A Dozen Dings I Miss

I am not a nostalgic person and always look for the cutting edge ideas, approaches and technology. I also know I am auditorily stimulated because I couldn't survive without my music. But today for some reason I started thinking about sounds that were so familiar to me that I no longer hear and miss from years gone by. Do any of these conjure up a memory or two? I’d love to hear comments about the sounds I forgot to include in my Dozen Dings I Miss.

1. The deafening sounds a Summer thunderstorm makes pouring buckets of water onto a tin roof. You couldn’t talk over it, you just sat and enjoyed the roar sipping on a Dr. Pepper moving back and forth in your porch glider.

2. The ringtone of a rotary phone is pure and always begged to be answered. Even at dinner you ran to a ringing phone because you knew it must be important. The other sound of the rotary phone memorialized in the Beatles song, “Come Together” is the click, click, click of the dial coming back after you rotated it forward.

3. As a kid I used to take a clothespin and clip baseball cards into my bicycle spokes to make “motor” noises. Sure a Nolan Ryan rookie card (Worth $1500 today) got eventually shredded in those spokes, but in a simpler time – it was all about the noise and never about the money.

4. Nothing signals being at the golf course better than the sound of metal spikes on the parking lot asphalt as you walked from the trunk to the club house. At first light on a Saturday morning it sounds like a concert there were so many golfers milling around. Wow do I miss this one a lot!

5. As I said I would be hard pressed to live without my music and in college there was nothing like cranking up the speakers on my Montrose album and just before Sammy Hagar burst out with his vocals the dusty static of the stylus hitting the LP about to burst out in a wall of sound was the greatest anticipation sound in my memory. (Akin to the greatest anticipation silence when the recorded music gets turned off just before the band hits the stage.)

6. For my family, reunions were retreats back to the family farm at the pavilion by the lake. The sounds of farm animals on the other side of the fence, kids running and playing in the grass, the ladies chattering and catching up on conversation created the back ground for the one sound I will never forget from my family reunions at the farm: The sound of the Five Brothers, two generations older than me, playing horseshoes and that unmistakable clang of a ringer horseshoe on an iron post.

7. Today when the ice cream truck tours through the neighborhood I swear I’m going to go postal listening to that kiddies’ song through bad speakers that plays over and over and over again. Just give me the Good Humor truck bells with the guy in white clothes and black bow tie. (I think the current ice cream guys are on a work release program!)

8. The Madden football video game is so lifelike. Kids today get to use championship teams, build their own teams and call their own plays. I grew up playing a pitiful game which had minimal representation to real football, but there was something about that hum sound of the vibrating field of Electric Football that made that silly game worth playing.

9. Concrete driveways are so quiet someone can drive up and be to your front door before you even knew anyone had arrived. A car driving into a loose gravel driveway had a distinctive sound that was either an early warning signal of someone unexpected arriving, or confirmation expected guests has indeed finally arrived! The best driveway sounds came from my neighbors who had rounded rocks of a cream and brown color we used to call Lucky Stones.

10. Computers make their own noises of cooling fans, CD drives and the old modem connection noises (those I don’t miss because it was just annoying.) What I do miss is hearing my mother, a very fast typist, work her manual magic on a manual typewriter. The sound of fingers striking keys, keys striking paper and that fantastic Pavlovian ding signaling the paper carriage needed returned followed by the clackity, clack of the carriage returning to starting position. It was a symphony of sounds!

11. Once upon a time filling your car’s gas tank was not self serve and as you drove into the pumps a small hose was laying across the concrete pad. When the weight of your car drove over the hose it sounded a ding in the service bays to let the gas station attendant know someone had arrived to have their tank filled, windshield washed and oil checked. I remember the excitement when I finally got big enough to ride over that hose with my bike and it sounded the ding. I drove that poor gas station fella bonkers riding over that hose. I just loved that sound.

12. I started this list with a summer memory and I will finish it with one as well. Growing up north of the Mason/Dixon line Summer was the time of year to play outside, have buddies over and enjoy time out of school. We didn’t have air conditioning in those houses so doors stayed open and screen doors were designed to protect the house from invading insects. The energy of youth never understood that design and to our opinion a screen door was designed to charge through swinging it open and letting that small spring located in the center of the door slam it back into the wooden door jam. I’ll bet that door would slam hundreds of times over the course of a summer. The sound of a slamming screen door always meant children having fun.

I know this isn’t an exhaustive list by any means. Do you share in my memories of these sounds? Let me know. What are the sounds you remember fondly and miss? Share those as well so I can enjoy your memories with you. Either write a comment here or email me at RJWhite@pinnaclesolutions.org . I look forward to “hearing” from you.