The Muddled Male

I Hearrrr Youuuu

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

        We live in a marvelous time.  If you have a problem, there is likely some technological device that can be invented to solve it.  Take deafness, for example.  If you were living in the sixteenth or seventeenth century and your wife claimed you were either inattentive or deaf, they might hand you an instrument called an ear trumpet as a way of helping you hear better.  For those of you who have never heard of such a device, it was a funnel shaped instrument, large at one end and small at the other.  The person struggling to hear would place the small end of the trumpet in the ear and aim the large end at the source of sound he or she was trying to hear.  The purpose of the large end was to gather in as much sound as possible which would then pass through the gradually narrowing passage of the trumpet to be focused at the small end now sticking in the person’s ear.  I have never been certain as to whether the ear trumpet actually did amplify sound, or that the sight of some poor soul with a funnel sticking out of his or her ear just caused people to talk louder. 

        In today’s world, however, amplification of sound is taken care of by the engineering miracle of electronics.  My problem turned out to be a degradation of hearing at the higher frequencies with the loss of hearing becoming worse with each increase in pitch until at the highest pitch observable by the normal human ear, my ability to hear had dropped to a level near the category termed as “Profound Hearing Loss.”  Although that might be a disadvantage to me, it was an advantage to Ann, my wife, who was gloating that she had been correct the whole time she had been trying to convince me that I was deaf.  As impossible as such a hearing problem would have been to solve using an old fashion ear trumpet, it is easily dealt with in this era using tiny hearing aids hidden behind one’s ears, each hearing aid containing a complicated electronic circuit that allows different sound frequencies to be amplified individually to a different volume as needed to allow the wearer’s ear to hear equally across one’s hearing frequency range. 

        So I succumbed to a test drive of the model recommended by the hearing aid specialist, and I admit that I am noticing a difference.  Since the higher frequencies I was missing are now being amplified to a volume I can hear, I am becoming aware of sounds that I haven’t heard for years.  Like the swishing sound your socks make as you walk across a hardwood floor in your stocking feet.  Or the rustle of leaves when a light breeze is blowing.  I hear crickets in the weeds around our house that I thought had left for St George one winter and never came back.  When the kitchen tap is running I can hear the crinkling sound that water makes as it hits the bottom of the sink in addition to the rumble I had been used to hearing.  And besides the sound of the cuckoo in Ann’s favorite clock I can now tell that there are whirring gears that make the sound possible.  Ah, and the sound of music.  With my new hearing aids I no longer have to be satisfied with thinking that I am listening to a duet between drums and a bass guitar.  I now also hear the lilting sounds of flutes carrying the melody and piccolos adding the trill.  And the best news of all? My hearing aids connect directly to my iPhone with Bluetooth so that I can answer a call without even having to take my phone from my pocket. 

        I admit that I was in Geek Heaven until the other day when I went to Wal*Mart with Ann to restock our pantry.  It was right there in public as we stood before the soup display that I realized that my hearing aids were paying more attention to what was going on in the rest of the store than they were to Ann who was telling me something important about the can of soup she was examining to make certain that there was nothing harmful listed in the ingredients.  I was straining to hear Ann, but what my hearing aids were amplifying were the sounds of every cart being pushed through the store, every crying baby, and each tired child as they ran up and down the aisle screaming about things they wanted to buy.  And I could hear the loud conversations of people visiting five aisles over.  But I couldn’t make out what Ann was telling me about the soup even though we were standing side by side.  So if in the future you come across us shopping in Wal*Mart and you notice that I have a funnel sticking out of my ear, don’t worry.  I am just trying to hear what Ann is telling me about the soup at the same time I am trying to ignore the din of life in a very busy and public place.  And if you stop to talk to me I may have to turn me head so that the large part of the funnel is pointing at you while my eyes are looking the other way.  That won’t mean that I am guilty of something and I am embarrassed and looking away, or that you bore me.  It is merely my way of staying focused on what you are saying instead of the squeaky wheel on a cart fourteen aisles over carrying a crying baby.  Another interesting thing, I wore my new hearing aids to Church today and no one except my son noticed I had them on.  They certainly would have noticed, however, had there been a funnel sticking out of each ear.