a concerning story of clicking and clanking | Alexia Walz

Soon, the clicking and clanking of silverware in fancy restaurants will become deafening again. And we will grow accustomed to that odd moment when everyone puts down their fork at the exact same time, and the restaurant becomes so quiet that you can hear the breath of the person in the booth sitting behind you.

Everyone in this space gets a moment to reset, to take a rare moment of silence in this busy, unforgiving world and use it to reminisce, to reflect, to remember all the intubations and the 30-day vacations on a ventilator and the vaccines and the implanted chips and all the false promises sponsored by the Joe in the oval office and the Joe in the chancellor’s office. They take the ethereal silence to recognize that they’re remembering that these horrors are passed. They’re gone, they’re old news. People get to live now, people get to breathe now, people can die on their own time now. Everyone can relish in the fact there’s no more outdoor testing tents and personal protective gear. No more polarization. No more suffering.

But then someone notices it. They notice that the beauty of silence is painfully unfamiliar and they go back to scraping their metal utensil on the plate because their wife is once again talking too much about their mother-in-law’s overly high expectations of her and the wife is upset because she’s actually exceeding expectations by taking care of the children and paying bills and solving disputes between herself and her mother in law and her husband isn’t doing anything at all besides smoking in the house and making the asthmatic children cough but in the mother-in-law’s eyes, the chain-smoking around the children is worthy of a Nobel prize because her son is the perfect candidate for world’s best dad and America’s most obedient husband and now, some five year old across the restaurant can hear world’s best dad scraping the china plate and he can also hear the head chef in the kitchen yelling at the busboy and he can hear his older sister smacking and slurping her spaghetti so clearly it’s like a fish flopping around in his ear and he hates the sensation of the fish flopping and the scraping from the husband and the berating of the underpaid college student whose version of a living hell is bussing tables for the faux Italian sous chef who probably gets aroused by yelling at his employees so the five year old begins to cry. He cries so loud that he is crying for the chain-smoking husband’s failing marriage and he’s crying for the wife who’s just one more smoke-induced asthma attack away from almost calling the suicide hotline but not quite because that’s not worthy of a Nobel prize and he’s crying for the chef who hasn’t yet realized that a daily trip to the liquor store might kill him one day.

He’s crying for the five hundred thousand lives lost. He’s crying for the rapidly increasing cases and the rapidly decreasing masks. He’s crying for the terrifyingly nonchalant Biden-Harris Administration. He’s crying for the Black lives murdered and the Black lives destroyed and the Black lives ignored. He cries so loud that even the adults in the restaurant want to cry. Sometimes, the clicking and clanking is just too deafening.