If you are hard of hearing and wear a hearing aid as I do, or if you have a Dad or Grandfather who falls into that category, you may know how fast ordinary conversations can turn into comedies of error. We, my wife and I, meet some one. His name is Jim. Days later she says: “I called Tim. I liked him. Didn’t you?” My poor brain is already overtaxed because (a) I try to be responsive, to react to what she just said., but (b) I have only one phoneme to work with, “IMM”. Imm who? The J, the T, and the H did not come through and I would not know who Tim is, anyway, because I never heard of him and I already forgot the encounter. No wonder I have a blank look on my face. On good days my wife will explain. On bad days when we are in a hurry she will just say: “Oh, forget it”.
Sometimes, however, she too forgets the name of a person we both met and both of us then try to remember. We both draw a blank. A week later she suddenly, without preamble, bursts out: “Tim, his name was Tim!” Obviously this was on her mind. It was not on mine. I only vaguely remember what this was about. In such cases it is best to keep quiet and let it pass.
Many words sound alike to me. “Mary”, out of context, could sound like “scary”. A statement such as “That was Mary” comes through to me as “That was scary”. My question: “What was?” produces a blank stare on the part of my companion. At that point I had no reason to suspect that I had not heard right. She, of course, had just seen Mary walking by. Without context I was left with just the sounds produced in my inner ear by the wave frequencies that come through. But explanations don’t go far. Normal hearing people tend to listen skeptically to such discourses, vaguely suspecting us freaks of putting on a show.
Sometimes it is only one word that I do not get. “The other day when we makanashnoo…” is a phrase I could not possibly understand. I know there are no Makanashnoos around here so she could not have possibly said that. In such cases I never hesitate to ask.
This brings me to Larry’s mother, the more complicated case of a sentence of which I understood every word and of which I still could not make sense. The sentence I heard was “Her son is Larry”. I drew a blank on “Larry” and recognized “Her” only as a possessive pronoun, a kind of word that should not lead a sentence, anyway. It is amazing how fast the brain can search its store of memories. To be safe I mentally scrolled past all kinds of names and situations, things that we talked about recently, people that we met, anything that might jogg my memory as to who that “Her” may be. Nothing came up and within a split second I had convinced myself that I had heard wrong. The signal was turning green, anyway. I had to move on. Forget Larrry.
Of course I still did not know what I should have heard. In this instance, the answer to the puzzle was quite simple. My wife had only commented that “the sun is glary”. Ridi Paligliaccio sordo. It ain’t easy.
(c)2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman. Picture credit: Pinterest
Herb, nice story. Very funny, my Dad as you know wear hearing aids as well so I completely understand what you were sharing. On the other hand, the good side is when my Mom starts to discuss with him he just turn it off and look at her with a smiley face pretending that he understands hahahahahaha.