There’s a truck parked in the street outside my house—a lime-green pickup truck with a little lime-green trailer attached to it, looking like a big shiny version of something you’d give to your grandson to play with in the sandbox.
I wouldn’t have noticed it at all—I’m not the kind of guy who dashes to the window every time a truck rolls past, just to see who’s getting something delivered or serviced—except that this truck has been sitting there idling at some high number of RPM’s (or RPG’s or IUD’s or whatever they call it. I’m not much of a truck guy.)
It’s so loud I can’t think of anything else.
There’s a hose running from the lime-green trailer into my neighbor’s yard. I don’t know what my neighbor is having poured into (or sucked out of) his property, but I’m sure I’ll find out before long. Neighbors talk. Maybe he’s getting a few hundred gallons of pistachio ice cream pumped into tubs in his basement.
I wouldn’t mention all of this to you, except that I can’t get my mind off the lime-green truck with the high RSVP’s. It’s so loud I can’t concentrate on anything else. I was just sitting here at my laptop, trying to write today’s column, but now all my concentration is shot.
To make matters worse, every few minutes or so—just about the time that I get so used to the noise that I barely notice it any more—the engine goes into a rhythmic revving-and-pausing, revving-and-pausing mode that rattles the pictures hanging on the wall. It’s the kind of rhythmic vibration that would set your imagination afire if you heard it from the other side of a thin wall in a cheap motel.
And then after five minutes or so, the truck settles into its steady rumble once again. Finally. Maybe it’s finished doing whatever it was doing and is ready to move on.
And then more revving-and-pausing, revving-and pausing.
And then the steady rumble again.
And, again, the revving-and-pausing, revving-and-pausing.
If this were a cheap motel, you’d want to go knock on the door, just to shake that guy’s hand.
But this isn’t a cheap motel. It’s the street just outside my window. And it’s disturbing that a lime green truck with a little lime green trailer can spawn such salacious thoughts in the head of an otherwise normal writer-type human being.
There’s probably some kind of village ordinance governing this kind of thing. (The noise, I mean. Not the salacious thoughts about revving truck engines. I don’t know how you’d regulate something like that, unless the guy was stupid enough to write his thoughts down and let other people read them. But who would be that stupid?)
Look, I know that sometimes we need trucks to come and do things for us that we can’t do ourselves, and sometimes those trucks make a bit of noise. But really, this has been going on for a half-hour or more. How can a guy be expected to write with a racket like that out in the street?
Still, who am I to complain? If anything, it’s my neighbors who have every right to grouse about the racket when my band gets together to rehearse in the garage. But they never do—even though the cheap motel in town probably sees a spike in business on nights when we play “Mony Mony” a dozen times and still can’t get it right.
Besides, I don’t want to be that guy who goes out and carps about all the noise. I grew up in a neighborhood with a few crabs like that on the block—the old guy who would dash out of his house to take your ball if it landed in his yard, or the old witch at the corner who called the cops when we tried to fly little balsa-wood planes in the street. I swore I would never turn into one of those codgers when I got old.
But now here’s this lime-green truck with its little lime-green trailer making suggestive noises out there in the street, and it’s so loud and intrusive I can’t get any writing done. Not a single word.
But wait. A moment ago the sound changed. It got a bit softer as if the truck and trailer were driving away….
But now it’s louder again, and when I look out the window I see that the rig has changed positions. Now it isn’t parked at my neighbor’s house across the street. Now it’s parked right next door, and the hose is running across that neighbor’s yard.
And now here comes that revving-and-pausing, revving-and-pausing, rattling a different wall, shaking different pictures in their frames. If this were a cheap motel, you’d be wondering why you weren’t getting the same room service for your $39.95.
And now it’s been almost an hour of being serenaded by that lime-green truck with its little, lime-green trailer. Anything would be better than this mind-numbing torture. I’d even rather listen to “A Horse with No Name” played over and over again, until….
But wait…. What’s that I hear?
Silence?
Silence!
The truck has moved on! It’s quiet on the street once again!
Finally, a guy sitting at his laptop in his house has the quiet he needs to think.
…to think…about…um-m-m….
Oh, great. NOW what am I supposed to write about?
Maybe I’ll have a story to tell you next week if the neighbors invite me over for pistachio ice cream.
