Used to be mad about you in Well now

I don’t mind quiet in small doses,
but long stretches of silence tend to bother me.
Living alone can be a very quiet experience,
so I have my little aural crutches.

The tenant on the other side of my thin non-insulated interior wall
and her extremely vocal five year old
give me a running audible on their activities.
I know when they come and go
door slam by door slam,
what room they’re in
(thud! thud! thud! thud! thud!),
the gist of their many shouted conversations,
and what shows they watch in only the finest surround-sound glory.
Why they’re so interested in shows with multiple massive explosions,
I’ll never understand.
(When they get too loud for too long,
I just remind myself that they’re paying the mortgage
and I need to welcome the nuisance as a large part of what keeps the roof above
titled in my name.)

Esme, Coco, and Lucy,
members of a species usually noted for its stealth and inscrutable silence,
have taken a perverse pride in the jewelry hung about their sleek feline necks,
little blue collars with small silver filigree heart charms and tiny tinkly silver bells.
As the bells now make silent movement impossible,
they have embraced the concept of counter-quiet with triple-minded enthusiasm.

My girls gleefully spend as much time and energy as possible
(between the obvious time-devouring obligations of napping and grooming)
in scampering about the house
on little leaden cat feet
with all the grace of mega-ton elephants on amphetamines.
(Thuditty-thud-thud! Thuddity-thud-thud! Thuddity-thuddity-thuddity!)

They happily indulge in constant forced horizontal evictions
(methodically attacking every object that has the unmitigated gall
to be claiming squatter’s rights on any raised flat surface).

And, of course,
each of my amazon trio vocally announces her glorious victory over
every each and every toy destroyed in battle-training,
never forgetting to crow as loudly as a full mouth can
as she parades from room to room displaying her vanquished foes.

They’re good little loves,
just trying in their own way
to protect their strange and fragile human
from the deep-thought inducing quiet.
(I just wish they understood that deep thought after midnight is actually called dreams
and humans require both the dreams
and the quiet that dream-inducing sleep requires.)

I too attack the singleton residential silence
with a constant electronic babble of nonsense
coming from the pad that moves with me from room to room.
I don’t really watch the shows.
I’m always doing something else with the babble softly in the background,
but I find it soothing.
(For some reason the phrase “It calms my nerves” came to mind.
Oh god! My old-lady-phase-approaching light just went off!)

I’ve started to mostly listen to another old series.
Strange how it takes you back to the life you had when the show first came out.
It’s “Mad About You” I’m on now from the early ‘90’s.

I loved that show.
Back when you planned your evenings around what was coming on when
M-A-Y was one of the shows I planned around.

The timing was perfect.
Paul and Jamie, they were newlyweds just like Ian and I were.

They were intelligent and witty and, yes, definitely neurotic,
but no matter their problems,
they always came back to the realization that the most important thing
was their love for each other and so there was always a happy ending.

I really did love that show.
(I watched the show religiously. Ian, not so much.)
I secretly wanted Ian and I to be the Buchmans,
smart and funny and hopeful and mostly happy.
I wanted us to come together after everything life threw at us
and embrace with confidence in our love at the end of every daily episode.

“Mad About You” was still on the air by the time Ian and I had separated.
As opposed to Paul and Jamie Buchman’s,
Ian and Ann McTeague’s show had really lousy writers
who had absolutely no clue what they were doing.
They couldn’t get the character development straight
and the storyline really suffered.
The producers even forgot to put in a laugh track.
“The Beleaguered McTeagues” was cancelled in its early second season.
(While the male lead had assumed his contract would be renewed in perpetuity
no matter what the storyline or his character’s behaviour,
the female lead opted out of renewing her contract
and refused all repeated inducements to fulfill her obligations in the matter.
She does continue to receive recurring residuals
in the form of massive loads of guilt but the amount eventually did begin to decrease.)

So here I am today,
watching/listening to a series I really loved decades ago
but stopped watching after my marriage collapsed.

I have a vague memory of someone telling me
some long time ago
that Paul and Jamie separated or divorced or died or something
in the last season of the once-loved show that I had stopped watching.

I think I’ve lived enough in reality after all these years to handle it
if the Buchmans turn out to be written more like the McTeagues than I would have believed.

Last updated January 29, 2018