My mother's deafnesss is very trifling, you see, just nothing at all. By only raising my voice, and saying anything two or three times over, she is sure to hear.
—Miss Hetty Bates, in Jane Austen's Emma (1815)
Jeanne has lived like Miss Bates for a long time, repeating herself at the breakfast table and throughout the day. This couldn't have been easy, but I told her martyrdom is good for the soul; unfortunately, I missed her reply.
So, as a long-delayed Christmas present, I broke down, and officially became a citizen of South Fogeystan, the dry country that children like to visit, pulling the little wires out of your ear, and asking "What's this, Grandpa?"
I got hearing aids.
I'd only been putting them off for 20 years — what's the rush? For one thing, it wasn't my fault. My friends who wore hearing aids always complained: they're uncomfortable and expensive; they sounded tinny, and looked like mushrooms in a teacup.
A while ago, when I was giving a poetry reading, a friend who wore them was sitting in the front row — out of habit, I guess — when suddenly his ears began whistling. He looked around, puzzled as the rest of us. It may have been my alliteration that set them off: …a paragon / where paradox and paradigm converge… I resolved to adopt a plainer style.
When the novelist Evelyn Waugh (A Handful of Dust, Brideshead Revisited) was aging, he became even more of a grouch than he had been. In a letter to his son, Auberon, he wrote, "I should tell you that I'm completely deaf by now. It's such a relief." While that can't be completely true, I know what he meant.
Now as I pad through our home, the floorboards creak like a scene from Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher — though so far no enshrouded maidens in blood-stained white robes have appeared. Maybe on Christmas Eve, with Marley's ghost. And at night, during this winter's overheated reproductive season, acorns rattle our roof like small-arms fire. (In our neighborhood, of course, it sometimes is small-arms fire.)
True, with my new aids, I can enter many more conversations — a mixed blessing, but less embarrassing. Before, someone might ask something like "Don't you love Faulkner's short stories?" and I'd nod, "Upstairs, to the right." Lots of awkward pauses, during which I'd smile, vaguely.
One of the bonuses has been that I've become interested in the piano again; we got our old piano tuned, and I'm playing Christmas carols and other simple pieces. It brings us back to the old days, when we'd gather with friends around the piano and sing folk songs after dinner. We often concluded — foreshadowing our connection with Creative Loafing — with a rousing rendition of "Joe Hill," a ballad about the union leader who was executed by firing squad in 1915 on trumped-up charges. (Defiant to the end, his last word was "Fire!")
An aid-wearing friend informed me that the first rule about hearing aids is, Never leave them where a dog can get at them. Apparently dogs are attracted to the scent of ear wax, and love to chew on hearing aids, a pretty disgusting bit of knowledge. All these years I thought Cappy licked my ears because he loved me. Well, De gustibus non est disputandum, as Miss Harris was fond of telling us in high school Latin, though she may not have had ear wax in mind. In fact, she would have fainted at the thought.
The small size of the new digital aids have had both a positive effect — not one person has noticed I'm wearing them — and negative: they're so light that I forget they're on, and in the first week I lost one while working in the garden. We were in despair for an entire day, scuffling among the acorns. In what we call the Miracle on Wildwood Lane, I eventually overturned our huge black garbage barrel, crammed with yard debris. About halfway through, there it was, huddling like a guilty snail among clumps of dirt and weeds.
Sometimes, when we're out at a particularly noisy restaurant, I feel I'm in a howling tempest — which reminds me of charming Miranda in Shakespeare's play, saying to her father (Prospero, explaining the treachery that exiled them to their island): "Your tale, sir, would cure deafness."
Well, mine may not be exactly cured, but this will be a Christmas season where, for the first time in a long time, I'll be able to hear, in person or on the telephone, everyone's greetings, songs and wishes; and I'm looking forward to it. So Jeanne and I agree with Tiny Tim, who cries out each year at this time, clearly enough for the whole world to hear, "God bless us every one!"
This article appears in Dec 23-29, 2009.