Free A Field Guide to Awkward Silences by Alexandra Petri

of the Bay.”
    Except nobody wanted to whistle “Dock of the Bay.” Everyone just wanted to sing. “Come on,” the woman who had organized us kept saying. “Come on, this is the only time all year when it’snormal to whistle! Come on! This is your chance to let it out! Nobody will silence you, like usual! Whistle, people! Whistle!”
    I looked around me and, not for the first time, felt like an impostor.
    •   •   •
    “It’s so nice to be among fellow whistlers,” everyone said.
    “Yes,” I murmured, trying to nod convincingly. “Isn’t it!”
    In an interview with
The
Village Voice
, the MC said coming to the whistling convention for the first time was “like coming out of the desert after forty years and finding your tribe.”
    But I thought—Tribe? How can this be? What can whistlers feel guaranteed to have in common with one another? All they can say for sure about their fellow whistlers is that they are able to make a certain sound by blowing through their mouths. At a
Star Wars
convention, at least you know that the people you meet will agree that Han shot first.
    Then again, sometimes you misjudge how close a hobby will bring you to another person. Once, I started a Meetup group for people who love airports, based on the logic that everyone I’d ever met who confessed to enjoying spending time in airports was a great human being. The people who showed up to our first meeting (in the TGI Fridays of Reagan National Airport, just outside security) were not what I had envisioned at all. Conversation quickly fizzled. “Let’s meet at a train station next!” one of them suggested.
    I bristled. “I don’t think you understand the ethos of this organization.”
    •   •   •
    There was one other impostor at the whistling convention. She was there because she’d heard about it on NPR and wanted to know what it was all about. We recognized each other on sight.
    “You’re a journalist,” she said. “Do you go to this kind of thing often?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Is it always like this?”
    I thought it over. “Yeah,” I said. “Basically.”
    •   •   •
    Do you ever have the feeling, driving through a strange town, stopping at a strange restaurant, seeing strangers laughing at the corner table—what if? What if this were my table, what if these were my old friends, what if that waiter knew my order? What if this were home?
    That’s how it felt.
    Proust said one of the startling things about aging was how you started to see people you knew everywhere you went. There’s Kat’s laugh. There, right there, coming out of a stranger’s mouth. There’s the face of someone you knew in middle school, riding the bus on top of a strange body. There’s your old chair in a stranger’s living room. There’s your old coach. There’s your grandfather sitting in someone else’s living room sipping iced tea. Life keeps reassembling people. There are only so many tunes you can play on these strings of DNA.
    Every friend group has a Karen, and if you don’t know instantly who it is, it’s you. Every e-mail list has the same squabbles. Every class has the same people—the clown, the brain, Dave. Every horoscope is true.
    Depending on when you catch me, this is terrifying or not. All the effort you put into living your authentic life, and it all works out much the same.
    That was the depressing thing about whistling: It was so fundamentally identical to every other pastime. It was weird being on the outside, for once, peering in.
    The convention was like spending a weekend with someone else’s grandparents. It was nice. On some level, all grandparents are the same. “Here is some food,” they say. “Now, it is time for us to watch TV at a high volume.”
    But it didn’t feel like it was mine.
    When I got home and told people where I’d been all week, they all gave me a shocked look.
    “You whistle?” they asked. “I had no idea.”
    “Well,” I said, “I don’t