Last week, I told my kids that what I wanted to do on Mother’s Day was spend some time outside, if the weather was good, and maybe plant a few annuals together. We could head out to a local garden center and fill some empty hanging baskets we have with petunias and pansies. It’s just a simple activity that brings a little pleasure to a stressed-out mom, whose kids are old enough not to eat the dirt, and will no longer impulsively or inadvertently tear the flowers off their stems.
There was not a rousing response to my request but the family obligingly followed along, game enough to head off to the garden center and help me carry a couple of trays filled with colorful annuals.
The weather was gorgeous, and while all our moods were strained—this was the first Sunday in a few weeks where we did not have to empty our sparklingly-clean, clutter-free house for a realtor to welcome strangers looking to buy—we were able to get to the point where we exchanged a few smiles.
Problems emerged, however, once we reconvened in the back yard. A neighbor on an adjacent street had been playing very loud music for the better part of the morning. While outside weeding earlier, my ears had been regaled with low-quality rap music about "getting head"—that was the chorus line. The neighbor, who lives in a newly-constructed duplex within view of our yard, was nowhere to be seen at first, nor could we discern the actual source of the music. There was no party. Instead he had apparently been tinkering with his truck and, we later saw, was preparing to build some kind of flimsy car port out of several aluminum rods.
Ordinarily there is music coming from somewhere on weekend days. Our next-door neighbors like to play loud Caribbean tunes from their car, especially if they’re either washing it or getting ready to head out somewhere. They leave the car doors open and sing loudly along with the music. This is often short-lived enough that we don’t complain, although it can be terribly annoying at times because of the way sound can invade private space. Another neighbor a couple doors down will occasionally host barbecue parties in the back yard, and rap or R&B will drift over to our yard along with the pot smoke.
But on this day it was different, most notably because those two homes were so peacefully, blissfully quiet, and this fairly new neighbor, with no evident festivities outside, was playing music loud enough that we had to shut the windows of the house just to think clearly indoors.
Once we were ready to do some planting of flowers, the music had changed to some traditional Caribbean music in Spanish, which was relatively tolerable if only because any lyrics about sex were not comprehensible to us. There was a lilting guitar melody and a rousing beat.
All the same, the volume made it impossible to communicate. We sat at our picnic table and tried to have a snack together. Our speech at a regular volume could not be heard to one another even while we sat there. We had to shout to be heard over the neighbor’s music.
It did not take long to realize that we needed to report this to the police non-emergency phone number, as the neighbor showed no signs of realizing that his sharing of his cultural appreciations was likely in violation of some kind of noise ordinance. Our heads were pounding. Neither my husband nor I wanted to go confront the guy, which could not be done by shouting over the fence because he wouldn’t have heard us, and we did not want to attract attention. I felt like a coward needing to call the police, and I fretted about it all afternoon after the call was placed. (The response: "We’ll send a car over as soon as we can.")
We gave up on planting any flowers and all came inside, shutting the windows, to get some peace and quiet. My children were moaning and groaning about the music for some time to follow, so we put on a movie for them just to help them change the subject. It’s one thing to tolerate the loud sounds, but another entirely to have to put up with your own kids carrying on about it. I had no more reserves in my well of optimism and cheeriness about neighborly ways on this day.
After an hour of hunkering down, feeling terrorized and penned indoors on this loveliest day of May, we ventured back out into the yard. The music had changed from traditional to reggaeton, which has a relentless, pounding dance beat. I think the volume had been inched up slightly. Between songs, we could briefly hear the birds singing around us, and then they’d get drowned out again.
My husband and I looked at each other and decided we had but one solution, short of the police finally showing up (which they never did): the personal listening device. We busted out the headphones, which we think our neighbor would have been wise to do as well, and we proceeded to blast our own music of choice in our ears while he went about mowing the lawn and I dug into some dirt. I selected the angriest, foulest-mouth Ben Folds I had available and played it as loud as I needed to in order to drown out the sounds in the air, which was quite a bit louder than I ordinarily would choose to play it. I handled the annuals I’d bought roughly and probably scowled the whole time I worked.
Later, we got a reprieve from the music when the neighbor’s CD evidently played to its end, and he opted for the radio instead. He flipped stations ceaselessly, but fortunately only turned it up unbearably loud when he came across a song he liked.
