If you’d think the shock and awe of four Pulitzers would mute a granddaughter’s proclivity to be a smart ass you’ve not met Jenna.  

Though, this Christmas, she’d decided to observe her first seasonal ceasefire of banter. Neither she nor her mother moved a muscle as my arthritic fingers struggled with the reindeer wrapping paper. Perhaps they understood their Dylan Thomas; there’s no helping the stubborn raging against the dying of the light.

Eventually, I triumphed, ripping the paper from Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. That book had me grinning, Jenna had clearly thought long and hard about her grandfather’s Christmas present.

Although knocking on complete retirement, I still had my monthly column—Letters from St Paul—in The Atlantic. And my granddaughter was obviously up to date with her reading.

It had been a paradox really. Surely a lifetime in Minnesota would mean already knowing all there was to know about snow. Yet, as the fall leaves fell, I’d chanced upon an onomatopoeia word—shin shin—whose pronunciation by Japanese people mirrored snow falling with the quietness that only snow was apparently capable of.

I’d investigated November’s first heavy snowfall and got to understand why snow’s silence did indeed differ from ordinary silence. That was the genesis of my December Atlantic column. Well, that and my daughter’s earlier summer stubbornness. “Dad, I’ve made you an appointment for a hearing aid.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. Mom was clear: ‘Your father will be skilled at turning a blind eye …’”

“Deaf ear, don’t you mean?”

“Don’t pedant me, Dad. ‘Turning a blind eye to inconvenient realities he doesn’t care to acknowledge.’”

“Fiddlesticks. Not once ...”

“No, Dad. Just accept Mom being right is one of those inconvenient realities!”

After that posthumous Queen to e8, and checkmate, I accepted the hearing aid’s inevitability. And, with the household’s sounds now more acute, it felt blissful shuffling outside into November’s snow flurries and being enveloped by shin shin’s quietness.

Though, as I joked with my readers, shin shin could never be total silence for me. After all, I lived with a teenage woman.

Jenna smirked; Christmas mischief was afoot. “Page eighty, Grandpa. Appropriate, given your age.”  

I grasped the bookmark-like folded sheet of paper that slyly peeked from the pages of Miss Smilla's. “What’s this?”

“An invitation to Orfield Laboratories.”

“Where’s that, what’s that?”

 “An anechoic chamber in south Minneapolis.”

“A quiet room, you mean?”

“The quietest place on Earth. So, the Guinness Book of Records says.”

“That’s authoritative, not.”

“The public can visit, but only journalists stay alone in the room. Might have mentioned your Pulitzer Prizes.”

“No Jenna! You know …”

“Worth it, Grandpa. You’ve called me out on the silence of granddaughters. Without my chattiness you’ll be able to discover what whispers remain.”

“Most likely your grandmother’s posthumous to-do lists.”

“Just as well I recognize granddad jokes, Pops. I’ll drive you tomorrow.”

On arrival, I got the rockstar treatment. Jenna got my most severe look. She turned a blind eye and asked the Orfield CEO, “What’s the longest time alone in an anechoic chamber.”

“One reporter lasted forty minutes. Most are done within twenty, disconcerted by their body’s eerie sounds.”

“Grandpa should sit, not stand?”

“Definitely. Without noise, balance is skewered and movement becomes impossible even for someone of your age.”

“There’s a panic button?”

“Yes. But wanting to leave isn’t necessarily panic.”

“Fair, I guess.” Jenna fussed inside the quiet room. Then, having made sure I was sitting comfortably and knew where the exit button was, she closed the door with a whimper and not her usual bang.

Immediately I was slammed by a wave of nothingness that was so much purer than shin shin. The silence was too loud, and my ears started to ache. Radar like, they needily kept scanning the maddening silence for something, anything.

Suddenly they focused.

Lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub; the rhythmic pulse of my heart. Snuffle … snuffle; as breath rose though my throat and nose. In perfect silence, it seemed like your body took a turn in front of the microphone.  

Hearing my heart and lungs was one thing, but quite another was my brain wanting to be heard.

I’d always imagined, when you’re on death’s door, that memories would be silent movies. Not so, if the anechoic chamber was any guide. I heard rather than saw the reverberating joy of past triumphs: the applause for my Pulitzer journalism, the church bells sounding our wedding, the laughter of our daughter.

But, in silence’s solitude, the guilt had ridden into town on that joy; there’s nothing that distracts you from the deepest of interred memories. From much earlier, before journalism school, came the soft reverberations of tears that fell, or should have fallen—My Lai, Vietnam.

Then the rat-a-tat of indiscriminate fire. The intermingling of screams from the almost certainly civilians and the just maybe Viet Cong. The thud-splash in the paddy fields as the hearts of a community lub-dubbed no more.

I’d won four Pulitzers for digging in the dirt for other peoples’ truth. Yet my truth was shrouded in the sounds of silence. The right thing to have done would have been to write up my Waterloo, the My Lai reality.

In the anechoic chamber slamming an arthritic hand onto the exit button didn’t sound like panic. But it was.

For, in the silence, this journalistic emperor had clearly heard he wasn’t wearing any clothes. It’s a siren call, thinking others won’t be impressed by a writer who’d issue shoot-to-kill orders. But that made a coward out of me.

Heart pounding, sweating profusely, grateful to the noise from outside; I stumbled from the chamber.

Jenna let me be, didn’t fuss. Then thanked the Orfield Laboratory’s staff and took my arm. I let her guide me to her car.

“Your February column will be ace, Pops!”

“Maybe.”

Or, maybe not. It's a long time since this lapsed Catholic has accepted confession as being good for the soul.