The Old Grouch

The Huffington Post had a long article on subway dancing in New York City which has to do with African-American boys who board the train and perform elaborate and very acrobatic dance steps as an exhibition for which they then pass the hat.  I am all in favor of young people finding legitimate ways to earn money, and I am a big fan of performance, a regular attendant at all kinds of spectacles.  But I like to choose my event, not have it thrust upon me.  More than that I, like a lot of other people, like to read on the subway.  Say what you will about  the "broken windows" theory of policing the city in Mayor Giuliani's era, but I really liked not having to put up with a steady stream of people telling their woes at full volume while panhandling, and now I really do not like the intrusion of the dancers.  Quiet is always better it seems to me when confronting yet another street musician.  I do not want music wherever I go.  I cannot imagine walking around with buds in my ear streaming in a constant sound.  Yes, it is possible to think with that distraction, but how much better to have the thinking apparatus going about it business in stillness and calm.  Isn't it enough that my personal silence is broken by the interior horror of tintinitus --or however you spell it?  Then again I have to remember in the long gone days of my youth when I was in high school sitting at my desk in my bedroom concentrating on my homework--and doing very well with it I may add--whilst listening to "Fibber McGee and Molly"  and other half hour comedy programs right at my side on the radio sitting there on my desk.  So it's maybe an issue of becoming frozen in time, or the grand change that overtook me when almost forty years ago now when I had a boyfriend, a kind of young genius, who was deeply offended by my casual use of classical music as background for my daily living and insisted that we either listen to the music altogether focused or turn the music off.  I grew to love silence then as I had never understood it before.