Happy Independence Day!
It is 9:30 am on the north side of the DFW metroplex, and already a lovely 93 degrees. I suppose if there’s a mathematical relationship between the time and temp that it will be 100 degrees by 10am (which it has been the past few days) and 120 by 12:00 noon. I’m hoping the whole algorithm falls apart before that point (and you’re right–I have no idea what an algorithm is, or if I even spelled it correctly. I can live with that). Because of the heat, I have not stepped up to the bar and organized one of those family-fun kids 4th of July parades. Unless we did it at 4:00 in the morning, it’s just too hot, and I hate hot. In fact, I’d enjoy the 4th of July a lot more if we could move it to mid-October. I think I shall have to file that thought away with the whole abolishing-daylight-savings-time-and-just-letting-the-masochists-who-enjoy-losing-an-hour-of-sleep-every-spring-get-up-an-hour-earlier-themselves thing. But that’s another post….
I woke up this morning thinking of what liberty means to me. Then I had to get up and kill a spider in the bathtub, because once the 5yr-old told me it was there, I couldn’t just leave it to run off and hide and grow into a great big spider. And there’s always the possibility that it’s a brown recluse, although I have yet to actually run across one in my house. I guess they really are reclusive. The Greta Garbo of the spider world.
Anyway…liberty. Right. One of the principals upon which our nation was founded. As a teenager, I visited the Berlin Wall twice (if you were born in the late 1980s or later, you might wanna Google ‘Berlin Wall’). I went behind it, into East Berlin, and also into Czechoslovakia. I saw first hand what it meant not to have liberty. Food, clothes, they had those things–not the best, not in abundance, but basic needs were met. Liberty, nope. The other thing that was so obviously lacking–obvious even to a 15 year old whose only agenda was finding romance in Europe, which, again, is another post–was a spirit of joy. Streets were eerily quiet, even in the evening rush of workers and shoppers on their way home. Smiles were rare–until someone found out we were Americans, and then it got kinda Twilight-Zonesque, but again…. It was an experience that changed me, and I will never take our liberty for granted.
But this isn’t a political blog (oh–please don’t try to entice me into a political discussion in the comment section. I will stick my fingers in my ears and sing “LALALALA.” I’m not going to get into it. I may, however, try to track you down and call you at home and discuss politics. Because that’s always fun).
One of my Business Law professors (yes, I took two semesters of Business Law. Are you impressed? Don’t be. I am about to share with you fully 50% of what I remember) described the legal concept of liberty by saying that you have the right to engage in an activity up to the point where it infringes upon another persons right to not be negatively impacted by that behavior. Of course, we all wanted the concrete, black-and-white-definition of “negatively impacted,” to which he answered something along the lines of “HA!” Because it’s one of those gray things, evidently, that allow our citizenry to sue each other for just about anything.
I loved Business Law, but in those years after college the only chance I got to use all that information, which at that time I still remembered, was to threaten to sue the jewelry store that informed me three weeks before my wedding that they wouldn’t be able to make my ring for the agreed-upon price after all (and it turned out to be a lovely ring).
Until I became a mother. Turns out the whole concept of rights dovetails right in with another legal concept that applies to parenting: the nuisance ordinance.
Let me explain. I have in my household two individuals whom we shall from this point refer to as The Soundtrack and The Narrator. The Soundtrack provides the score of my family’s daily routine, and at any given moment is emitting some form of hum or click or whir or badabadabadadeeedeeePOW! Yesterday, The Soundtrack learned he could pop his tongue so loudly that The Mommy would think someone had fired a gun in the house. The Soundtrack is also fond of adding elements of percussion to this score: pencils on granite countertops, the kicking of a toe against my unfinished pecan wainscoting.
The Narrator does exactly what the name implies. For instance, while driving into town, The Narrator is apt to produce something along the lines of “Oh, look! A truck carrying a bunch of cars. Red cars. Blue cars. Silver cars–is that silver or gray? Oh, we’re driving over a bridge. Look down there–those trees look like bushes. There’s the QT. I love QT! That man is picking his nose.”
Both The Soundtrack and The Narrator enjoy setting their various specialties to music which, unfortunately, makes neither of them more enjoyable. In fact, it ups the intolerance level by a factor of at least ten. Which is why one of most common phrases in my house is “WOULD YOU PLEASE BE QUIET?!?!!” Yes, it is all caps because it is normally shouted. And yes, I’ve included the dreaded question mark/exclamation mark combo because it’s usually more of a threat than a request. The funny thing is that the two citizens of Morenotopia that use this phrase the most often are–take a guess–The Soundtrack and The Narrator, toward each other.
You wondered when I was getting back to the whole liberty-business law tie-in, didn’t you? I don’t blame you. I had doubts myself. Well, here it is.
I spend a lot of my waking hours negotiating just how much soundtracking and narrating constitues infringement and negative impact. Turns out The Soundtracker has a very low tolerance for any narration whatsoever, and The Narrator has similar feelings about soundtracking. Both have an oddly intense need for peace and quiet, which I find ironic. In fact, the words poetic justice would come to mind except that there’s nothing poetic about two screaming, snarling, shrieking children in the living room while I’m trying to write.
Several times a day, I have to remind one of them that it would be unjust to deny the other their right to emanate noise. I extol to them the virtues of liberty, decry the injustices of dictatorship, remind them how precious our freedoms are.
And then I tell them all to shut up and go to their rooms.
Tags: 4th of July, Berlin Wall, heat, Independence Day, liberty, Narrator, nuisance, Parenting, Soundtrack, spiders
