Granted, I was cranky when the idea came to me - curmudgeons have at least a passing acquaintance with crankiness.
Our vacation had ended, but we were still many hundreds of miles from home.
And granted we were on day two of an all-day-in-the-car drive back to Fort Collins. The book on tape was beginning to drone as if stuck in a loop. I-80 felt like a running river of big-rigs, jostling each other like logs. Brown dirt and road-kill and a horizon that stood unaltered like a joke (“How can it look exactly the same after six hours?”) spread and loomed and repeated themselves mile after mile.
Inside the car, the To-Do lists had started jotting themselves in my head, the boys were whiny and fretful that summer ever had to end, and the dog seemed to have brought back a flea from the beach – he kept scratching; each time the thump thump thump on the floor of the car startled like sudden tire trouble.
We were all tired when we pulled into a fast food restaurant in Evanston, Wyoming – when traveling with a dog in 95 degree heat, the car stays running and only one adult gets out at time. The hot air grabbed me even before I was fully out of the air-conditioned car. Mac trucks idled in rows. The wind pushed the constant swish-rub sound of interstate tires through the parking lot.
I opened the restaurant door. Cold air – Ahhh. Then BAM – a visual jolt of what-to-look-at-first. The lines were ten people deep and I remembered I didn’t need or want food. Customers shifting from foot to foot waited to order while children ran or cried or twirled on chairs, knees and ankles spinning outward. The air felt charged with more than the unusual family pit-stop frenzy, but the chaos looked the same.
I headed for the bathrooms when I figured out what was up. A huge flat screen TV blaring and scrolling hung on the wall. I rounded a corner – another flat screen TV.
People were chewing, shooing kids toward fries and pop, gathering belongings to head out – all the while chins raised up toward the screens, watching. The news-noise, flashing graphics, fast-food spillage and deep fryers hissing overwhelmed. And it wasn’t just me – everyone looked more than road-dazed; they looked caught and buzzy and bleary-eyed. Trapped by the TV.
I reached the bathroom door, pulled, and swoosh – it opened. My eyes closed for a moment, in a blink, anticipating the escape and shut door. I opened them when my ears told me I hadn’t left the outer room. It sounded just the same. I was now staring at yet another flat screen TV – in the bathroom. It was blah-blah-blahing news and stock updates.
Deliver me, I thought. Deliver us all.
We do not need TVs in restrooms. I venture to say, even, that it is not good for us.
Door-shut moments of drowned out stimulus, of shoulders squared quiet, of re-gather, re-group, realign are necessary, needed, important. Do you need to discover them in a fast food restroom? No – but we also don’t need sight and sound hounding us at all times, in all situations.
I read once of a woman with seven children. In her upstairs bathroom she had framed a small grouping of words “…. Be still and know that I am God…” Her young daughter thought it disrespectful – it was a bathroom, after all. Though, as the daughter grew, she realized it was probably one of the only quiet places her mother had, the words reminding her to remember what she already knew.
We need the absence of buzz. TV’s all around are not good for us.When blaring sound and flickering pictures follow us so closely, it is just too much. Having to duck the constant stream of bad news, and bad advertising, and just plain old bad TV is tiresome at best, depleting and diminishing at worst.
Eventually we have to stop and listen to our own breath –we have to face quiet. If we don’t, we will not still. And, if we don’t still, we will not know.
