• This guest post is written by Dawn Moyer, introduced by Julie Mathison

I am excited to share my first guest post! Dawn Moyer is a good friend who happens to share my birth year and is one of those people that you can’t stop talking to, once you’ve begun. We invariably find common ground, but I was surprised and delighted to discover that we are both analog-minded, and that Dawn has explored the power of these experiences and connections in her own right. Just this year, she was interviewed by the Boston Globe for an article about the power of talking to strangers to combat loneliness, even suicide, and to promote a sense of belonging and well being (https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/06/04/opinion/teach-kids-talk-to-strangers). As an instructor and student advisor at Oregon State University, Dawn pairs students with classmates they’ve never met and sends them out and about on campus with signs containing conversation prompts to engage with dreaded strangers, an experiment that quite often surprises the participants by reminding them why they’re in college.

During a recent movie night at my house, Dawn and I started reminiscing about playing street games as kids, a profoundly analog activity that seems to have all but died out. We recalled how, as dusk settled in, among the other night sounds — crickets, birds, frogs, the slam of a car door — there would invariably be a voice, a parent calling out for one or another of us to come in for the night. This lovely post explores the simple power of voices to connect us, to foster a sense of place and belonging. It’s about childhood and child-rearing, and the importance of growing up with the knowledge that, even as a child, you already belong to the greater world. It’s about our physical senses, the act of hearing and listening, and how voices are woven into the texture of our experience. Human voices touch us, root us, and move us in ways that feel simple but act upon us in profound ways. Please share in the comments your own experience of the power of voices — and enjoy!

~~~

Summer nights, playing outside in the twilight with a cluster of other neighborhood kids in the streets and backyards, we skirted the drainage ditch that ran the length of our neighborhood, or navigated obstacle courses we made in the street with chalk or stones. Kids were called home for dinner, and if you were lucky you could return to the adult-free world after dinner, until the streetlights came on or your parents remembered you weren’t home. If you ventured into someone’s house for a bit, there was a wide network of roaming kids and one would come in and alert you if your mom (and it was nearly always the Mom), beckoned you home. Ranging through the grass and driveways and basements, I kept one ear out for the inevitable bellowing. Voices raised up and over the rooftops, calling “Kenny and Billy!” “Andy and Bindy!” (or the dreaded “Billy and Dawn!”) — pitched like an Appalachian holler. We stopped, everyone listened, someone might translate the message to the group (“It’s for you, Cindy!”), and then the rest of us resumed play. I can picture my mom, hand cupped to the side of her mouth, head tilted upward, sending out the cry to my brother and me. It was time. If we didn’t hear, there would be a courtesy repeat, and then after that, you didn’t wait to find out. If you saw your Mom walking toward you as you played, your heart skipped a beat.

In the days before we even had a private phone line (we were on the very edge of town, and even in the 70s this was a throwback), the sounds of neighbors conversing through open windows and across fences was as common as the dandelions that filled our yard. The web of neighbors was complex and yet simple. You went to the neighbors for an egg when you ran out in the midst of making a cake. No keeping score. No apologies. The expectation was that you would return the favor one day.

When my kids were preschool and school-aged, and we lived in a small town, they had flip flops with tiny bells on them –which was excellent for locating them when they were in our yard or the next aisle in the store. They had the freedom denied to so many of their peers, and I knew it was my duty to keep an ear out for them, without appearing to do so. They needed to know they only had to raise their voice, because I was there. I believed then, as I do now, that children need to feel they are part of a larger network of adults than just parents.They were raised in a community that drew together to look after them, and they looked out for one another, as I watched without hovering.

They got to know the girl next door and called to her when the sun warmed the yard and they wanted to play. “Georgia!” they would yell, in unison. Georgia eventually would call back over the 8 foot fence “Sophie and Sadie! You want to play?” They would climb around the fence and together run around our yard or hers, exploring the dark places like the woodshed and overgrown weedy corners among the ferns. The sounds of their voices were evocative of those years past, when there were so many children (and so few adults) — even though I knew that small children were now a rare species in our aging neighborhood.

Traveling in India in the 90s, the call that became a hallmark of the trip for me was the ubiquitous “Chai!” from street vendors, a long stick draped across their shoulders, kettle and glasses dangling from either end. We drank many steaming glasses of chai, waiting for trains or buses, and I haven’t yet found a place in the U.S. that can recreate the taste: sweet, milky and earthy, something akin to the dirt that coated my sandals and trouser legs. The vendors’ call was enough to raise my eyes from a book or a nap, and more than once my backpacking companions and I shared a laugh over our travel mishaps while drinking from community glassware, returned to the tray for the waiting vendor after consuming. The call was as timeless as the tea.

These days, in my work on a college campus, I note more than any change in my 20 years the deadening of noise. Most students walk between classes with ear buds, music filling the void where conversations once sprouted. I walk into classrooms and there is no buzz of conversation – only silence as students look downward, awkwardly passive in the presence of their peers. When did this come to be? It hasn’t been so long, and yet it seems like another era.

Sometimes I take the first five minutes of class and speak directly to the class: “You signed up for an in-person class to get to know others – it’s part of the experience. Turn to the person next to you and ask them about their day, or weekend, or term.” I give a few minutes, and let the conversation reach a crescendo — then let it stay there for just a few minutes. Class material can wait just a bit; this too is important. They are learning to socialize. To trust one another.

When I’m spent from talking with students all day, or from fielding questions from my co-workers, I fantasize about having a whole day to myself — a day of quiet and time to passively read, to check messages or write. I think about who I would be if I could just have the time to reflect. Would I miss coming home to a spouse who has worked alone all day at home and who gushes about what he has learned or read or discovered as soon as I walk in the door? I relish the time with my adult children when they are home, or when we talk about their discoveries, fears, successes and when they make me snort aloud with stories about the people and events in their lives. I think we all need to feel called, by our loved ones and friends and neighbors — and sometimes by strangers. I wonder what this new world of “content” and story fragments is doing to our sense of place, to our empathy, to our feeling of being needed. Giving without expectation. Calling upon others, because that is why we exist, as a species. It’s as old as the stones in the rivers that carried our wares and people across the land.

In my waning years, I hope young people don’t stop listening to the call of family members, or neighbors across the fence, or the silent call for a conversation not yet begun. Isolation is good for rumination, but to listen to the din of the human world is to know a culture, and know oneself. I just hope the din carries over into future generations, and we continue to launch the sounds of our voices on the wind, like the dandelion fluff in my yard.