I rousted quite early this morning, primarily because I am dog-sitting for friends and the fear of dog poop on light-colored carpet is a powerful motivator. A truly astronomical benefit to being up so early was the opportunity to observe the so-called Super Moon, which was super spectacular morning.
As I am cruising to and ‘fro from my canine destination, I am taking my usual musical flashback to the 60s and 70s, when rock was truly magical (doesn’t every generation say this?). And I am doing that combo thing: singing here, whistling there. And then it strikes me like one of Zeus’s thunderbolts how absolutely marvelous a thing whistling is.
That is, if done properly.
There are those of us who never stopped marveling at the wonder that is the human body. After someone finished counting fingers and toes after we were birthed, there came a realization that this wriggle factor was only the beginning of the mystery. That much deeper, and sometimes darker, conundrums are there to tease the gray matter.
How incredibly interesting that something as inane as lips can be so interesting and provocative. All the babbling of infanthood leads to the good and bad verbal behavior of adulthood. To every kiss given to the objects of our affection. To every hurtful thing we intended or didn’t intend as sound is strung to sound, word to word, and sentence to sentence. Lips are also not a bad place to hang your lip gloss, if you get my drift.
But ah, the miracle of the whistle. My capacity to whistle goes back to childhood. My father -- a music major in college prior to switching up to political science – set a pretty high standard when it came to moving air. My dad played the trombone all his life, so he knew whereof he spoke when it came to deployment of lips.
Interestingly, I don’t recall ever hearing my dad whistle. But you could just see the pain on his face and the agony in his eyes when I whistled off key. So rather quickly I learned that I need to hit the mark or bear the consequences.
I was always jealous of those kids who could muster up that big-whup whistle as they shoved prodigious digits into their mouths. You know the one I’m talking about. This was a talent I never acquired. And the other pastime of childhood, placing a blade of grass between the fingers and sending some wind out in harmonic convergence, was also something that escaped me. My grass whistle sounded something akin to a banshee on a bad hair day.
Through consistent but unconscious practice, however, I because a pretty fair whistler. I don’t have that fancy and, sometimes overdone, operatic vibrato that some whistlers have. But I can do the next best thing: I can still whistle on key.
Have to admit: as a kid, and even today, there are probably few things as annoying to me personally as much as someone who whistles off key. Fingers on the chalk board and all that good stuff. I develop a case of lemon face pretty fast. I have the social decency not to smack someone in the kisser when B sharp comes out as A flat. But I gotta tell you, the inner urge is still there.
This represents something of a dichotomy for me. I am a true believer in the art of self-expression, and I readily acknowledge that the ability and talent to whistle runs through typical highs and lows. I guess I should consider the expenditure of energy it takes for the human brain to communicate with these flaps on our faces and tell them to do something… anything. And in this metaphysical sense, I am amazed at anyone’s ability to generate an imperfect or perfect sound.
Better to have whistled and lost, than never whistled at all.
I also realize that whistling is a sound that represents spontaneous joy. But really, folks. How joyful can it be when the act causes someone else to want to slap you into tomorrow?
Please don’t mistake me for a whistle snob. If you think I’m being a little nutzy here, think about it this way: What if one of the rounds of American Idol focused on the ability of candidates to whistle. See where I’m going? Advertising revenues for most things, with the possible exception of ear plugs, would certainly plummet as TV viewers beat a hasty retreat to just about anywhere that isn’t in front of the tube. The value of mute buttons cannot be overstressed!
Anyway, my thanks to Steely Dan for that super-lit pre-dawn jam session. I’ll save my evaluation of humming for another day….
