My alarm is set for 6AM every morning without fail, even Shabbat (which irritates Ipstenit). It’s also permanently set to NPR. I tried a couple local stations, including WTMX the Mix, which I do like, but their morning show chaps my ass. I either want all music or all talk, and if I get talk, I want it to prep me for my day. So NPR it is. I’m a creature of habit and I like my radio the way I like it, thank you very much.
I’ve also had the same radio since High School, and at ten years old, it’s having issues. Through most of November, it started having issues with reception and sound. As my old time radio tapes say, it was having high fidelity issues, and you could easily detect surface noises and volume drops. Irritating. In December, I toyed with the idea of getting a new radio, since the trials and tribulations happened after my younger kitten knocked the radio off my night stand. Once I talked about the idea, though, the radio panicked and healed itself.
Shush. I think it was the weather.
Every morning, the radio makes this ‘click’ sound, that isn’t sharp so much as it’s that noise your radio makes when it’s turned on. This click is the signal for the cats to jump up on me and nose me awake. It’s followed immediately by the news. I have the time set so that generally the first thing I hear is Morning Edition telling me what time it is, and then I get my glasses on and off I go to start my day.
This particular morning, however, there was a click and no news.
You have to understand some things. There are mornings where I’m hyper-awake at 6, lying in bed waiting for the alarm and savoring the feeling of being still and quiet in bed with my Mrs. and our pets. Once that click happens, all bets are off and I know it. If, by chance, I sleep through the click, the cats poke me, nose me, and meow politely at me until I realize what’s wrong and get going. At the quiet of 6 A.M., that click has a way of piercing my soul and charging me up. And if it doesn’t, I have Doofus and Dumbass to help me. They never miss it.
As a sidebar, the noise that sends me up and out of bed like a gunshot is the second click of that radio, which is completely similar and yet totally different than the first. It’s the click of ‘Okay, I’ve been on an hour and Ipstenu is about to head out the door, so it’s time to turn off.’ It’s the click that means if I’m not already out the door, I’m going to be late to work. Zoom, I’m off.
This morning, again, there was a click and no news.
On some level, I thought I’d slept through the whole hour, on a Saturday, and for some reason the cats had let me sleep in. Since I’m blind as a bat, I had to put my glasses on before I could grab my watch and verify it and the clock radio and Ipstenit’s rarely used alarm clock all said 6:01 A.M. Admittedly, my watch is analog, but it was just after the hour. Close enough for government work.
You bet your life I was wide ass awake at this point. The cats were too, so I fed them to shut them up and then stood there, staring at the radio. I had to stand between the cats, otherwise the older one will abandon her low-fat food for the kitten’s high-protein/high-fat kitten food, and the kitten will starve. Dumb cats. My second idea, now that I knew the radio should be on, was that it had died. So I flipped channels to WTMX and got their crap music. Oh yeah. But they also have crappy news, so I knew if anything had happened, they keep playing music for a while. I went back to NPR (WBEZ) and still, no sound.
Something bad must have happened, I thought to myself. NPR rarely has dead air, and if they do, it’s for seconds and not minutes. I’d creeped into minutes now. Radio programs don’t have dead air, they just don’t.
Dead air is, if you don’t know, what you call it when a broadcast becomes unintentionally silent. Normally this is operator or technical error. Like if the radio DJ puts a song on and then goes to take a whiz, but the song ends before he gets back. Or if the feed from the TV tape deck to the output frizzes. Generally, everyone panics at this point to get shit back on. Dead air means no product. No product means no income. Many people, including me, consider dead air one of the worst fates for a network.
Seconds were now turning into minutes. My panic level was rising exponentially.
Out the window was the standard, cold, winter morning. Saturday six A.M. is quiet in my neighborhood. I looked out at the buildings across the alley and saw we all had power and nothing looked weird. No undue traffic in the street. Everything was perfectly normal. Except for NPR.
But NPR, my bastion of normalcy, my morning standard for almost five years (like I said, there was a break in there for other stations), stood silent. I felt a chill, not of winter. Of fear.
Now, at 6:05 A.M., I assumed I was panicking unduly. After all, the rest of the world seemed to be dawdling along just fine. It was a nice, fine December day. If something horrific had happened, Taffy would have been on the phone already calling me. Hell, my dad was in Japan and a whole half day ahead of me! He’d have called! Surely I was being a Mulder.
6:08 A.M. Silent radio.
There was sound, faint but unmistakably the radio. The volume was at it’s normal setting, which is to say it’s really only audible from my side of the bed. As the cats were done eating (and currently sitting in their cat tree staring at me as if to ask what sort of freak was I?), I abandoned my post. At the radio’s side, I could hear the sound. It was both faint and intermittent, but it was there.
At first it sounded like some strange man making a speech, and my thought went to Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds. “Great, we’re being invaded by Hitleresque aliens,” I muttered. “Muugghhhshhz?” replied Ipstenit.
The sound vanished for seconds. Then it was Lakshmi Singh telling me that this was NPR. She too cut out. Then the radio kicked itself and I could hear Melba Lara apologizing for the technical difficulties, but this was NPR, National Public Radio, and this was your morning’s news.
That was it.
Nothing was wrong. Nothing bad had happened. Just normal, radio problems. For nearly ten minutes I’d been NPR-less, and I’d been terrified.
I’d been gripped with an unshakable fear that I couldn’t talk myself out of. I’d been panicked, holding my proverbial breath, waiting for a sign. I can laugh at that now, but the fact remains that I had been fearful.
It’s disturbing to have that feeling of terror. Some people might say that it’s all the post 9-11 bullcrap that did it to me, and I’d like to think they’re wrong. But one of my earlier thoughts was ‘Shit, someone blew up the Sears Tower, and that’s the big radio tower and that’s why I can’t get NPR!’ My check to WTMX, mind you, cleared that suspicion. WBEZ’s radio tower is off Navy Pier anyway.
Looking back on it by a couple months now, I can quote FDR as my explanation for what I felt.
“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, Saturday, March 4, 1933