I was visiting my son in Arlington, Va., a suburb of the nation’s capital. Almost every day I walked for a few hours through the crowded streets.

One day it rained and the rain had cleansed the accumulated residue of industrialization from the air, and the temperature was mild, and the humidity was low. In short, it was a good day to walk; in fact, it was a good day to be alive.

Then I realized that the ubiquitous cell phone conversations were disturbing my peace of mind.

Had these conversations been about cabals, or had even a wisp of concupiscence, I would have been a happy listener; I love gossip and even playing the voyeur, if so cast.

However, these cell phone conversations were utterly banal, and hence, invasive without having any redeeming value to me.

I was annoyed. I could not think of any way of defending myself against the megaphones of mediocrity.

And then it came to me. I could be annoying as well. In fact, my mother and several ex-girlfriends had even commented that I was good it, maybe a natural.

I have committed to memory a few famous Shakespearian soliloquies, a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti from his book “A Coney Island of the mind,” Robert Burns “To a Mousie,” and tidbits of several other poems from Keats, T.S. Elliot, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I paused for a moment and considered my intent. I am a little long in the tooth (70) for such mischievous behavior. On the other hand, I have never completely grown up either, so, what the hell!

I did not have to wait long to strike. A young woman was walking just ahead of me on the street. I had to make sure she really had a cell phone and was not just a crazy person talking to herself, because I am opposed to making fun of the disabled.

Then I saw it. She definitely had a cell phone, and, she was talking loudly and animatedly, about nothing of interest. I thought of the line “… full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

So, imagining myself as Sir Lawrence Olivier, and using my diaphragm so that the folks in the back row of Albert Hall could hear me, I began “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, each day creeps on in its petty pace …”

It worked! I could tell that she was having trouble hearing because she hunched her body, cocked her head like the RCA dog, and cupped both hands around the phone.

And no, I would not be “a poor player that struts and frets his time upon the stage to be heard no more.”

I did come back again and again. But, alas, as the little boy said to Alan Ladd in the movies when he was about to tussle with a barroom full of bad guys, “Shane, there’s too many.”

Nelson Strasser lives in Lakeport, Calif.