Month: July 2018

I am not one of those that hear the grass grow. Nor do I hear the squirrel’s heartbeat, to borrow another concept from George Eliot. But then I would not want to hear such things, anyway. I would settle for just hearing what those around me are saying. Not that I do not “hear” them – if anything, I am annoyed by the din, the constant roar that surrounds me – but I would also like to understand what people are saying. I find it very taxing to give a well-reasoned cohesive answer to a question I did not understand. I am not a reliable conversation partner. Folks may be put off when they discuss Macy’s sale of pots and pans and I respond that I don’t really need any socks, nor pants. The short of the story is that the family counsel came to the conclusion that I should have a hearing test.

This was done. Among other things they put earphones on me and I had to listen to words and then repeat them. The first one was the word “clarinet”. Then came the word “woods”.  Hello, I thought, this is going to go my way. The next word was “reed”. Didn’t I guess that? This was fun, actually. The next word was “laughed” followed by the word “fest”. This test was music to my ears because I was thinking “Mozart”. Unfortunately the music was only in my head. I had the fest all wrong, and it was nothing to laugh at. It had not been clarinet but cabinet; goods, not woods; followed by “weed”, “graft”, and “west”. What a downer. There went Wolfgang Amadeus. I probably should look for a recording of the Concert in A for Clarinet while I can still hear. But I digress.

I came away with a chart showing what was normal hearing (in black) vs. what was me (in red). This explains a lot and people make allowances because they understand that old age and my deteriorating inner ear ganglion cells slow down my brain. Many are supportive, none more so than the Edison Company. When I call them to pay my bill the helpful voice on the recording always warns me: “While you are waiting you may hear silence!”

You can say that again, Sister.

© 2018 by Herbert H. Hoffman

If you are young and healthy you seldom see a physician. You do not think about blood pressure, salt, and heart attacks either. Your systolic blood pressure is about 120 mmHG. But then you get old and the situation changes. You go to the doctor more often than you would like, and you watch with apprehension when they measure your blood pressure. You also learn some Greek and start to talk about hypertension vs. hypotension. Both are bad news. One day, some years ago, the paramedics measured my blood pressure at about 79 mmHG and took me straight to the emergency room. I learned that day that low blood pressure can be deadly, depending on how hypo you go. My case, luckily, was not serious enough to worry. They sent me home again.

The real bugaboo, however, is hypertension. You do not want any of it. It could do damage to your heart, to your arteries, your kidneys, your brain, or all of those together. And it could interfere with your sex life or cause other similarly tragical dysfunctions. I have been lucky so far.  I do not have hypertension.  But my cardiologist put me on a low salt diet anyway, “to keep it that way,” as he warned me.  One learns something every day. I learned then to stay away from sausages, soups, sauces, and other salty things, and that is also why I spend more time reading labels than actually shopping on my visits to the supermarket.

I have to admit that I spent almost a century now in total ignorance of the dangers of excess salt in everything we eat, although much of this, I suspect, was already known in the glory days of Gomorrah. We read in ancient scriptures that the Gomorreans were sinful. I suspect that they were a fun-loving crowd and that their sins included gluttony, meaning that they tended to eat more than was good for them, especially spicy food, and much more salt than the maximum daily amount their creator had carefully measured out for them, a warning they, being humans, blissfully disregarded. He was so upset with their irresponsible behavior that, as we would say today, he “nuked” them to oblivion. A few survivors ran away. “Get out!” he shouted after them. “And don’t you ever come back. Don’t even look back!”

He must have been a vengeful god, given to severity. When one of the women furtively glanced back he selected her as an example to others. She died. Of too much salt. So much, actually, that she turned into solid salt, one hundred per cent pure sodium chloride. Not much more has been published about the affair, other than the fact that this was her unfortunate lot.

Here you have it then, the untold story of Sodium and Gomorrah.

© 2018 by Herbert H. Hoffman. Picture credit: clipart