A Field Guide to Awkward Silences

by Alexandra Petri

  “No can do,” another cop responded. “He’s in the building already. We have no way of communicating with him.”

  “When is this set?” the moderator asked.

  “The present day,” David said, looking baffled.

  • • •

  Actually, compared to these crews, Mr. Oliver seemed downright normal. He was conviviality itself. One upside of our extended acquaintance was that we figured out that neither of us really wanted to be drinking coffee at four in the afternoon, so we came up with a new system where we went to a bar and drank four beers apiece and agreed with whatever the other person was saying because the music was too loud to hear over. It was much better. We gave up the pretense of wanting to get plays on Broadway and instead I just downed a Sam Adams Seasonal while he told me the things President Obama was doing wrong and brought me his print copy of the New Yorker with several unflattering paragraphs about Hillary Clinton circled in ballpoint pen that I ignored as politely as I could.

  There’s a kind of relief that comes from hanging out with the elderly. With them, I no longer needed to pretend that I watched Boy Meets World. With people my age, I’d been doing this for years, and it had started to become a strain. “Oh yeah,” I say. “Boy Meets World. Loved it. He met the heck out of that world, didn’t he? Topanga! Topanga!” If Wikipedia ever makes an error in its plot recaps, my entire social life will collapse.

  I started looking forward to it. “Do you want to come out on Monday?” my other friends would inquire.

  “I can’t,” I would say. “I’m going to be getting drunk with an old man.”

  • • •

  For a while, during the vampire craze, being an old-person magnet began to seem like an asset instead of a liability.

  “This whole Twilight mania is just about being obsessed with pasty immortal creatures who have been around for hundreds of years and don’t go out in the sun. Octogenarians are the next best thing! They’re immortal, so far. And they don’t go out in the sun very much, except to renew their prescriptions. If I can hang with them, vampires will be easy.”

  “I thought you hated Twilight.”

  “There’s no better way of protesting Twilight than showing people what it would really look like,” I suggested.

  What concerned me was that Mr. Oliver didn’t seem to think of himself as an old man. Superficially, he knew his type. He had once walked over to a church that was putting on A Christmas Carol and volunteered his services as Scrooge. (They didn’t cast him.) But on the inside? I wasn’t so sure. On our Monday evenings, Mr. Oliver sat there making off-color jokes and downing beers like any of my other friends. Did he think we were on the same plane? Sure, I’d never claimed to be hip, but at least I’d never had a hip replacement.

  Would this be me in a few years?

  Being cool in the present was something I barely managed at the best of times.

  For years I was the person adding “Songs of World War I” to class playlists. Jenna would contribute “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Kat would contribute “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and I would contribute “Belgium Put the Kibosh on the Kaiser.” This is an actual song. I can sing it for you now, but I won’t, because you have done nothing to deserve it. I curse like a sailor . . . who died in 1840. “Gadzooks! Heavens to Betsy! Land o’ Goshen! Oh, for the love of Pete!”

  In sixty years, I’ll be hopeless.

  • • •

  Maybe this friendship was a form of insurance. If I was willing to hang out with Mr. Oliver, maybe, someday in the future, when I’d crested the ridge of seventy, someone would be willing to sit there with me and pay for three rounds while I complained about how the government had gone downhill. I certainly hoped so.

  Old people are just people, after the vigorous application of time.

  And I know how fast obsolescence comes on. I once owned a BlackBerry.

  I expect every morning to climb out of bed obsolete. I know how it will start. I will suddenly be very interested in the weather. My joints will ache. I will flip, instinctively, to the obituaries. I will discover that I am helpless when confronted with the latest technology. The thought will occur to me that something terrible has happened to popular music. I will spend my days meticulously planning visits to the grocery.

  I do what I can to forestall this. I do everything short of lurking outside middle schools, grabbing students as they emerge, and shouting, “The trends! Tell me the trends!” I spend a good hour every day worrying about ways that people from the future might consider us racist and deciding whether or not to endorse robot relationships. I even listen to dubstep.

  But already I can feel myself growing outdated.

  Not to say that I have an old soul. People who tell you they have “old souls” usually are jerks who just got back from a trip to somewhere in the Andes that Really Changed Their Outlook. I don’t have an old soul. I just understand my place in the culture, and it’s next to the Metamucil.

  I’m especially worried because I’d always had the idea that Old Age was really more of a place than a time. You arrive at seventy, and they welcome you with a Werther’s Original and a record player and replace all your kitchen fixtures with blue Formica. When I finally hit that point, after years and years of being fifty or sixty-odd years behind the times, I was going to have an edge, for once.

  So I remember vividly the terror that gripped me when the Oldies station I’d been listening to switched from songs of the fifties, sixties, and seventies to “Classic Rock.” The past wasn’t supposed to move. It was supposed to wait for me.

  Meeting Mr. Oliver had only confirmed me in my terror. He wasn’t the vampire. I was. The only way I was ever going to get my fix of hanging out with old people who liked what I liked was if I did it now. And that would only put me further behind.

