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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1999-07-28, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JULY 28, 1999. PAGE 5. Arthur Black Quiet, please! I have a rather unusual request to make of you: I want you to stop reading. Just for a moment. Put the newspaper down, close your eyes ... and open your ears. How many different sounds can you make out? If the answer is ‘none’ you're a fortunate soul - and a rare one. I'm travelling on a B.C. ferry as I type these lines. I can hear three or four different conversations going on nearby. I also pick up the hiss and thunk of a door to the outside deck opening and closing; the riff of a deck of cards at a table across the way - and of course, the bass line throb of the ships diesels. I can also hear, if I listen really hard, the monotonous hum of fluorescent lights and the fellow beside me turning magazine pages. Not to mention the sound of my breath. The weird thing is, I’m in a relatively peaceable oasis, as modem environments go. People around me are reading and dozing and writing letters. But their brains are recording the same sounds my brain is recording - perhaps more. You have to wonder what all this superfluous noise is doing to our health. Nothing good, according to experts. Studies show that nearly 10 per cent of all adult North Americans are suffering some permanent hearing loss - and the figure rises to 25 per cent for folks over 65. The doctors reckon that regular exposure to loud noise is one of the chief causes. And it’s not just our ears that suffer. These bodies we all lug around were built to Cave Person specifications. That means whenever they hear a loud noise, they go on Red Alert. Every time a horn honks, somebody yells or a moron with a boom box stereo in his car drives by our bodies react as if a saber-toothed tiger just strolled by the cave mouth. The blood pressure shoots up, the heart starts pumping, muscles flex, respiration increases, little jolts of adrenaline spurt into our bloodstreams. This happens even when we’re asleep. And noise is almost impossible to escape. You go to a mall, you get piped in Muzak. Sit in the dentist’s waiting room; he’s got the sound system tuned to the local country station. I phone up the local bus company and a recording tells me all the operators are busy but I should ‘hold’ for the next available agent. Then the company bombards me with a list of every bus schedule in the province. Shaddap, already! The sad thing is, a lot of people fight back by cranking up their own noise level. We turn up the TV to drown out the sound of an argument in the apartment next door. Joggers and skiers clamp Walkman headphones on their skulls before they hit the trail. Odd, how we just roll over for noise pollution. If someone spat in our coffee or lit a smelly cigar, we’d go ballistic. But mufflerless motorcycles? Blatting lawn mowers? Some jerk yakking on a cell phone at the next table? We just shrug. Perhaps not for too much longer. Noise is not only bad for our health, it’s bad for the bottom line. The San Francisco Chronicle now publishes ‘bells’ beside its restaurant reviews, indicating the noise threshold of various eateries. And recently, Northwestern Mutual Life Company of Milwaukee decided to set aside two weeks of the year - one in December, the other in May - during which employees in the home office would not have to answer their phones. The employees got so much more work done in those two weeks the firm decided to make every Wednesday a Quiet Day. Productivity shot up by 20 per cent. It may be a long time before your boss and mine see the sexiness of silence. In the meantime, we can help ourselves. A Harvard University cardiologist says that just spending 20 quiet minutes alone twice a day, decreases blood pressure, lowers the heart rate and increases the flow of blood to the brain. Plus, it just feels so damn good, listening to nothing Nothing at all. By Raymond Canon Swiss become prime hockey players I regretfully confess that my hockey days as anything but a spectator are over. No NHL team has called me in quite awhile to till in even though they might find themselves in dire straits. I am reduced to talking hockey with the president of the University of St. Gallen whenever I am back in that city for a visit. He played about the same time as I did so we both know a lot of the Swiss hockey players of that era. Switzerland, it seems, is so democratic that even retired hockey players can become president of a university. Needless to say, he also has impeccable credentials as an economist. I was, however, totally surprised when someone told me that the Toronto Maple Leafs had chosen a Swiss hockey player as their number one pick in the draft. “You’re putting me on,’’ I countered. “No,” replied my friend. “It really is true. His name is Luca Cereda and he plays for Ambri-Piotta. Where is Ambri-Piotta? I’ve never heard of it?” When I got over my astonishment, I told him that I was not surprised he did not know where it was. In fact, if any of my readers (other than the Swiss ones) know where Ambri-Piotta is, LII eat a kilo of Appenzeller cheese. No, make that Emmentaler of Gruyere. All right, for all those whose knowledge of Ambri-Piotta is zero, head south from Zurich, past the Lake of the Four Cantons, stop to look at the statue of William Tell in Altdorf and then go over the Gotthard Pass, (or through- the tunnel). Shortly after you leave either of these behind, you turn off the Autobahn to your right and you will find the two villages of Ambri and