Families: Mine won’t shut up

Under normal circumstances, I’m a pretty soft-spoken person. I’m not the kind to shout over others or scream at the person next to me when a library voice will do. But put me at a table with 13 of my relatives, and suddenly I’m screeching like a chimpanzee at the zoo, trying to be heard over the pandemonium.

It’s not that my family members cannot control the volume of their voices, or that we have particularly impassioned conversations, or that we are all naturally loud people (in fact, the majority of our 14-member clan is normally quite introverted.)

For some reason, though, family gatherings seem to bring out the “loud” in all of us.
It’s no wonder my grandfather is using hearing aids these days. I’ve been in the family for 21 years now, and I can already feel my auditory organs beginning to fail.

Perhaps this Thanksgiving was particularly boisterous because we were all gathered Charlie Brown-style around the ping-pong table in my basement, our voices ricocheting off the walls like lottery balls.

To send compliments on the potatoes to the chef at the other end of the table was like trying to get an order to the bartender at the Thirsty Turtle: You ended up sprawled across the table and screaming at the top of your lungs. And your aunt would still respond, “No, there’s no tomatoes.”

During dessert, by which time we had resorted to more primitive forms of communication, my brother looked at me and mouthed, “Where’s the dog?”

In fact, she had been markedly absent for a good 15 minutes — she wasn’t stealing anyone’s napkin, climbing into anyone’s lap or circling anyone’s legs in pursuit of scraps.

I excused myself (not that anyone took note of my politeness over the din) and found her upstairs in my parents’ room, curled up as if in hiding. Yet even in that hideout, I could still hear the distinct rumblings of high-decibel conversations thundering up from two stories below.

“Well now that he’s in college, he never calls home!”

“Oh, Rachel’s the same way — worries me sick!”

“Could you pass the —”

“They said it would cost $8,000, can you believe that?”

“If you hold the Colts to 17 points, how do you lose that game?”

“Samantha, you cannot eat pecan pie — you just had your wisdom teeth out!”

“And then she says she can’t talk, she’s on her way to church!”

“Wasn’t she getting married to that boy in the Marines? Did she have the baby?”

“Didn’t it ever occur to you people that we might be busy at school?”

Another Thanksgiving, another decibel-level louder. But somehow, it does seem that the louder the family party, the more enjoyable it is.

Show me a family that has civilized, audible conversation at its Thanksgiving table, and I’ll show you a group of people that doesn’t know how to have fun.

Maybe we’re just enjoying the time we spend together. Or maybe we’re all just gradually losing our hearing. Luckily, we have an ear, nose and throat doctor in the family.

Rachel Hare is a senior French language and literature and journalism major. She can be reached at hare at umdbk dot com.