  • • •

  Maybe you get the Morrie you deserve. Mitch Albom got an inspirational old geezer who said things like “If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely” or “It’s like I keep telling you—when you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”

  I frowned at the notes that I had compiled of things Mr. Oliver said to me. “Mr. Oliver? I’m not a Mr.! I’m a Sir!”

  “Take a look at my class photo: Wouldn’t you say ‘Young Jack Kennedy’?”

  “Have A Lolly, Dolly! Love, Olly!” (This was a handwritten note I received at the office.)

  “What do I think of Woodrow Wilson? How can you even ask that? I hate him! Hate him. Yuck. I think he’s just awful. Worse than that guy we’ve got now.”

  “Alexandra? Thank God! Thank God you’re alive! You didn’t pick up the phone, and I was worried you were dead.”

  Trust me to wind up with the old man who, instead of dousing me with wisdom about what the Buddha said about detachment, all the while dying in a picturesque and heartrending manner, told me off-color jokes about Marilyn Monroe, repeated that Bowdoin was superior to any other place on earth, stayed healthy as a kickboxing horse, and made me pay for our drinks.

  But gradually, as we got farther and farther away from the plays, it got nicer and nicer to have someone to talk to. What would I have done with Morrie? He would have bored me stiff. You can only take so much inspiration before you want to run outside and scream.

  One day Mr. Oliver showed up looking particularly jolly.

  “I went to the doctor today,” he said. “My nurse—a male nurse, we’ve forged a real connection, he’s a Filipino, he says he’s leaving to go to Florida, which I’m just so upset about, but he says—guess what?�
��

  “What?”

  “He says: I give you twenty years.”

  “Huh?” I said, temporarily nonplussed.

  “He gives me twenty years! Isn’t that great news? I’ll be a hundred years old!”

  “Wow,” I said. “Twenty years!” Twenty more years of his odd cackling laugh and his somewhat mangled retellings of the lives of famous writers. Twenty more years of squinting at his hand-scrawled manuscripts because the woman at the library who used to type them up for him had finally gotten fed up. Twenty more years of Mr. Oliver. “That is great news!” I said.

  And the strange thing was, I meant it.

  Go Whistle for It

  Maybe anyone can whistle. (All you have to do, I hear, is put your lips together and blow.) But I felt like the world’s biggest impostor.

  I was sitting in one of the front rows of the Franklinton Baptist Church as the pastor, a tall man with short graying hair who looked like a cheerier version of the magician Penn Jillette, worked himself into a lather.

  “Whistling,” he was saying, “is an expression of pure joy. I whistle when I feel joy, and I always feel joy when I hear someone whistling. And we are just so blessed, truly blessed, to have a whistling champion here with us today.”

  Oh no.

  Please stop, I thought. That is more than plenty.

  “A champion who has come all the way from Washington, DC,” he went on, “to share her amazing gift with us.”

  The assembled parishioners sat up a little as I shrank down still farther in my pew. Maybe I could melt slowly away and vanish, I thought, like an embarrassed polar ice cap or a damp Witch of the West. Maybe I could just vanish deep into the earth.

  “Please welcome—”

  Oh no.

  “Alexandra Petri.”

  • • •

  I should probably start from the beginning.

  I was in North Carolina for the Fortieth Annual International Whistling Convention.

  I like whistling the same way I like farting: I enjoy doing it myself, but I don’t get any particular pleasure when other people do it around me. My idea of a good time is certainly not driving miles and miles down the East Coast to listen to strangers fart.

  But in the interest of journalism, I trucked down to Louisburg for the Fortieth Annual International Whistling Convention to see what the fuss was about.

  The history of this event, as I understand it, is that on a lark they had a whistling contest at one town festival. Then word spread. The contest mushroomed. One morning they woke up and there were contestants coming in from everywhere to demonstrate their whistling chops. Spain. Israel. China. Japan. New York City. California. You name it, they’d sent a whistler. Without return postage, if possible.

  • • •

  Whistling has a long history. As long as people have been capable of making funny noises on purpose, it has been part of the rich vocabulary of music. However, it didn’t really achieve success as an art form until the turn of the twentieth century.

  I learned all of this at Whistling School, conducted by a woman I’m going to refer to as Doris because that was the vibe she gave off.

  To say that the International Whistling School (I have my graduation certificate sitting around somewhere) gave us an exhaustively thorough account of the history of whistling would be a gross understatement. We started with the whistling of the Greeks and Romans and worked gradually through the highlights up to the present day.

  The biggest problem with doing a history of whistling is that it is a noise we have been able to make ever since we evolved to have the proper equipment. But documentation is lacking.

  Doris lamented the fact that in so many ancient cultures the word for “hissing” and the word for “whistling” were the same. In the Bible, for instance, it was impossible to tell whether God wanted us to “whistle at the ends of the earth” or “hiss at the ends of the earth,” one of the numerous Bible-translating problems that are bound to lead to a certain amount of awkwardness when we come to the Day of Judgment. “What’s this about being in subjection to owl husbands?”

  (Yes. There’s actually a Bible from 1944 that says women should be in subjection to their “owl husbands,” but this is a typo.)

