Quiet please | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Kathy Manos Penn is a native of the “Big Apple,” who settled in the “Peach City” – Atlanta. A former English teacher now happily retired from a corporate career in communications, she writes a weekly column for the Dunwoody Crier and the Highlands Newspaper. Read her blogs and columns and purchase her books, “The Ink Penn: Celebrating the Magic in the Everyday” and “Lord Banjo the Royal Pooch,” on her website theinkpenn.com or Amazon.

    Surely I'm not the only one who requires quiet time. Let's start with the mornings. For years, I rolled out of bed, fixed my cup of coffee and took it to my office upstairs. I was accompanied by the cat and the dog and silence. My husband didn't get up as early as I did in those days, as he was retired while I was still working. That meant I had at least an hour of quiet to check my emails and gear up for the hustle and bustle of my work day.

    I've never been one to turn on the TV or the radio when I get up. And now that I'm retired and don't have to take my coffee straight up to my office, I want to carry it to my recliner or the porch with the morning paper and my tablet. I make my way to the office eventually to write my columns and work on my book and tend to routine tasks.

    Until I gear up to face the day with a workout, a shower, and a change of clothes, I want quiet. Oh, you can talk to me, but I don't want to hear the TV or radio. Sounds simple enough, right?

    It would be simple if not for my husband's tendency to get his coffee and open his Chromebook to check emails and Facebook. That's fine until he clicks on a video and it blares across the living room. That habit makes me crazy.

    I could truthfully say that it's hard to concentrate on a Wall Street Journal article with voices in the background, but even when I'm just checking my email, playing Words with Friends, or reading the comics in the Atlanta paper, I find the videos irritating.

    I feel the same way about my reading time in the evenings. Periodically, I say, "We don't have much of interest recorded; do you want to turn off the TV and read?" My husband will agree, but to him, reading includes listening to a video on his Chromebook. Aaargh. He's very well trained about no noise in the bedroom once I start reading in bed at night, and I think it should be obvious that the same rule applies to reading in the living room. I need quiet in the mornings to gear up, and I require quiet at night to wind down. I can't say why I'm this way, but I am.

    I was relieved and amused when I read a WSJ article one morning that described the quiet cars on the NY railway. Yes, there are cars where people neither talk on their cell phones nor play videos or music on their phones or computers. Sounds like heaven to me. If I were an NYC commuter, I'd pay whatever it takes to ride in that car. The article described the horror of the regular quiet car passengers on a day when the train had too few cars to designate one as quiet. I imagined them going through withdrawal and could picture a whole car of people silently screaming with their hands over their ears like the figure in the Edvard Munch painting called, appropriately, The Scream.

    Not that I ever thought my need for quiet made me strange, but I felt vindicated when I read the quiet car. I know my husband still thinks I'm strange and finds my irritation irritating, but don't you think life be boring if we were two peas in a pod?

    Kathy Manos Penn is a Georgia resident. Her latest book, "Lord Banjo the Royal Pooch," and her collection of columns, "The Ink Penn: Celebrating the Magic in the Everyday," are available on Amazon. Contact Kathy at inkpenn119@gmail.com.