Auditory Memory

I'm sure that I'm like other people when I say that I remember the oddest, seemingly unimportant things. This is as true for memories of sounds as anything.

Long ago, when I was seven or so, I was in Chicago, staying, along with my younger sister, at my grandparent's apartment, the first floor of a two-flat. My aunt, uncle, and cousins lived upstairs. We were there whilst my mother and dad were finding us a place to live in Royal Oak, Michigan. We were in the process of moving there from the Kansas City Area.

There were regular sounds: the sounds of the machines at the factory on the corner of the next block; the sounds of the trains at the end of the street: slow starting noises for the commuter trains coming up from the station down at Lawrence Avenue, and the ones slowing going down to it, and the almost noiseless hum of just the electric motors (without the growl of the diesel engine) as the fast-moving 400 would go by. The bell on the bicycle or tricycle I was riding was another. And then, just the foot-falls of a walker. City neighbourhoods can be very quiet, indeed. Traffic noise from Foster Avenue, flowing, starting, and stopping at the light there.

Five years later, when my father was very ill, we moved from the San Francisco Area, whence we'd just moved in the Spring of 1963 (from Royal Oak) to Chicago. My father died within a month of moving there. We would live, in that same apartment for four years (I wish it could have been much longer), and apart from some of the bicycle bells, I knew many of the same sounds. New sounds, night sounds through my bedroom window mingled with the sounds of a ball game from Cincinnati or St. Louis; robins on a Spring morning, which I'd taken for the girl next door practising her piccolo before school (when I asked her about it later, she thought I was crazy...but she thought that, anyway by that time).

Sometimes these are such vivid sounds, from so long ago.