Back from Tbilisi: The Sounds of Silence

After two days back in Kingston, I begin to understand the term "the silence is deafening." I live in a sixth storey apartment above one of Kingston's busiest thoroughfares, and I keep my windows open for the fresh air. Day and night, there is constant traffic noise and sirens of every type and the sounds of automobile collisions at the busy corner below me. On most nights, but especially on weekends, I hear below me loud drunken arguments between a man and a woman, not always the same man and woman, and the celebratory sounds of people partying. In the morning there is birdsong and more traffic noise as folks head into town to work. This is a noisy place. Yet all I hear now is silence, deafening silence that I had never heard here before. What's different? In Georgia, I lived in a second storey apartment with a fair-sized courtyard and with apartments next to and across from me. I was separated from a street that was actually far busier than this one in Kingston. Of course, I still heard birdsong in the morning, but I also heard other, more satisfying sounds. I heard cats talking with each other across the courtyard. I heard mothers calling their children home. I heard couples talking in a language I did not understand, yet understood the loving feeling. I heard and saw young boys in the courtyard playing soccer or racing bicycles down the tunnel by which residents entered or left, then slamming on their brakes and screeching to a stop before to avoid crashing into the building walls. The cool of the evening brought construction sounds. I would often hear someone hammering in an apartment near me. Even after dark, a man in a second storey apartment was installing new windows. Often, I heard a classical pianist playing in an apartment at the end of the yard near my Air BnB,or a fantastic jazz pianist playing at the other end, or a violinist playing in an apartment across the courtyard. These were positive, joyous sounds, not the everyday unaccented sounds of North America. It is in the lack of this music and this familial love that I am experiencing a deafening silence.