Piotta. “Villages!” you say. That’s right, they are just villages but there is a difference between them and most other Swiss villages. They are both hockey-mad and on the night of a game thousands of spectators from the whole district are crammed into the local arena. They take their hockey as seriously as they do in any city in the Czech Republic or even Canada. Mr. Cereda is a good representative of his country in that he speaks all three Swiss official languages (French, German and Italian) and English as well. If he is of Italian origin (or should I say from the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino), learning German is a real accomplishment; that language has to be one of the hardest for an Italian to learn. My hat goes off to him! Signor Cereda (pronounced Cherayda in Italian) is about to become 18 years old so I suspect he will spend more time playing in Switzerland or for a junior team this side of the ocean before he gets to the point of putting on a Maple Leaf’s sweater. But his selection does point to one thing that I have been emphasizing for some time. Europeans are doing a better job of teaching their young players the fundamentals of hockey than we are in Canada. During my two stays in the Czech Republic I was really impressed with the way they were bringing these players along. That approach spread to Switzerland in the early 1990s. Until then that country was never known as a hot­ bed of hockey. It is about time that we took a serious look at what is being done over there and see where we can learn from the Europeans. In the meantime I plan on seeing Luca Cereda play hockey and if at all possible I would like to do an interview with him in whichever of the four languages he chooses. I look forward to all this with a great deal of pleasure. Maybe some day he, too, will become president of a Swiss university. While on the topic of good and pleasant things Swiss, let me remind any reader with a Swiss connection that Sunday, Aug. I will be the celebration of the Swiss national holiday. As it has for many years in the past, the festivities in this area will be at the Menzi farm between Brussels and Monkton and will start at 10:30 a.m. The Menzis are the most hospitable of hosts and there is something Swiss for everybody’s taste. You can’t miss it. Just look for the Swiss flags in the vicinity pointing the way. A Final Thought People with goals succeed because they know where they are going. - Earl Nightingale The - Short of it By Bonnie Gropp I’m awake Everyone knows the trees may keep you from seeing the forest from time to time. But what might surprise you is they can keep some people from sleeping too. It was with bemused wonder that an urbanite friend discovered during a recent visit to our home, the rustling music created by the wind in the trees, had disturbed her slumber the previous evening. 1 was somewhat bewildered to think this familiar lullaby which soothes me to sleep could be cacophony to another. Ironically, the sounds of sirens troubled me not at all during a return call at her high-rise apartment, looming above the well-lit, busy city streets. Perhaps it was the late hour of retiring and early rising, but I found nothing unsettling in the unfamiliar sounds around me. What makes this all the more interesting is that sleep is something I don’t do well. It’s a condition to which I was alerted early. I recall following the birth of my first child, the pearls of wisdom from one ‘well-wisher’ —“You just enjoyed your last full night of sleep.” So, when my darling little boy slept the whole night through his first day at home, I developed a certain cockiness, a “well, you don’t know much attitude” to my advisor. This, unfortunately soon dissipated. I eventually came to know that parenthood is directly correlated to a type of insomnia. My first inkling that nights of blissful unconsciousness were of the past hit when that same little snoozing angel became a toddler. Going to bed to sleep became his least favourite pastime. As he would turn his bedroom into a rumpus room at all hours of the night, my subconscious was ever on the alert. A good night’s sleep became a cycle of dozing and waking. Obviously as every parent can attest, in the years since, there have been any number of situations which result in if not complete sleeplessness then loss of a good few hours in a restful comatose state. Illness, sleep walking, bathroom trips and drinks of water have ultimately brought to reality the sage comment of the aforementioned expert. But none more so than adolescence Teenagers have fun, need to have fun, like to test their independence — and often adults’ patience. I have been blessed by four children who as teens completely and totally forgave and forgive me my over-active imagination and paranoia. Like their older siblings did, the two still at home accept and placate, doing their best to see that Mom doesn’t worry needlessly. They generally understand and try to let me know where they are and with whom, at all times. Unfortunately, sometimes their best efforts and intentions aren’t enough. Knowing they are out, knowing how unsafe this world can be makes for very light sleep indeed. And when startled awake I find they are not home, I panic. And as if that’s not enough, to my kids amusement, I can’t even sleep if they're not in bed. Recently, my daughter had friends over and with’each passing hour I slept more fitfully. When finally I heard her go to her room, all my birds were in the nest and I fell into a deep, blissful sleep — aided, of course, by the soothing lullaby of rustling leaves.