Anyone who has traveled by plane in the last two decades knows the travel day is an inevitable sequence of hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait: a curious mix of anxiety and boredom. It was charming to see this reality beginning to dawn on a toddler the day before Mother’s Day as we sat on the tarmac and heard the airplane engines roar to life.
“Let’s GO!” he exhorted gleefully from the seat in front of me. “FIVE, FOUR, THREE, TWO, ONE!” His mother, smiling sheepishly, murmured something to him I couldn’t hear. “TOO LOUD?!” he demanded incredulously, with the air of a young Augustine being told he was too good. Who ever heard of such a thing?
My mind flitted back to a favourite family story. “I wuv church! I wuv nursery! I wuv church!” our nephew sang/hollered through the first half of the drive to Grandma and Grandpa’s church. Then, as family lore has it, he paused contemplatively before bellowing, with evident relish, “I’m TOO LOUD!”
The concept of too loud has yet to dawn on some of the voices Eden and I hear on our daily meanders. There are the dogs alerting the neighbourhood that we’ve arrived, the the cool electronic voice’s1 remonstrance (“Hi! You are currently being recorded”) whenever we pause in front of that one house, the inexplicable “CHANGE PASSWORD… CHANGE PASSWORD… CHANGE PASSWORD” blaring from the crosswalk amid the thucka-thucka-thucka-thucka staccato heralding safe passage. Much to my pride and delight, Eden takes it all in without a peep, though she does pull her ears back and her harness forward, hastening past each din.
Walks, of course, are their own sequence of hurry up and wait: quickly skirt this raucous hellhound’s yard, so I can pause and sniff an innocuous-looking tuft of grass for a minute or two. Hurry through this crosswalk and leave its noise in the dust; now let’s thoroughly investigate this blessedly silent stump. The pattern sounds burdensome, but it’s really not. I’m on the same page, little one; inquisitiveness is charming, and I’m more than content to seek the silent sites. A meander through the city trumps the airport’s rush-delay-rush any day.
1Reminiscent of how I imagine the Ministry of Magic’s phone booth announcer in the fifth Harry Potter.
Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth (‘16) is a science communication researcher and practitioner working on her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University. Natasha hails from Calgary, Alberta. Some of her favo(u)rite authors are C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Bill Bryson. Her favourite earthly place is the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and her favourite activities are reading and enjoying the great outdoors—preferably simultaneously.
