Terry Marotta:
Time To Tune Out
The Excess Noise

My cat hears things the rest of us don’t. Abraham has other troubles too, but the worst is these phantom noises. Year after year I have taken him to various veterinarians, who can find no cause for these auditory hallucinations. Yet the poor little fellow still suddenly cranes his neck, then ducks and looks up again—exactly like a miniature version of a King Kong getting buzzed by miniature airplanes.

So today I’m thinking maybe he should just start doing what the rest of us do in this noisy culture: tune out most things, and only half-attend the rest. Because between the radio jingles and the billboards and the sudden surging volume of the television ads, it’s true that most of us absorb only a fraction of what’s out there.

I know my own family members don’t hear half of what I tell them.

For example, I recently took Abe to the vet yet again. As usual, she came up empty on mite patrol, but on learning that the cat had been executing a strange slow dance punctuated by retching, she also suggested a couple of different remedies, one being an inoculation between the shoulder blades designed to knock out any one of a dozen critters that might be causing this problem.

When I came home and told my husband about this regimen he thought I was saying that some doctor had given ME a shot between the shoulder blades to purge ME of parasites. I hadn’t seen his eyes grow that round since the time I showed up at his workplace with Santa stickers all over my forehead. It was pretty funny.

Then that night when my boy came home from school all weary and burdened, I thought to cheer him up by telling of the cat’s second remedy.

"Check it out! " I exclaimed, pointing to a tube of tuna-flavored lip cream the vet had given me to smear around Abe’s mouth, in case a furball was the real cause of his dry-heaves ghost-dance.

He looked at me with deep alarm. Turns out he too thought the stuff was for me.

But my favorite example of this whole half-listening thing came a few days later when I was sorting the day’s mail on the couch in my study, while one of our older "extra" kids sat at my desk surfing the web. I had just opened a small package to discover that a reader had sent me a tiny green silk pillow, maybe four inches by five inches in size and stuffed with fragrant pine needles.

"Hey, smell this!" I said, tossing it over to the 24-year-old.

"What IS it?" he asked, catching it with one hand and bringing it to his nose.

"They call it a sachet. You’re supposed put it in your underwear drawer. You know—so you’ll smell nice."

He peered and peered at the plump silk pouch, turning it slowly in his hands and then, politely but with troubled expression said, "You’re supposed to put THIS in your UNDERWEAR? But wouldn’t it be kind of...BULKY?"

He too had heard only half.

So I don’t know.

Undie-enhancers. Human cootie shots. Fish-flavored lip balm for humans. Maybe we should give up even pretending to hear each other right and, like Abe the cat, tune in to our own personal sound-tracks.

Write to Terry at tmarotta@comcast.net or PO Box 270, Winchester, Mass., 01890