I realized things were getting desperate when I found myself cupping my hand around my ear to hear what people were saying, like an old hermit in a western movie.
Then there was the matter of the television. I had the volume up so high that a vase on the nearby glass-top table was jitterbugging toward the edge.
My wife caught the vase and said something I couldn’t hear.
“What?”
“I SAID, YOU’VE GOT TO GET YOUR EARS SORTED!”
She was right. I might get away with my condition in New York, where everybody’s yelling, but it’s different here in London. Brits tend to lose volume toward the end of their sentences, so I wind up nodding in agreement about things I can’t hear.
For all I know “Charlie, I was just wondering if you could hmm hmm hmm hmm” is actually “Charlie, I was just wondering if you could help me dispose of my wife’s body.”
It’s not just the people on the street. There’s a British TV anchorwoman I call The News Whisperer. This woman delivers her nightly reports as if she’s trying not to wake the baby.
Anyway, the last time I had my ears “sorted,” as the British say, was thirty years ago. A good old Brooklyn doctor pumped water into my ears to clear the wax. It worked, but I was so dizzy I nearly fell onto the subway tracks on my way home.
There’s a gentler system now - they actually vacuum the wax out of your ear canal.
“It’s worth a shot,” my wife said.
“What?”
“I said…never mind. GO AND GET IT DONE!”
The cheerful British ear technician shoved a cone into my right ear, shined a light in there and let out a low whistle.
That’s never a good sign.
The left ear was no better. Basically, I had a candle in each ear canal. They had to be softened with olive oil (yes, olive oil!), and it took an hour of vacuuming to get all the wax out.
But I could hear again. Praise the lord, I could hear!
I stepped outside and was jolted by an explosive ringing in my pocket. It was my cell phone, which I’d never heard before.
“HOW’D IT GO?” my wife screamed.
“Fine!” I said, holding the phone at arm’s length. “You don’t have to shout anymore!”
A roaring sound, like a plane coming in for an emergency landing! Yikes! But it was only the arrival of the double-decker bus that would take me home.
I was really looking forward to this ride, because the thing I missed most during my deaf days was eavesdropping.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve always loved other people’s conversations. The inadvertent humor, the jagged language, the complaining, the crazy hopes and dreams….what’s better than that?
So I took a seat in the midst of a pack of commuters, eager to listen in, but I’d forgotten how much the world has changed since I Iast had my ears sorted.
Nobody was talking. Everybody was texting. I could hear that, all right - click-click, click-click. Kind of dull, to tell you the truth. Nothing to wax eloquent about. www.carilloauthor.com