Stop, Look and Listen?
So I’m in the park, yeah, got a thermos full of pu-erh tea, got my Kobe Libra Colour, found a comfy bench, settled down to read. It’s not a big park, some benches, a few trees, a playground, but it’s close to home, and there’s usually people in it. Good for me: I enjoy living alone, but I also like to get out of my tiny flat. I’m a semi-regular fixture. I get nods and smiles from the neighbours. It’s pleasant.
Now mostly I don’t want to talk to people. No offense, people are great, but I communicate for a living, and I talk and teach all day, so after work I want some quiet time.
That’s why I read. It slows down my brain. Happy medium. Nowhere near the stimulation of a computer screen, needs a bit more attention than watching television. I’m not claiming that it’s meditation, because it’s not, but it’s my kind of altered state, you know? I haven’t quite recaptured the kind of escape from reality I used to get when I was a kid, but yeah, it’s a good way to wind down.
The e-reader I use has a lighted screen, so even as the sun goes down and it gets darker, I have no problem reading. At some point the lights in the park turn on. They’re almost bright enough to read by, but I don’t need them.
This park is in the middle of two blocks of flats, next to the street, and catty-corner to two car parks. The community centre and police post are down the ways a bit, there’s a mosque and a temple a little distance away, and there’s a three food places nearby.
Because of where the park is, people are always looking for directions, and I guess the person to ask is the giant, peaceful-looking man sitting on a bench, looking at the piece of plastic in his hands. No one has any idea that I’m reading how Monkey’s being a right pest to the Jade Emperor of Heaven and has just eaten all his best peaches.
So I have these headphones - Anker Soundcore Space Ones. I used to use earbuds, but the trouble with AirPods Pro is that they’re so unobtrusive that people can’t see them. The headphones are great. The reviews mostly agreed that they had pretty good noise cancellation, and with a bit of tweaking in the mobile app, good sound as well. The latter wasn’t a major concern for me as I mostly listen to podcasts, although I did adjust the EQ a little to even out the sound, make it a bit brighter, counteract the bass-heavy and somewhat muddy tuning that the cans come with.
When I’m reading I usually either have white noise going (the sound of rain - something about reading while it’s raining soothes me) or I’m listening to classical music. Can’t listen to podcasts because that would take attention away from the book: I reserve those for when I’m commuting.
But mostly I got the headphones because you can see them. They’re not hidden. They’re not subtle. They are, in fact, fairly big and obvious. I got the blue ones. Black ones would fade into my hair, I think, and there were sort of champagne-coloured ones but they weren’t in stock and I didn’t like them anyway. These blue ones suit me fine, only I managed to get a couple of drops of chocolate sauce on the ear cushion, and even after I wiped them off there’s a couple of brown dots but I can live with that.
So you can imagine me, in the twilight, sitting in the park, with my headphones on, reading my book, pausing occasionally to sip my tea, looking up if I sense someone going past, nodding and smiling at the neighbours, waving at the horde of small boys on bicycles when they go (sometimes when they buy water from the corner shop they have trouble opening the bottles and if I happen to be there they ask me to help so now I regularly wind up twisting open bottles for all of them and in return if they see me they whoop and ring their bells), and mostly having a peaceful enough time because the headphones signal to most people (correctly) that I CAN’T HEAR THEM.
Except for this guy, who stopped, stood next to me (I didn’t notice him) and talked at me, and then I turned, and looked at him, and noticed he was a deliveryman, and he was still talking, and I pulled one ear-cup away from my head (which stops whatever’s playing, oh the wonders of technology) only to hear him ask me, painfully slowly, as though I was some kind of idiot, or someone who doesn’t understand English, where block 123 was. And I’m not an idiot, and my English is far from perfect but more than functional, and the real problem is that I had noise-cancelling headphones on and the sound of the rain going. So I looked up at him (because I was sitting down, and he was standing up, and even then I was close to being at eye-level with him because I am tall and he is not-tall) and asked him to repeat himself.
“Sorry, what?” I said.
And then he asked me again, where block 123 was. That’s when I turned my head, slowly, slowly to one side, till I was looking at the side of the block of flats next to me, where the number of the block was painted, much, much larger than life, exactly the number of the block that he was looking for because I was sitting next to it, and then I pointed to it, and asked, tremulously, as though I wasn’t sure, “Block 123?”
I turned back to him and he stammered a thank-you and headed off to deliver whatever he had to deliver.
I was so amused I forgot to be annoyed because really, if you can’t see a giant “123” painted on the side of a block of flats while you’re looking for it then I shouldn’t be surprised that he didn’t see the big blue earphones I was wearing. I went back to my book because I wanted to know how Monkey was going to get out from under the mountain that Buddha had plonked on top of him.