Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Bye Bells
“Do you hear that? Do you hear the church bells?” Waking up late, the first morning of a long weekend on Lake Superior, my husband asks me what time it is. No watch, no clock, no phone, so the church bells will tell us what time it is.
“Do you hear the bells?”
“No, I can’t hear them.” Bye, bells, I thought. That’s it for church bells, the bells I’ve heard up here for the past 16 years. Add it to the list of things I can’t hear anymore. Like the waiter who stands behind me and asks for my order, the colleague sitting five seats to my right asking me a question with his hand covering his mouth, or the daughter on the phone who has important news to share and questions to ask.
No can do. No more.
Right away, I zip into my ‘things could be worse’ mode. I could be totally deaf. I could be blind. I could have Alzheimer’s Disease and think my husband is the bell. I could be like the guy in Dalton Trumbo’s book, Johnny Got His Gun, who lives for eternity limbless and faceless in a military hospital, able to hear everything but unable to express even the slightest wish which is, I think, the worst, to be utterly expressionless.
So, I’m thinking. Who cares if church bells have bitten the dust? I’m 64. I’ve heard plenty of church bells and plus, I could probably hear the church bells if I got dressed and hiked over to the damn church. I am not so deaf that I couldn’t hear the bells ringing if I was standing under them. It’s just a matter of ‘is that what I want to do with my time right now?’
Even though leprosy is a lot worse, hearing loss is no fucking picnic. It’s not like everything is really worth hearing. Idiots in meetings, stupid music, horns honking – is it really a loss if I don’t hear that stuff? These are the smart remarks I make when I’m trying to minimize what is increasingly an avalanche of inconvenience and difficulty, and every once in a while, scorching embarrassment.
My hearing loss is pretty significant. I have two very pricey hearing aids along with a streamer that constantly adjusts the hearing aids to accommodate changes in a listening environment, say walking from a quiet street into a noisy restaurant. Added to the hearing loss is tinnitus – an ever-present sound in my ears and head. Some people with tinnitus hear ringing, with me, the tinnitus is the sound of water. I hear the tinnitus all the time that I’m awake. It’s the sound people think they hear when they listen to a conch shell except my head is the conch shell. I like to think I’m always at the beach.
Most people I work with know about my hearing loss. They respond with varying degrees of kindness – I like to call it disability competence. Some people have it and some people really don’t.
A few weeks ago at an important meeting for me professionally, a colleague, in full view of probably forty people, mouthed the words CAN YOU HEAR from across the room.
No, my friend. I can’t hear. But all forty-one people in this room can read your lips.
I get it. It’s hard to know how to deal with someone with a disability. I once shared a duplex with a blind woman. Sometimes I would go to the basement to do my laundry, flick on the light, and scream to find her standing at the washing machine. Obviously, that it was dark down there had not bothered her at all. So, I tried to be very nonchalant. Blind? Who’s blind? My surprise at finding her in the dark basement was about me. It wasn’t about her. I didn’t feel compelled to say CAN YOU SEE?
I like to think my hearing loss came from listening to endless Eric Clapton playing Layla – not unplugged – for months on end while my infant daughter grew out of colic or from cranking Waylon and Willie on the car radio so loud I’d have to keep the windows rolled up at intersections to avoid angry looks from other drivers. I want to think I caused my hearing loss, not that it is happening to me.
I don’t want to be powerless, ever. No Johnny for me.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
Jan, Your implant has improved your hearing since you wrote this, correct? How is it going now? Today I used a wet heat eye mask I bought to treat dry eye a year ago but had never used. I hadn’t slept at all last night and I thought it would block the light and let me finally sleep in the afternoon. I got so claustrophobic that I couldn’t even breathe. i felt blind and realized for the first time what it would actually feel like to be blind and also realized I wouldn’t be able to stand it. I took the damn mask off and luckily eventually fell asleep and slept for seven hours. Ahh. At any rate, hearing has been a small problem for me since a childhood of ear infections and then breaking both eardrums on an airplane flight. I was sitting next to one of Nixon’s advisors on the plane but didn’t want to think our conversation had anything to do with the bursting—ha. I would choose loss of hearing over loss of eyesight any day. Like you, I still count my blessings and cross my fingers re/ the fears. In no way do I equate my difficulty in hearing to yours, by the way. Just spewing words. Judy