It came up last weekend and it was one of those moments when you realize that you totally missed noticing something that didn't happen. I think that's the nature of missing things that stop happening. I remember the first time I was hit with this was when the Chief Engineer asked the young Auxiliaries officer where he had been last night. The ship then being underway in the Persian Gulf I replied that I had been asleep. His pointed question, "you didn't notice the lights going out?" left me without a clue what he was talking about. Turns out the ship lost power when we lost the electrical load and my Emergency Diesel Generators spun up to meet the sudden loss of power demand. Well, one of them did. The other spun up and was tripped by the overspeed governor. Several times. In fact it never came online which made recovering the plant somewhat more intricate.
How do you notice the lights going out when you're asleep? Well, the fans also cut off and you can hear the intakes and fans running 24 hours a day on a warship underway. Their absence is what cues you to wake up now. It's funny though, after that first time I always woke up when we lost the electrical load underway which served me well enough when I was a chief engineer.
What has happened to stop it I do not know but the non-stop screaming by little girls at the K-4 elementary school across the street stopped. It seems to have stopped for quite some time. I got used to screaming 6 and 9 year old girls who step out of the school and hit the playground already screaming at the top of their voices. There was never any meaning, it was just high pitched screaming.
It's gone. As I look back, I think it stopped when classes and schools resumed after Covid. I just didn't notice its absence for awhile.
4 comments:
Wife and I regularly babysit our 3 1/2 year old grandson. The silence you describe at the school just gives me chills.
It's not quiet. The kids still play and are loud enough to hear as they play their games and run around but the little girls no longer exit the school building and start with piercing shrieks. It's like someone taught them inside, outside and an end to nonsense screaming voice. It didn't really bother me but sometimes it made me look over to see if there truly was something wrong worth screaming like a wounded animal.
Ah. Thanks for the clarification.
Damn. Now I'm wondering what else has stopped? The bastards have harmed this country, this world, in ways that I could have never imagined. And I imagine a lot.
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