My eyesight has long since deserted me, but I pride myself on having excellent hearing. Well, I once did, anyway. I desperately want to avoid the stereotype of the hard-of-hearing old fogey who is pitied, barely tolerated, and written off as irrelevant. It is a bit more complicated than what the aging process contributes, though. Up until now I have not admitted as much, not even to myself. Confession time.
Here is an honest-to-God example of one of my more recent telephone conversations. Mind you, I was on my cell phone, inside a storage locker, inside a building, and deaf in my left ear from a recent airline flight. That said, I had the phone to my good ear....
Woman: "Hi, I'm calling from Speed's Towing. We just picked up your deceased father's car which you kindly donated to Oregon Public Broadcasting? Well, turns out we do need that Power of Attorney before we can transfer it elsewhere."
Me: "Steve's Towing? I can do that, but it will have to wait until I get back to Colorado next Friday."
Woman: "That's fine, but it's Speed's Towing. You can just mail the POA when you get home."
Me: "Ok, good. So let me get the name again, and the address."
Woman: "Speed's Towing...."
Me: Ok, I got that, Steve's Towing...."
Woman: "No, Speed's Towing."
Me: "Alright, let me spell out what I'm hearing: S-t-e-v-e apostrophe 's'...."
Woman: No, two 'e's'...."
Me: "S-t-e-e-v-e 's?"
Woman: "It is S-p-e-e-d-s. There is no 'e' on the end."
Me: "Steed's Towing?" A horsepower-themed towing company did not seem like a stretch....
Woman: "No."
Me (sighing heavily and pausing): "Ok, can I get the address at least?"
We manage to agree on the street location, city, state, and zipcode.....
Me: "Ok, let me try spelling this out one more time: "S as in Sam, T as in Tom, e-e, d...."
Woman: "No, it is S, p as in Paul...."
Me: Oh, Speed's Towing, as in going fast!
Woman: "Yes!"
I cannot believe I did not remember the name from the logo on the side of the tow truck, but I was trying to keep all the paperwork organized, so I'll stick to that story of trying not to be distracted. Meanwhile, had the woman merely said something like "Speed's, like going fast, vroom-vroom!," we might have not exhausted all the minutes on my Tracfone.
I still pride myself on being able to track down katydids and crickets from their songs, but even a few years ago a fellow entomologist was pointing out the song of a certain katydid species....and I could hear nothing. The frequency of the song was too high. Last year I found another katydid with a flashlight, and observed his wings moving at high speed, but again I could barely make out a sound.
I have some tinnitus in my left ear in particular, and occasionally it loudly asserts itself, but overall I am more bothered by external noise than I am unable to perceive it. I am wishing right now I could tune out the noisy neighbor kids who insist on shouting and shrieking during their play right outside in our closely-arranged townhouse complex. Apparently the architecture amplifies sound. Lucky us.
Most of us men will not admit it, but more than half of our "hearing" problem, especially when it comes to our spouses, stems from the fact that we are not very good at listening. It is sad to realize that as I age I care less and less about what other people have to say, much of the time anyway. There really is a steady stream of dialogue that literally goes in one ear and out the other, or vanishes somewhere in a sea of neurons in the auditory lobe, never registering in our cerebral cortex. When we are halfway paying attention, then our translation of the sentence or monologue can get scrambled.
For example, on one occasion my wife was reciting to me the hour that our upcoming airline flight would be leaving. She said something to the effect of "Our departure time is eight-thirty AM...." My appropriate and respectful response? "What about The Partridge Family?" I now have a ringing sensation in the other ear, and I may need to see the dentist, too. Honey, I'm only kidding. Honey?
I have tinnitus in my right ear. Sometimes, usually at night when trying to sleep, it can seem crazy loud. And sometimes people will say they hear a bird and I hear nothing, so I wonder if there's something wrong with my hearing. But other times I hear things they don't seem to pick up on - although I think in those cases it is more a case of me picking the sound out of a big mix of sounds better than some other people are able to - so maybe I could have hearing loss, but still good sound discrimination or something. I've read that it is common for us to lose the upper registers of hearing as we age - a few years back there was a phone ringtone that teenagers were using that was a really high pitch because, at least theoretically, their teachers and parents were likely to be unable to hear it. My father is now almost totally deaf. He has always had hearing difficulties from a child illness - deaf in one ear and damage in the other. At this point I think the hearing aid people told him he has no hearing in one ear and only 10% in the other. I think he does remarkably well for that, but my whole life has been a constant thread of him not hearing the dinner table conversation, getting mad at people for being mumbling and being rude so as not to make enough effort to include him, and everyone else feeling frustrated because they hadn't been trying to exclude him and were just genuinely not aware of what he can and cannot hear - like a broken record over and over.
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