I Miss the Hiss

I got another great deal from Sirius radio for my birthday this spring. Three more years of crystal clear sound and seemingly unlimited variety.

Due to a decent speaker system in my Honda, my neighbors can enjoy it too as I pull into my driveway on our quiet street. Often the dial is stuck on channel 6, enabling me to relive the ‘60s. It’s almost like I’m there in the studio with my favorite group. I can hear each voice. Each instrument.

But something is missing. It isn’t the music selection. Or sound quality. Definitely not the volume. But something else . . .

What’s missing is the hiss.

For me nothing will ever beat listening to vinyl records. I didn’t spin many of them, but I listened to them all the time on my pocket transistor radio. That seemed to even amplify the hiss.

In my younger days, I often slept outside on the back porch, or in a blanket tent held up by the clothesline. Mom and Dad probably thought I was crazy, opting out of my perfectly comfortable bed. My transistor, along with dangerous amounts of sugary snacks, was always with me to make up for the rugged conditions, though.

Often a friend or two would forfeit their comfortable beds and camp out too. But sometimes it was just me and the critters that roamed our country yard at night. And of course some Zombies, Yardbirds, Hermits, and Beatles.

It was the early ‘60s and Britain was invading America’s airwaves. I loved it. About the only British group I wasn’t real big on was the Rolling Stones. (Sorry Mick Jagger fans.) My favorite group could keep me awake for hours on summer nights, just waiting for another play of love songs like “Love Me Do,” “She Loves You,” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand.”

Often I played this music through an earplug, which served to lower the sound quality even more. It added tinniness to the static and hiss. Why did I do it? I don’t know. A lot of things I did there are no explanations for. But it was a cool novelty.

And it did serve to keep the music in my head and not outside. I didn’t necessarily want my dad opening the back door and always hearing rock and roll coming from my campsite. A lot of parents in my area, and for sure the preachers, were leery of this new era of music and culture. I don’t recall for sure, but Dad probably preached a sermon or two on this very subject.

When I was much younger, Dad would sit on my bed at night and we would talk and sing songs together. Now I was getting older, but he would still sometimes visit with me at bedtime. And occasionally he would walk out to my tent where we would sit and talk.

Dad knew what I was listening to. He didn’t say I couldn’t. He was allowing me to start making my own decisions. I remember the talk one night about choices we have to make. Not just about music, but about our life direction. After he went back to the house, I turned my radio off. Not from guilt because it actually wasn’t one of those kinds of talks—even though parents in those days could pour it on pretty heavily—but to think for a while about what he said.

Besides, a Stones song was playing and I was waiting for it to end. (Sorry again.)

That was a teaching moment I can picture like it was yesterday. My dad took the time to do a lot of those with me. Maybe that’s why I decided to become a teacher myself. Although I didn’t always make those good choices Dad talked about and it took a while, I made it.

I taught 27 years in the same school system. The last 20 or so were in a new building. But often my heart was back in the old school with its drafty windows and hissing radiators.

Even if you didn’t catch the title, by now you’re probably seeing a theme here.

Those windows covered an entire wall, and they rattled when it was windy. During the blizzard of 1978 snow found its way through the gaps. The first day back, after I cleared the snow off the desks, I realized I should probably let the kids wear their coats in class. The radiators were giving it their best shot, but they just weren’t cutting it.

Those iron structures were noisy. They made banging noises as they warmed, and steam hissed out of a control valve. I think there was some whistling in there too. They finally got hot around third period. Sometimes I stood right next to them while I taught. I can’t unremember the odor of hot polyester from my leisure suit jacket when I made contact too long.

Those were the good old days, before we moved to the new school with one small window in the room, air conditioning, and normal heat. The only extra noise in the room came from rambunctious middle schoolers. I missed the hissing radiators and noisy windows which had muffled the extraneous vocals.

It seems I passed my fondness for hissing to my offspring. It showed itself during the cicada onslaught of 1987. One day my youngest son came into the house with cicadas poked headfirst into each ear canal. All I could see were back legs and the tips of the wings. I was scared to death because Mark had a history of serious ear infections.

I was able to pull the cicadas out in one piece. They hissed at me when I evicted them from their new home. Now that his ear canals were open, I had a question for Mark. “Why in the world did you stuff these things into your ears?”

I should have guessed: “I like the sound, Dad.”

Maybe there’s more to this fondness for hissing. The sound takes me back to times of my life with warm memories (especially when I leaned too long against the radiators).

I am encouraged, though, that hissing things are making a comeback. I saw vinyl records—new ones—on sale at Walmart. Recently on a DIY show, I watched people rehabbing the old-style radiators to use in their homes.

And for sure, the trees in our neighborhood will come alive with the deafening hiss of cicadas again in 2038. So I’m in luck.

Feature photo by Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash