Paul Richardson: The Doppler Effect

One of my greatest pleasures as a child was the overnight stays with my maternal grandparents. My paternal grandfather had passed away three years before my birth and my dad was a change of life birth, so his mother and my grandmother was in a different stage of life by comparison to my Grandma and Grandpa Smith. 

While my Grandpa Smith was ten years younger than my Grandmother Richardson, my Grandma Smith was thirteen years younger than her husband. A complicated and wild conflagration if there ever was one.

So, with this palette of characters that filled the various grand-person positions, I was provided with a variety of interactions. I cannot recall having ever made an overnight stay with my Grandmother Richardson, not that it never happened, I just can’t recall it ever occurring. I did, however, have the opportunity to engage in sleepovers at Grandma and Grandpa Smith’s.

It was on those occasions that I was enlightened to the fact that even though they were a devoted couple, they were quite different. Was it due to the age gap? I don’t know, but it was clear that they each had a different approach to life even in the way that they handled the night.

I still find comfort in the memory of bedding down in a bed where the old school way of storing quilts was simply to place multiple layers on each available bed. In the winter this was a weighty but comforting and warm place to burrow into at night. Since my grandparents always heated with wood, the temperature tended to drop significantly during the overnight hours. In the summer, however, those multiple layers of quilts just had to go.

Once her grandchildren were situated for the night, Grandma Smith could soon be heard turning in for the night in her adjoining bedroom. Grandpa, however, would always have a few more hours to burn, possibly falling asleep in front of the television which bathed the house in that eerie blue light that was the fallout from televisions of the black and white era. 

Sometimes I would wake to find the television displaying a static picture that indicated the station had signed off for the night. This was a prominent indication of one of the ways that they differed as individuals.

One of the most significant impacts of these overnight stays were on my auditory senses. The sounds were all different. My parents' home was located on a remote county road, one mile outside of Neosho. A low traffic area. Grandma and Grandpa’s home was located just off of the curve on a state highway and a primary route to boot. 

The sounds of traffic were an integral part of the environment at this location. At night one could hear the semi-trucks pulling their massive trailers coming along the highway. As they arrived, rounded the curve, and departed, the wavelength of their sound was constantly contracting and then expanding.

Years later in high school I found that I had been comforted by the Doppler Effect.