Our apartment complex sits alongside a busy street and directly across from the Emergency Room entrance/exit of a good sized hospital.Between the street traffic and the hospital activity, the noise can at times, be deafening.
When it’s warm like it has been of late, our street becomes Thunder Alley, as seemingly every Harley-Davidson in North America storms up and down the road in a bombastic blast of steel, fuel, and leather.
At least a dozen times a day without warning, the calm and quiet are shattered like bone going through glass by the piercing screech and wail of ambulance sirens.
There’s also a Middle School nearby, and when school is in session, the kids walking to and from the school create a whirling buzz of hoots, cussing, and incoherent babbling.
The incoherent babbling is a noisy indication that in five to seven years many of these kids will be either knocked up or doing time…or both.
There is another notable sound that often seeps through the windows of the digs and into my ears.
It typically happens at night, as I sit next to the windows while at our computer…and?
I hate it.
It emanates from the hospital parking lot near the Emergency Room section.
It is the sound of men and women, family and friends wailing in sorrow, crying in disbelief, and in tone that is both angry and languid screaming…
“No, no, no…Why dear God, Why?”
When the motorcycles roar by, the thunder fades quickly.The piercing screech of the ambulance sirens, is so commonplace here that I don’t notice the noise nearly as often as I do.
The incoherent babbling of the school kids is a mere annoyance, but…
The overture of infinite sorrow that I sometimes hear being played by folks standing in the hospital lot strikes a much more profound chord.
It strikes me louder, and echoes longer.
And yeah, like I said…
I hate it.
Cheers!!
