May 30, 2019--May as Well Be Deaf

Since pretty early middle age, I haven’t been able to hear much of anything. The severity depends on the circumstances, but the silence has always been there.

I first noticed the phenomenon at a rare lunch some of us lawyers went on when I was at SAS Institute in Cary, NC, right off of Research Triangle Park. We were at a very nice place (why? We weren’t paid anything, and we all disliked the boss. Why did we bother?), so nice that there was a piano player plying his trade in the background. The table was a fairly rotund circle so some of my colleagues were, fortunately, far away. Because of the piano, and some really fairly muted conversation elsewhere in the room, I couldn’t hear a thing. I was maybe 36.

I ate my lunch in blissful ignorance of the conversation, which would have ranged from little kids, to government contracting, to traffic. Nothing interesting, so I was secretly pleased and wondered how soon we could leave.

Over the years, this alternatively alarming and annoying trait has never gotten much worse, but it’s bad enough. At some point, I told myself that I shouldn’t follow my mother and her father in annoyingly insisting that I could hear. I’d get tested, I’d get hearing aids, and I’d wear them.

My mother was really exasperating. We would go to a restaurant, and the waitress would make a speech: I’m Amanda, I’ll be helping you tonight, here are the specials, etc. etc., and then Amanda would focus on my mother and ask, “Can I get you something to drink?”

My mother, after having smiled sweetly and in silence at Amanda the entire time, would then turn on me and ask, “What did she say?” God, did you get ANYthing of that?

When she moved to assisted living, issues multiplied: when I showed up, she wouldn’t be wearing her hearing aids. Where were they? When found—in a drawer, the bathroom—they’d be missing batteries. Where do you keep your batteries, Mom? WHAT? she’d ask. I mean, what a great Catch-22: she can’t hear without her hearing aids, but she can’t get her hearing aids without answering some questions. When I located the batteries, they were dead. It was a weekend, and the battery store was closed. She didn’t perceive any problem.

I resolved not to put my family through that.

So I went to some nice woman who tested me using lots of equipment, and she told me that I had minimal hearing loss in my right ear; my left ear was perfect. Good! I was, let’s say, ebullient. Not that I could hear you if YOU said it. Big word, lots of soft consonants.

Then she said, “I wouldn’t suggest that you try to have a conversation with someone in another room. Also you may need to turn your right ear more in their direction.”

What the hell? Which is it? I’m fine or I’m deaf? I decided, like my forebears after all, to minimize the whole thing. I can HEAR.

However…the facts on the ground were not as positive. As years went by, I found that I really couldn’t hear either Nancy or Kate all that well. But, I thought, Nancy mutters and Kate talks too fast. It got bad enough that one day, after asking “what” over and over, in exasperation finally I told Nancy, “OK, if you’re not going to speak so that I can hear you, I’m just going to assume that it’s not important enough to hear.” That went over great.

But doubts worried at the back of my mind. Also my dear cousin Kathy says she’s having trouble. We had dinner with her and her family in Boston, and, though we sat together, we kept shouting “What!” at each other and everyone else.

I reminded her of a family story: a flock of our common forebears lived in Mansfield, Tioga County, in Pennsylvania’s northern tier. They would venture to a hotel in Elmira, New York, for dinner. One night, our great-grandfather shouted, “Could we get some more wine?” I understand the place quieted right down. This did not occur during Prohibition anyway.

So I went back to the audiologist, though this time it was a clever young man who’d perhaps bought the business. He performed the same tests, and he came up with the same diagnosis: a little hearing loss in my right ear.

“So,” I asked eagerly, “I can tell my wife she mutters and my daughter she talks too fast?”

This was a risky question. I was putting him on the spot; he might not want to take the chance of offending my family, or he might even think, given these stakes, that he might want to walk back his diagnosis—“well, I wouldn’t go that far,” he might well chuckle. But no. “Yes, you can tell them that,” he said. I did, and that went over just fine, too.

Recently we walked into a restaurant that we hadn’t visited before. The noise was deafening. I told Nancy and Kate, “You guys have a nice evening talking. I’ll just enjoy my meal.” I ended up talking to an old guy at the next table, though, like most old guys, including me, he was boring.

What does this mean? How much have I missed? It’s a continuing mystery: if my hearing is essentially just fine, why can’t I hear anyone? Often I just give up and tune out, knowing that I won’t hear anything, though, to be fair, sometimes I just tune out whether I can hear or not.

It didn’t bode well for my legal career that I was so used to tuning out that I would go somewhere else in my head right when the partner assigning me work would say, “And here’s the most important thing to keep in mind.” (I’m kidding. Partners in law firms are never that clear. You’re better off not listening.)

No wonder I’ve spent my life feeling like I was doing dishes in the dark. I also can’t hear them clinking together.