elodieunderglass: ale-hoatzinsrocks: pathos-logical:soracities:soracities:ever so quietly losing my
elodieunderglass: ale-hoatzinsrocks: pathos-logical:soracities:soracities:ever so quietly losing my mind courtesy of maria popova *screams into pillow* [ID: Two excerpts of text that read:An otherwise rational man, my father describes the train encounter as love at first sight. Upon arrival, he began courting my mother with such subtlety that it took her two years to realize she was being courted. One spring morning, having finally begun to feel like a couple, they were walking across the lawn between the two dorms and decided it was time for them to have a whistle-call. At the time, Bulgarian couples customarily had whistle-calls distinctive tunes they came up with, usually borrowed from the melody of a favorite song, by which they could find each other in a crowd or summon one another from across the street. Partway between the primitive and the poetic, between the mating calls of mammals and the sonnets by which Romeo and Juliet beckoned one another, these signals were part of a couple’s shared language, a private code to be performed in public. Both sets of my grandparents had one. My mother’s parents, elementary schoolteachers in rural Bulgaria who tended to an orchard and the occasional farm animal, used a melody of unclear origin but aurally evocative of a Bulgarian folk song; my father’s parents, both civil engineers and city intellectuals, used a fragment from a Schumann waltz. End ID] My parents are both biologist and used to do a lot of field work and needed ways to communicate and find eachother quickly. So they have this whistle of which I don’t know its origin. They use this in a forest, sure, but also to find in eachother at the supermarket. When I can’t find them at the mall I use it now and it works surprisingly well. Oh yeah a Family Whistle is super practical. -- source link