, there is a sound I have come to treasure. It is the sound of a single leaf letting go of a maple and finding the ground. It makes no speech. It requests no vote. It simply falls, when the whole town, for the length of that fall, is quiet enough to hear it.
I should like more of that, Columbia. I should like it very much indeed.
Until then, I remain, ever yours,
Cassandra
(Who is, at the moment, very tired)
