The Whistler

Ye s t e r day, my husband and I made a quick trip to the grocery store. I waited in the truck with the dog while he dashed inside for a few necessities. When he returned to the Ford F-150, his face was pinched with irritation.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. He gestured toward another shopper walking through the parking lot. “That guy’s a whistler!” he declared, as if announcing he’d spotted a dangerous criminal. “I could hear him whistling all over the store. It was so annoying!”

I felt a sudden tightness in my chest. “Let me remind you,” I said quietly, “that my dad was a whistler, and I would give anything — anything — to turn back time and hear him whistling again.”

My emotional response seemed lost on him. My husband’s sensitivity isn’t just a quirk of personality — it’s a genuine condition called misophonia, where certain sounds trigger intense emotional reactions. Indeed, he has the genetic marker for it in his DNA — something I discovered years ago after one of his irrational outbursts. While I’ve long known about his aversion to the sounds of chewing, crunching, smacking and clicking, yesterday’s incident revealed another trigger: whistling and perhaps, humming.

For me, encountering a whistler in public is like stumbling upon a time machine. I find myself following the whistler, just a little, drawn to the familiar melody of my childhood. In my experience, whistlers are almost exclusively male, typically from older generations. In fact, I cannot recall ever hearing a woman whistling in public spaces.

Whistling — producing a musical sound by forcing air through a small opening formed with the lips — is something of a lost art. Creating the sound requires practice and skill that fewer people seem to cultivate these days, but a whistled tune can transport me instantly to our family home in Bonaire, circa 1970s and 1980s.

My father, born in 1933 and with us until 1992, belonged to what now seems a dying breed of whis- continued from page

tlers. As he prepared for work, his whistling drifted through our house. In my bedroom, I’d listen to the music floating from the primary bathroom as he splashed aftershave on freshly shaven skin and dressed for the shift ahead. After his passing, that music disappeared from my life. In the years following his death, he would visit me in dreams. I would hear him before my mind’s eye saw him. I could recognize him by the sound of his distinctive gait (made with his long legs and heavy footsteps), but it was the whistling that confirmed his presence before I even saw his face in those dreams.

While I appreciate hearing men whistle a tune (not to be confused by my disgust of the twonote “wolf whistle” historically directed at women in a sexual way), my husband experiences these same sounds as something akin to fingernails scratching the surface of a chalkboard. His misophonia transforms what brings me comfort and joy into something unbearable for him.

So there in the parking lot yesterday, I found myself in a wistful longing for what whistling represents to me — my father, a simpler time, a form of human expression that seems increasingly rare in our world of earbuds and constant noise and distraction.

Perhaps this is why I felt so irritated when my husband complained about the whistling stranger. It wasn’t really about him or his discomfort, but about my own grief — that something as simple as pursed lips and expelled air creating a melody could be both a source of annoyance for someone I love and a treasure I would give anything to experience again.