Ed Grisamore

There is a man in our building who arrives at work every morning at about the same time. I know when he gets there before I ever see him.

No, I don’t watch out my office window for him to pull into the parking lot. (I don’t even know what kind of car he drives.)

But I hear definitely hear him before I see him.

Dave is a whistler, you see.

I don’t just hear Dave in the morning. I hear him at different times during the day. It floats down the hall. It bends around doorways and bounces off walls.

I hear that whistling as he comes up the stairwell. It’s a very happy whistle. I have a theory that whistlers are basically happy people.

You never hear a whistler whistling the blues.  There are no deep, dark melancholy tones from the lips of whistlers.

Birds whistle. It’s a joyful sound.

I guess my earliest memory of whistling was in “Snow White” and “Whistle While You Work.”

Then there was the theme song from “The Andy Griffith Show.”

And, of course, my all-time favorite whistling at the end of Macon’s own Otis Redding singing “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.”

Remember Tom Sawyer? Here is an excerpt from the novel by Mark Twain.

“Within two minutes, or even less, he had forgotten all his troubles. Not because his troubles were one whit less heavy and bitter to him than a man’s are to a man, but because a new and powerful interest bore them down and drove them out of his mind for the time — just as men’s misfortunes are forgotten in the excitement of new enterprises. This new interest was a valued novelty in whistling, which he had just acquired from a negro, and he was suffering to practice it undisturbed. It consisted in a peculiar bird-like turn, a sort of liquid warble, produced by touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth at short intervals in the midst of the music — the reader probably remembers how to do it, if he has ever been a boy. Diligence and attention soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet–no doubt, as far as strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, the advantage was with the boy, not the astronomer. ”

I’m convinced we could solve a lot of problems of the world if you would just whistle.