  Because of this minor verb confusion, you couldn’t tell which one people were doing until you got all the way to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where a young squire was described: “Syngynge he was, or floytynge, al the day.” Floytynge could have been whistling or playing the flute, but Doris thought it was probably the former.

  Whistling really started to Happen in a big way after the Civil War. There were whistlers before that—Samuel Pepys, the famous English diarist, reported hearing someone who could whistle like a bird—but it took vaudeville to turn it into a massive fad, when George W. Johnson, a former slave, climbed up the charts. Unfortunately, because everything used to be terrible, his top-selling tracks all had names like “The Whistling Coon,” but at least he seemed to make a decent living out of it.

  Up until this point whistling was mostly an activity for men alarmed by prices they had just heard, birds, or birds alarmed by prices they had just heard. But then along came Mrs. Alice Shaw.

  Alice Shaw was the most famous lady whistler of the nineteenth century.

  In addition to being the most famous lady whistler, Alice was definitely the most uncomfortably sexy.

  “All beholders held their breaths as the broad expanse of snowy decolleted bosom heaved gently,” wrote the Des Moines Mail and Times in 1889, “the handsome head and face uplifted, the rich ruby lips puckered kissably, and a soft, sweet, silvery trill shot forth, at once electrifying the audience and suggesting the presence of an impossibly cultured canary.”

  Yes, really. I did some more research into Alice Shaw, just to see if her whistling was always that sexy, and the short answer is that it was not.

  “Certainly it cannot be claimed that whistling is the most dignified and important form of art,” the Musical World of November 3, 1888, noted, describing Mrs. Shaw’s performance. They did not mention the heaving décolletage or rich ruby lips, instead contenting themselves with observing that “There is but one Mrs. Shaw; we shall not be charged with discourtesy when we hope that, for her sake, and our own, there may not be another” because “a generation of whistlers is an appalling thing to imagine.”

  • • •

  Whistling sprouted and blossomed and became ubiquitous over the following decades.

  There was even a radio show in the forties called The Whistler. It was like The Twilight Zone, but with more eerie, high-pitched pucker whistling and less wrestling with moral issues using the framework of science fiction. “I am the Whistler,” the voice on the radio intoned. “And I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, many secrets, hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes, I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak.” I don’t know how he found this out while whistling. I would have assumed that the people with strange tales and secrets who stepped into the shadows would have heard him approaching from a long way away. But I guess it was a different time.

  There is something of a schism in the whistling community over different types of whistling. Pucker whistling is the kind you picture when you picture whistling.

  Palate whistling, on the other hand, comes out high and pinched through the teeth and includes a sound like a moon-bounce slowly deflating. It seems to be a little more versatile than pucker whistling in terms of the number of notes you can produce per minute. It is the best for summoning cabs, by a mile.

  If Pucker Whistlers are the Jets, Palate Whistlers are the Sharks. They could have the world’s least threatening rumble. And for whatever reason—depending on whom you listened to, it was Judge Favoritism or Sheer Merit Because Pucker Whistling Is Simply More Pleasing to the Ear—Palat
e Whistlers tended to place lower in competition than Pucker Whistlers.

  Finger Whistling is not even permitted in championship competition. The use of fingers puts it into the category of “allied art,” which is whistling while doing something else. Your work, for example.

  • • •

  There was a whole phase of popular culture in the mid-twentieth century where every movie or TV show seemed to have a whistle or two in its opening credits. The Andy Griffith Show. The High and the Mighty.

  But then it began fading out until it was just Sitters on the Docks of Bays, Dwarves Who Work in Mines, and Cartoon Characters Trying to Act Nonchalant.

  There’s been a pop resurgence of whistling in recent years—“Pumped Up Kicks,” Flo Rida’s inventively titled “Whistle,” “Moves Like Jagger,” among numerous others. It would, however, be hard to say that whistling is back in the mainstream, especially if you looked around you at the whistlers’ convention. The audience consisted of the whistlers themselves, their somewhat beleaguered-looking families, a few local thrill seekers, and some elderly people who had been bused over from their retirement home to take it all in.

  • • •

  The first performance I heard was the Vassar a cappella whistling group. This was their big off-campus trip every year. I’m sure it was a big inducement. “Join the whistling a cappella group!” posters probably proclaimed all over campus. “Spend spring break in a place actively worse than where you are right now.” Not that there was anything wrong with Louisburg. There wasn’t. It was a lovely place, and everyone there seemed nice. I liked all the stoplights. There was a good coffee shop/bookstore that had a nice display out to celebrate Gay History Month, which, in my naive way, was not what I had expected of Louisburg, North Carolina.

  Doris crept onstage with a harp. Her demeanor at all times was that of someone trying to avoid waking a person sleeping in the next room.

  She plucked the harp. Twang dinkle twangle twang-tringgggg twingle. (That was my attempt to write how the harp sounded. William Shakespeare, eat your onomatopoeic heart out!) “Do you hear the Autoharp?” Doris asked. Twingle tring tring tring tringggg.