Silent cry

There are little tragedies, often preventable, happening all around us; calls for help that we do not hear because we're too cocooned in our own worries.

Actually, none of this sententious tosh is relevant to what happened just a few minutes ago, except that it also featured a Silent Cry. We'd just gotten home from an excursion and were pottering around, on engrossed in our domestic errands, when we suddenly realised that Sonny was uttering regular yelps that seemed halfway between howl of anger and peevish whimper. As we drew near, however, something very dramatic - and completely unprecedented - happened.

His mouth opened into a frozen expression of great anguish. His neck elongated and his eyes shuttered as though in the throes of huge torment. Yet not a sound, neither peep nor gasp, issued from the little fella. We both stared. Pa picked Sonny up. The seconds ticked by, and still, there was not a sound.

Mum and Pa were having hasty consultations. "Is this crying?", he whispered. "I think he's crying... look, there's some clear liquid pooling at his ear lobes," she replied. "Yes, but I don't see any teardrops or tear-tracks near Sonny's eyes," he countered, adding: "And in any case, who turned the sound off?"

We both agreed that whatever was going was almost cartoonishly dramatic. And still, as Pa clutched our six-month-old baby, he was frozen into an endless second of silence. It was as though someone had hit the 'Pause' button, except we weren't characters in a DVD. Or maybe Sonny had somehow been transformed into one, going by his stock-stillness. We were beginning to wonder if, completely out of the blue, he had gone utterly crazy.

After a good 10 seconds had gone by, there was a shudder. A great big tear rolled down. And things returned to something approaching normal. Sonny became crying wildly, Mum hurried to supply more milk while Pa collapsed into the computer chair, asking himself wildly, "Will anyone believe us if I blog about this?" It was one of those "lost-time" episodes that people who believe in extra-terrestrials and flying saucers like to talk about. Except it had happened to our son.

As these words are typed, the little fella has fallen into a deep sleep. Maybe the imminent eruption of his teeth has played havoc with his hormones, or psychic wiring, or whatever keeps him tethered to infant normalcy. At all events, if this Silent Cry episode recurs, we'll have to start doing some serious research into what's going on, which should involve reading medical texts... and probably watching selected episodes of The X-Files.