Ode To A Hearing Aid
She had a heavy Slavic or Russian accent, I’m not sure which, and she was fairly soft-spoken and I thought she was asking me where the canned soup was. So I stood up from the work I was doing and said OK canned soup is this way and she asked again and I heard “restroom.” I said oh it’s down there past the registers at the end of the hallway by the floral department. Even with my hearing aids, this sort of mishearing happens fairly often, especially when there’s a lot of ambient noise like in a busy grocery store.
In his book River of Consciousness Oliver Sacks calls those little mistakes paracuses. He wrote about his own diminished hearing near the end of his life and he had a few similar ones like hearing choir practice or firecrackers when his friend was going to the chiropractor.
I had to get through some initial sad feelings about my diminished hearing and it was hard to admit that I really needed help. It adds a little bit of business to my everyday life because I have to remember to take extra batteries with me all the time and that little wire to ream them out when I need to and I have to make sure to take them out in the rain or before I dive in the water at the pool. Lest I sound like a Pollyanna, I need to say that it sucks to need hearing aids, but it sucks more to not hear. I’d like to have my old sense of hearing back, of course.
But I’ve been learning that you have to laugh a little bit about it and that hearing aids themselves and the need for them can be a great subject for gratitude work. I don’t often think about them this way.
I started a list of “what’s great about this?” and wrote down —
Not completely deaf
Beethoven’s good company
It’s a chance for a laugh
It’s a chance to be unexpected and disarming and maybe a gift to someone who needs them (only thirty percent of people who need them ever get them)
It’s great to have memories of my grandmother
Ah, there’s something, to remember my maternal grandmother and the cigarette pack-sized unit she used to have to deal with and its squawking and how she could flamboyantly pull the earbuds out of her ears if something my grandfather said pissed her off and she didn’t want to hear it any more.
A built-in female voice whispers in my ear when a battery is getting low and greets me when I put one in and whenever I change the volume. I decided to name her Nettie, my grandmother’s first name. It’s perfect. I hadn’t thought of that until this little meditation.
It’s not dramatic, it’s just ordinary, and you can meditate on anything, which makes me think of Pablo Neruda’s odes. If you’re a fan of the Chilean poet you have doubtless run into one of his Elemental Odes whether to an artichoke, the atom, numbers, laziness, the dictionary, the seagull, even to his suit, among many others
I wondered if an Ode to Hearing Aids might have looked something like this, borrowing lines from him and adding a few of my own.
Every morning, hearing aid,
You are waiting in a box,
to be filled in your little doors by a battery,
all sounds, my ear.
You eat words for breakfast,
lunch and dinner.
Minerals of earth have willed themselves
into the small strong hands of humans
who could make your tiny coil.
That’s why every day I greet you with respect
and then you give me a river of song
and I forget you
because we become one being
and we’ll be always in the wind,
through the day, the streets and the struggle,
one body.
I invite you to find some simple things all around you, things that you take for granted, and see them as ode-worthy and rejoice in them and delight in them and give thanks for them.
