So when I was a kid…

When I was a kid, I was told many times to turn down the music. Even when I had speaker cables running to the basement, so my music and my sleeping parents were separated by an empty level of the house, I still recall my dad coming downstairs and asking me what the hell I was doing. I just kept boosting the volume … until it was too loud.

These days I don’t listen to music quite so loud as I know it could do to my hearing, and I no longer feel any need for rebellion. Rather, I just listen to music. Sometimes it does need to be louder, granted.

So when I moved in with Julie some months ago, I fully expected to have the roles reversed. I’d be the one going downstairs in the middle of the night. But to my great surprise, it hasn’t happened, and it’s not likely to ever happen. Her kids have their TVs and computers, but no stereos. The closest they come is their phones, but they listen with AirPods and other headphones.

Far from me telling them to keep it down, they are the ones coming to me, telling me to turn it down! It’s mostly the subwoofer the kids want turned down, and it’s mostly the main speakers Julie wants turned down. The kids are a level lower. And one of my Magnepan speakers sits right in front of the door, so since they radiate sound equally forward and backward, it’s like I’m pointing the speaker out the door into the rest of the main floor, where Julie is doing something that doesn’t involve my music.

I get it. Others are doing their own thing and don’t want to be interrupted, but it’s strange that after all these years of living alone, I’m again the one being told to turn down the music.