BY JOHN MCLOONE

There’s nothing like a peaceful night.
Often, they aren’t as peaceful as they used to be. And many nights are more tranquil.
Back in the day, which was a lot of days ago, my darling bride and I resided in a tiny house located on a state highway out of a busy factory town. Way back when, mufflers were big business. They were built to fail in a year or two, so about 1 in 10 vehicles at any given time were on the way to Midas.
Loud vehicles, back in the day, were not a good thing. If your muffler went bad, you had to get it fixed as soon as possible. You were driving a nuisance vehicle, and you were destined to get a warning if you didn’t get it fixed. Mufflers littered the side of highways like deceased deer do now that no one is charged with cleaning up roadkill.
Our house was close to the highway. Our bedroom was on the highway side of the house. Midas mufflers were proudly manufactured in this town. To know how big the muffler business was, every night at the end of second shift, a seemingly endless string of trucks packed with these pieces of automotive gold rolled within about 20 feet of our window. I waited for it nightly.
As our family grew, we moved about 15 miles into the country. What a change we experienced! There was a little room to move about, and our dog came back about once a week after finding something new to roll in that only country living has to offer. And it was peaceful. Much too peaceful. I had gone to college in Milwaukee and lived a block from a bustling emergency room that hosted many vehicles nightly that were rushing patients there with lights and sirens. From there, I experienced a couple years of the “rattle, rattle, thunder, clatter, boom, boom, boom” (if you remember this jingle, you’re old too!) of Midas mufflers. From there, we moved to a place where the nights were as dark as night and noises came from nature. I couldn’t sleep. It was too quiet. I got into the bad habit of sleeping with the TV on to give me the background ambiance I had grown accustomed to.
Forty years later, and times sure have changed. Some wise guy realized that mufflers didn’t have to only have two-year life cycles. That factory is gone. Those rumbling 11 p.m. monsters are gone. But so am I.
I was relaxing Saturday night with the windows open listening to the sounds of the present night and reminiscing over what kept me awake during my formative sleep years. It’s much quieter now, but not too serene. There were some thunderstorms to lull me in and out of sleep. Some dogs barked. The train a mile away went through on time. Early in the night, there were a couple of these UTVs that have taken over roads. They’re loud, I thought. Then I was treated to a symphony of a couple vehicles that really brought me back. The goal used to be to have quiet vehicles. That’s changed, apparently. The louder the better! About every hour a pickup would thunder by, and I could hear it hit every stop sign down the street, accelerating to provide maximum sound output at every stop.
Most nights, it’s aggravating. This night, it was a trip down memory lane.