Eliza, Sarah, Michelle, and I just moved into a new apartment in a neighborhood that's flush with kids, and every afternoon, barring rain, blizzard, or everyone being grounded, the streets and alleyways thicken with the voices of children playing. Since we live on the second floor the voices rise like a flock of starlings and settle on the windowsills, a chirping chattering mass of partly clear vowels and slurred yelling that in its own raucous way soothes and cheers.
What do these voices say? Everything and nothing, really. There are the usual territorial yells or blowing off steam. There's laughter, sometimes a cry of pain or outrage. There are the loud counting off of hide-and-seek, the breathy chant of a cadenced jump roping song, ratta-tat-tats of boys playing war. Mostly it's just schmoozing, small talk of no particular weight that glues the kids together in a casual yet solid way, the kind of talk full of the normal that makes ordinary life safe if not memorable.
Of course, it can be annoying, too. Just underneath the window of my office is where the young boy from downstairs and his compatriots have their bullpen. They practice their pitching against the basement door, and the loud repetitive thump of the tennis ball uncouples my train of thought quicker than hunger or a just-remembered almost-forgotten appointment. Or the squeal of girls, pitched just at that note which pries off the skin and shudders the spine -- often the meaning of the universe slips just past my grasp as one of those shrill blasts curdles the air.
But mostly it's a comforting sound, the sound of children racked and buoyed by their own growing, their own mixing and matching of boundaries and codes. The best talk to listen to is when the kids don't know they're being eavesdropped. We have a porch just off the kitchen, and with the kitchen window open, we can hear all their secret conferences and plots. For some reason they either ignore us or believe we don't exist, or that if we do exist, we wouldn't dare listen to their plannings. In this talking the kids begin the dance of diplomacy, a respect for and irritation with rules, a patient exasperation with the gnarly briar of human personalities. In this talk they work out the multitude of etiquettes that allow them to get along. Here they deal with knotty moral issues: Should I leave my sister behind if my friend wants to play only with me? So and so says I'm a baby: what should I do? I have two dollars to spend at the store and my mother says I can't spend it on candy: What's the limit before she gets angry? All of this has to be sorted out and assigned some understanding, and they talk it through and talk it through until it holds a shape.
At night, before they go to sleep, the two girls talk to each other. Most of the time we tell them to just get to sleep, eager to have some peace for ourselves. But they murmur on anyway, determined to have the last word. And even that, at the end of a long day, is not an unpleasant sound, the soft vowels and consonants of their talk and laughter floating up like cartoon balloons, dirigibles full of the ordinary navigating the darkness. There'll be more talk tomorrow, so many more words, and we all take some comfort from that.
(March 1996)