Noises off

Home! I was in the Chicago area for a week, doing some coaching, then I visited my sister, and then went up to Holy Cross Monastery for an overnight retreat. I returned yesterday, looking forward to sleeping in my very own apartment, on my very own bed. Washed my face, brushed my hair, lay my tired head down on my very own most excellent pillow and, anticipating bliss, turned out the light.

But I had forgotten something (cue menacing music): my very own upstairs neighbors. And their clompy shoes, and their TV and their music, and their running through their apartment, all of which started after 10:30 PM and went on intermittently for hours.

Now, lest you think I am a sleep wimp, I should mention that both the house I stayed at in Illinois and the monastery are located near active freight train tracks, and I slept just fine, and thank you for asking.

Part of the problem here is the way my building was put together in the first place back in 1954. I learned a lot about this a week before I left for Chicago, when my bathroom ceiling collapsed because of a water leak in the apartment upstairs. While waiting for the hole to be repaired, I measured the distance between my ceiling and my neighbor's floor. Can you guess the measurement? Perhaps you cannot.

Four inches. A two-by-four with a little room on each side. Because the joists are really about 1 1/2 by 3 1/2. Because they are cut while the wood is green, and green wood shrinks as it dries, and... well, never mind.

So there is four inches of space. And the space is filled with... can you imagine? No, you cannot.

Air! And, as I discovered while cleaning up the debris from the collapse, double-edge razor blades. Do any of you remember that there used to be slots at the back of or along the side of medicine cabinets for the disposal of used razorblades? As a child, I often wondered where the blades went when you dropped them in the slot. Now I know. They didn't go much of anywhere until the ceiling crashed down. Then they went all over the floor.

Given the poor design of my building, we residents are always going to hear some goings-on upstairs, no matter how quiet our neighbors try to be, and all of us have to be tolerant and considerate. That is a given. But I think that, if you come in at 1 AM and turn on loud music, you're not putting quite enough effort into being quiet. Ditto if you move furniture around at 3 AM. If you throw a party that starts at 10 PM, you have no carpets to speak of, your guests are all wearing shoes, the music is loud, and your windows are open, the casual observer might form the impression that you don't care enough to even seem to be trying.

I am not categorically opposed to loud. There is nothing I love in quite the same way as I love the sound of a Strat roaring out of a great big amp. But it really does have to be Jeff Beck playing the thing, and even then, not after lights-out.

I could count sheep, I suppose, but that doesn't actually work...

...because they sound too much like my very own neighbors.