noise, sound, hearing

In the late spring of 1998, I finally took action to prove James wrong:  I was not hard of hearing - he was incredibly soft-spoken!  In June, the audiologist returned the verdict:  I am deaf as a haddock.  I got my hearing aids in the first days of August, and shortly thereafter learned I had breast cancer.  Of course, the two are unrelated but will remaim forever linked in my mind.

Tom O'Connor, the audiologist, and I talked at length about the nature of my hearing loss and the advantages of different types of hearing aids .  I finally decided o spend the big bucks and get things that well-nigh invisibly fit into your ear (the smaller, the more expensive), and to get one for each ear.  I realized that I would feel lopsidedif I could hear better out of one ear than the other; a decision I've been happy with ever since and which figures into the story to come.  

James came with me when I finally got the aids, since I'd asked Tom to tune the aids to the particular pitch of James' voice.    When that was done and, with the aids in my ears, I heard James speak, I thought he was shouting at me.  He was not, of course; it was me truly hearing him for the first time.  In the days that follwoed, I heard many strange and wonderful things:   the sound that bicycle tires make when you ride your bike to work, the sound of scissors cutting paper, the sound of my dog barking in the night.  Who knew?  Not me.  

Over time, I became inured to the onslaught of sound and of noise.  I filtered it out as anyone does (is that true?  Does everyone filter sound?  Or is only me, who didn't hear it for who knows how many years?)  And then, several months ago, my right aid gave out.  I took it in to the shop.  With only one working ear,  I felt constantly off-balance, continually out of whack, totally unhappy.  Over several weeks, I stopped wearing the left aid in an effort to regain some equanimity, some sense of physical and psychic balance.  I think that this slow remove of my connection to the hearing world - the failure of one aid followed by the conscious removal of the other - somehow blunted my perception of what happened.  I no longer heard, I no longer reacted to sound, I no longer had one of my essential connections to the world.  And I had no idea that any of this was true.  

For reasons I shan't go into, it took several months to get a new right hearing aid.  I did not put it in until I got home and could insert both the right and the left aids.  Sweet Jesus in the Morning!  The sound, the noise, the incredible volume of everyting that goes on daily in the world!  I asked James, I asked friends, I asked strangers:  can you hear the clock ticking all the time?  Can you always hears the squising sound that car tires make when they turn a corner?  Cne you always hear the gurgle of pipes in the bathroom two floors up?  Can you always hear the goddamned birds in the back yard even if the kitchen door is closed?  Is that thunderous noise really the refrigerator?  Is that the bus stopping a block and a half away?  

What about this sound?  That one?  

Yes.  People who can hear, can hear.  People like me, who cannot hear yet can be helped, rejoice in sound, in music, in random noise, in the sound of a great-grandfather's mantel clock ticking and chiming.  Mostly, in the sound of voices telling us that we are heard, are listened to, are loved.  

Thank you for listening, for talking back, for making a joyful noise.