We’re asking you to make “silence” a presence in your post
There is a garden just across the path. It was a garden with vegetables, flowers, trees, bushes: a garden to please the eye, a reward for the gardener. It is now a quiet garden; there is no longer a gardener. It is now a garden of silence.
I called my father last week he is now 98 years old.
“Hello dad”
“Hello Pat”
“How are you keeping?”
“Yes”
“How are you keeping?” my voice was a few decibels louder.
“Yes”
“No dad, I mean HOW ARE YOU KEEPING.”
Mr. Swiss calls from another room. “Do you have to shout like that when you call your father?”
“Yes, he cannot hear me.” And then my dad reacts.
“OK, just the same, just the same.”
“Dad are you wearing your hearing aid.”
“Yes.”
“Your HEARING AID.”
“No, it’s no good. I cannot be bothered, it doesn’t help.”
and so the conversation continues. I tell him that my husband has problems with his back. “Yes” he answers, and after a while he asks me how my husband’s back is.”
My husband tells me when I have finished with my call, “I think the complete neighbourhood probably heard the conversation.”
My father lives in silent country.
There are many forms of silence. A silence that no longer exists and a silence that it’s owner does not realise it exists.
I once had to travel by train. I entered the carriage and took my phone to inform my husband I was on my way. The lady sitting opposite, suddenly put her fingers to her lips. I looked at her with bewilderment. What was wrong? She pointed to a sign on the wall of the carriage saying “Quiet Zone”. It seems that in this carriage quiet was to be observed at all times. It was a carriage for the readers, the sleepers, the “zombies?”. It was not the carriage for me, so I left as soon as I arrived and moved to the next carriage where there were human beings, people that lived and breathed, that spoke to each other. I decided a world with silence was not my world.
One day I will move on to a quiet world where my garden no longer exists, where I will have eternal silence. I might move on to a deaf world with a hearing aid, but I hope I do not move on to a world of silent compartments in a train.
Chronicles of an Anglo Swiss 
Many people of our parents’ generation refused to wear hearing aids. Garry’s father refused and it made communicating nearly impossible in his latter years, something Garry still regrets. The technology has improved. Not enough, but maybe it will get there in time for us.
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Although my dad did not really want a hearing aid, he decided it would be better. Ufortunately the British National Health Service is not the best. It is free but you only get what they can afford, which is not the best. If my father would pay himself, he would probably have a hearing aid that would help. He now just gets an inferior product.
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This is beautiful. I just have the feeling that silent train compartment is more than just that.
http://marthakennedy.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/ah-kya-kha-loo-i/
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It might be, I did not stay long enough to find out. I felt like an outcast. Something like the cowboy that walks into the saloon and everyone stares.
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