Whistling

I wonder what ever happened to the art of whistling. I don’t mean whistling for your dog or calling for a taxi or the two-finger version to applaud or get someone’s attention. I mean whistling a song, whistling as with an invisible musical instrument, played with the lips like an absent harmonica. In the old old days we didn’t have IPads and IPods and Smart phones to provide us with music as we worked or walked, so we had to provide it for ourselves. I guess humming and singing softly to oneself are also activities of the past. When I was a young man of ten or twelve, I whistled all the time. Or so my older sister would have me believe. She always called me Elmo when she heard me tootling away. I only learned what she meant when I was in high school and one of the top-ten songs was “Heartaches,” whistled by Elmo Tanner, a member of the Ted Weems band. I’m not sure if girls whistled back then or if it was forbidden because it was too un-feminine. Back then, boys and girls weren’t allowed to swear or mention bodily functions or talk back to parents or skip school or stay out after the ten o’clock curfew whistle sounded on the village siren—just one up-and-down alarm for the curfew. It was a continuous alarm for fires and a single whistle for blizzardy mornings to tell us we didn’t have school that day. Oh, the joy of hearing that whistle. It almost made me want to whistle when I heard it, but usually I just went back to sleep. We did lots of things back then, and had lots of things forbidden to do. Back then we all remained in our strictly delineated boy and girl roles, even though we may have wanted to escape. Just as those barriers have now dissolved (the lines between boy and girl, man and woman), so too has the art of whistling disappeared. In the arts, the three most memorable mentions of whistling are Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio telling us, “When you meet temptation and the urge is very strong, give a little whistle, give a little whistle! Not just a little squeak, just pucker up and blow”; Anna when in Siam singing, “Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect, and whistle a happy tune, so no one will suspect I’m afraid”; and that most famous of all, Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not telling Humphrey Bogart, “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” Everyone in the theater knew she was talking about something other than whistling, but back then we weren’t allowed to mention it. Now, in a world that keeps getting more and more confusing led by a man who keeps getting more and more confusing, I think we should all take up the lost art of whistling. Just pucker up and blow.