Bay Ridge, By the Sound of It

The bus woke me up nearly every night during my first week living in Brooklyn.

The bus stop is less than half a block away, and the squeaks, breaks and revving engines were more than enough to awake me from even the deepest slumber. And believe me, that first week my slumbers were none too deep. Among the buses, the garbage trucks and the music from the bar downstairs, I was briefly worried that moving to New York was a horrible mistake.

Now I barely notice any of it. Admittedly, the bass in the bar has been lowered to a much more acceptable (read: nonexistent) level, but the buses, trucks and sirens remain. But now they're as much a part of the atmosphere here as the sound of lawn mowers on summer Saturday mornings in Ohio.

And now that I can block out the traffic, I can easily pick out the sounds that make living in Bay Ridge a pleasure. The church bells. The coos from the pigeons across the street. Even a foghorn or two from ships in the bay during early weekend mornings.

You've heard the phrase "the silence is deafening"? If I ever heard anything approaching silence, I really would reach for a hearing aid.