Disquiet

A new, small, inexpensive Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood recently filled the space vacated by a smaller, even less expensive Chinese restaurant. The old place was here for over a decade. The new place has been in place for a week. The new place is larger than the old place because an interior wall was torn down, doubling the seating area. Still, there are only eight tables, seating between two to four people each.

Yesterday at lunch I sat, party of one, at one of the tables for two. The place’s growing pains were evident in various ways. Two thirds of the menu wasn’t yet available. The benefits of a proper lunch menu have not yet been acknowledged by the proprietors. People kept dropping by to ask if they serve the same food — dim sum — as the previous restaurant, which they don’t exactly, though they do serve many dumpling dishes and appetizers. Annoyance can sound similar between different languages, on both sides of a counter.

The kitchen was quite close to where diners sat. Even though the wall between those two sections had been preserved, sounds of the kitchen were evident. Much of the sonic activity was simply a matter of cooking — the rough texture of a wok being pushed around, the light crunch of vegetables being quickly diced, the pouring of liquids, the flash of oil caught by a flame. Many other sounds served as evidence of those growing pains: the grumbling of people getting in each other’s way, the anxiety of misplaced or confused orders; things being dropped, searched for.

Restaurant kitchens are rarely places of repose. Still, there is a distinction to be drawn between frenetic and chaotic, between harried and nervous. This isn’t intended as a criticism of the place. Restaurants rarely open firing on all cylinders. They’re more like Broadway plays, which get previews before they’re fit for review. For all the anxiety inherent in the sounds of the learning curve, there was a clear sense of purpose, of fortitude, of attention. Something falling apart sounds quite different from something coming together.

*(Photo by manda_wong, used via [Flickr](https://flic.kr/p/9yqYjD) and [a Creative Commons license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).)*

The bank was quiet yesterday. It was especially quiet for a mid-week visit in the afternoon, especially on the last day of the month. The line was short, two people ahead of me, with three people at the lengthy counter. The bank was sizable, with hard, shiny floors and wide, blank walls. Despite the reflective power of all that surface area, the financial conversations were muffled, muted, their privacy respected by the room’s structure and design. Street noise occasionally became apparent when the front doors, down a short hallway, opened, especially when a bus was pulling up to or out of the stop just beyond the entryway. Keystrokes were heard. The occasional beeping of generic computer equipment was absorbed into the room’s capacious silence. Inside the main hall of the bank, music played lightly, music as background noise, so matched in volume to the hush of the space — a hush akin to a museum, or to a proctored examination — that it took effort to discern the identity of what song was being played.

After I was done with my transaction, I walked down that short hallway and turned to take the stairs to the garage. The music faded slowly as I moved further and further from the main area of the bank. However, as quiet as it got with each step, the music was only suddenly, firmly gone when the stairwell door closed behind me. Immediately the space around me was void, empty, echoing its own silence, reinforcing its absence by presenting nothing more than a voluminous hush, a hush that made the quietude of the bank feel, in retrospect, more like a stage whisper, like a carefully crafted impression of quiet. The bank was private. In contrast, the stairwell was vacant. Private is valuable, comforting. Vacancy is neutral at best; if anything, it is devoid of presence, of comfort.

Stepping into the stairwell was like having the illusion of the bank’s authority dispelled. Inside the bank, its institutional gravitas was everywhere, from the visual depictions of its storied history to the sheer impression made by the activity. To step into the stairwell was to realize how much of that authority was a performance. To step into the stairwell was to step backstage, into the wings of the show that was the bank. I wondered: Had the music continued from the bank into the staircase, would I have experienced the transaction denouement for a longer period of time? Would I have had the song more likely in my head as I exited the garage? Would the authority of the bank have lingered more in my imagination? Would I have remained comforted by its institutional loco parentis, rather than dispiritingly enlightened as to the environmental conceit that had provided that comfort in the first place?

The back window hadn’t been open regularly for some time, not for more than an hour or so at a time, always with the shade pulled down to the slit opening. This was because of the drought. The drought meant turning off the water in the yard, and turning off the water meant the plants that were supposed to grow didn’t and the plants that weren’t supposed to grow did. Working in the back room, far from the street, meant a certain amount of quiet. The shut windows reduced planes and birds to a muffled whisper.

This summer the yard was reworked with low-water plants, native to our region or to regions that bear climatic resemblance to our region. The yard was no longer a post-apocalyptic vision of neglect, and the window was open all the time. Briefly. Then came the discovery of black widow spiders — speaking of things thriving in the absence of rain — which led to some research before the exterior ledges and walls were cleaned (broom rinse repeat).

Yesterday the window was open much of the day, and I was home much of the day. Having the backyard rejuvenated makes the house seem bigger. The open window extends sight lines. The space to sit expands in turn, even when that usable space is imaginary (mental sight lines) during the summer San Francisco fog. Planes and birds are louder now, as are the wind, and the neighbors, and the stray cat, and the occasional helicopter.

Previously the window muffled the outside. Yesterday I sat at my desk, back to the window, peaking occasionally over my shoulder out the window at plants whose names I knew and herbs I’d cooked with just the night before. Something had drawn my attention. There was a rattle. The pull-strings from the shades rustled in the breeze. They conversed with a small mobile on the other side of the house. Having an open window in the back meant the open window in the front now had a partner in air-flow. The mobile rustled. The shade strings rustled. The rustling created a foreground noise. It provided a sonic metric of the wind, and also a distraction from noises further away. Deep into the afternoon I realized I hadn’t heard a plane or a bird or a neighbor. The rustling string had created a subtle aural distraction, something for the mind to secondarily focus on, in favor over more distant distractions. Opening the window had removed a physical partition, but in turn a sonic partition had presented itself.

*(Photo by i_yudai, used via [Flickr](https://flic.kr/p/xCNT3) and [a Creative Commons license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).)*