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" I&amp;#039;m a talker. By nature. I&amp;#039;m an explainer, a chatterer, a negotiator. I used to think each day began whenever I started talking. But lately, I&amp;#039;ve begun to see the day&amp;#039;s first moment of speech as the icy grip of anesthesia setting in. And all that talking that I used to think meant something -- all that jabber about the Red Sox, or the treatise on the placement of cup holders in the new Endeavor? I realized that&amp;#039;s just the guy in the paper mask telling you to start counting backward. White noise, the world numbing you. A whole day does indeed begin once you start to talk, but it&amp;#039;s a different day.  So I decided to shut up. I decided to employ silence as my tool of influence for a month. I wasn&amp;#039;t taking any vow or casting off the world. I am no monk. Rather, I would work on developing silence as an autonomous aspect of my own use of language, a response in itself. Silence would become its own greeting, a wordless assertion, my first means of expressing, even pressing for, what I wanted. And it would, I hoped, throw people off a little. Make them wonder, just for a moment, what I was up to. I hoped they would fill the gap out of a nervous impulse to make me happy. In every circumstance -- at every tire store and library desk, with every waiter, bartender, and pet-store clerk -- my first act was to not speak. I had my ways. Count silently to three Mississippi, take a long look around the room, put my hands in my pockets and think, all while they looked at me. That&amp;#039;s how I started out, working to quiet only my own quirky gestures and rote responses with a series of tricks, looking to break a pattern of back-and-forth that I had come to count on, where one party fills in dead space with explanations of what they want while the other rushes to tell them what they can get. The idea wasn&amp;#039;t so much to make people uncomfortable (though that was a certainty); it was to muscle my way back into predictable exchanges, to consciously use silence and see how it changed things, how it might tip exchanges and transactions in my favor. I had a boss once, a quirky guy whom everyone was curious about because he hardly talked to anyone. He knew a lot, but he never said a thing more than he had to at work. You brought him an idea, and more often than not, he stared at you blankly in response. This happened to me again and again. Then maybe I&amp;#039;d say something else or reformulate my proposal. He&amp;#039;d purse his lips, swing his legs on his desk, and, after a deep sigh, say something profoundly unlike any word I can write here. Maybe &amp;quot;Eh.&amp;quot; So sometimes, I&amp;#039;d pitch an idea -- sentences piling up, one after the other -- and then I would shut up, let silence take over. And he&amp;#039;d sit there the whole time, hands behind his head, look at me, and, once in a while, say, &amp;quot;Okay.&amp;quot; Now that&amp;#039;s a productive silence, since I wasn&amp;#039;t thinking about what he wanted but rather what I was capable of, how I could shape my ideas to make them happen, about what I could do. His silences -- and they were legendary -- motivated. That was what I wanted, a silence that motivated others, even people I didn&amp;#039;t know. First I stopped saying hello to everybody I passed on my way into my some-time office in New York. Nothing to the doormen at my hotel, not a word to the guy giving me coffee, nor to the security guard who always nods to me no matter how many months go by between visits, nor to the myriad people who passed me at my desk, where I sit for only a few days every couple of months. I nodded, or gave a little wave, or watched them pass, but I said nothing. At first, it just made me feel unfriendly and uncomfortable. None of it netted me very much. I could bear down on tasks easier for the first time since the seventh grade, when I had a teacher who damaged me permanently by making me play chess at one end of the room and draw a still life at the other in some left-brain, right-brain scheme. But soon, I saw the upside. I never had to hear about the Red Sox. The less I talked, the easier it was to shut things out. When I saw someone I wanted to talk to, I made a note to get up and go see them. Their desk, my agenda. This made me the agent, albeit a bit less friendly one, of change. At restaurants, I found, silence is money. I&amp;#039;ve always liked jabbering at hostesses and waiters. But when I entered, the agenda of silence kept me from registering any part of myself that could be charmed or cajoled. Every time I was shown a table, I just took a three-Mississippi pause before replying, and every time -- without fail I say! -- they offered me a better table. When ordering food, I&amp;#039;d just stare at the waitress and think, waiting -- even if I was only ordering waffles. I could see the discomfort. I could feel the relationship these people had to time. They had orders waiting, they didn&amp;#039;t care what I wanted, they only wanted to get moving. My silence slowed them down, made them pay attention. The women gave me a longer look back, the men moved faster.  I wandered through an art gallery while waiting for my girlfriend, who had a doctor&amp;#039;s appointment. The owner approached me, gave me an offhand greeting. Did I have any questions? he asked. I think I shrugged then, took a long look at him, then up above him, then back to his eyes. I muted myself and shook my head. Rude. That&amp;#039;s what I thought. The word entered my brain and there I was, fighting back the impulse to explain why I was in his gallery (which would make me matter less to him, since I wasn&amp;#039;t buying) and why it might seem that I was being rude (which would turn the thing on its ear, giving him the power to let me off the hook). So I just kept it shut. I could see him trying to make out who I was. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re always interested in a buyer,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Let me get you a schedule of what&amp;#039;s upcoming.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;d made me wrong. And in that, he&amp;#039;d made me into somebody. Weeks later, in Los Angeles, I pulled up to a valet-parking guy in front of a restaurant on Third Street, traffic snapping by, indifferent and twilight gray. I climbed out of the car, said nothing -- no pithy remark, no throwaway greeting, no ice-breaking I&amp;#039;m-okay-you&amp;#039;re-okay nod to the fact that he was younger than most of the books I own. It took some restraint. But by not speaking, I could see the things that I might usually say hanging in the air around me, and I knew then why I said them. In a strange city, on the way to dinner with someone more important than I am, I always feel I&amp;#039;m in the wrong place, that I&amp;#039;ve made a mistake, and that I&amp;#039;m on the verge of another. Keeping quiet allowed me to focus. Silence allows you to be indifferent to your own insecurities. More important, I think it made the guy wonder who I was -- or whether I was anybody. Guy was checking me out. Really seeing me. This was how it went now. Silence is far easier to punctuate than language. I handed him my keys, gave a nod, and paused when I took the ticket. He looked at me hard then. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll keep it up front,&amp;quot; he said.  Used right, silence communicates trust. It&amp;#039;s like carrying a holstered gun. I ruminated a long time before using that simile, which feels more than a little trite to me, but I&amp;#039;m telling you, that&amp;#039;s pretty accurate. It&amp;#039;s not dangerous; it&amp;#039;s in the holster. But people notice. It can&amp;#039;t kill anyone, but they see what you are carrying. Silence makes you the sheriff. I&amp;#039;ve been writing since 6:15 this morning. It&amp;#039;s 11:34 just now. My son came and went. I hadn&amp;#039;t spoken. So I went outside and sat on the porch. They&amp;#039;re pouring a new sidewalk across the street. The cement truck was spinning. Very loud, I thought. These details of the obvious! I shrugged, utterly aware that I didn&amp;#039;t have to announce it to the world, but thinking I might feel better just for getting a word out. The neighbor&amp;#039;s dog trotted out just then and stared at me. Ella. I gave her a nod, and she took one step forward and sat in a little patch of shade. I stared right at her, and she growled. Not a stupid dog, I thought. Across the street, they were shouting to one another. &amp;quot;Loud,&amp;quot; I said at last, nodding at the guys raking cement into the forms.  When I looked back, the dog was loping back around her house in a wide circle, hanging back, toying with the voice in the distance. Her master was calling. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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