Shanghai again …
6 days in Shanghai, now at Pudong Airport, waiting to go to Hong Kong. Although I’ve been to this airport about 5 or 6 times in the last few years, this is the first time I’ve noticed that it’s right by the sea. The picture shows looking out past the loading area for planes, to the open sea beyond. Who knew? Various hearing adventures this trip, which I’ll spend this post talking about.
I was here to attend an Electroacoustic Music Studies Network (EMS) conference, and I really shouldn’t react the way I do. I should probably just accept what I find at academic conferences like this, but I have a hard time containing myself. Basically, we have a bunch of European and American composers of a very specialized type of music, talking about each other’s music and the music of their teachers. And no one but me seems to be bothered by how insular and self-serving the whole thing is. Although there were several pieces on the concerts which were quite lovely, there were also quite a few which sounded completely hackneyed and like they were written according to a formula of how this particular music should be written.
Even worse, the papers were often talking about a kind of orthodoxy which says that one must follow the prescriptions of the founder of acousmatic music, Pierre Schaeffer, in order to do things “properly.” And I just don’t get it. What does this have to do with creativity and the act of composing music and presenting it to an audience? I spoke with Robert Normandeau, a composer who seems to buy into the orthodoxy, but also writes some quite beautiful music, about trying to strike up a dialog about these issues, and even though we didn’t really begin anything at the conference, perhaps we will over email, or elsewhere.
I chide myself for these complaints … why should I complain about these insular attitudes if it is a comfortable environment for the people who subscribe to it? In as much as it seems to me a little bit like a religious belief for some of the people at the conference, you’d think I’d leave it alone, just as I wouldn’t think of arguing with anyone about their religious beliefs, regardless of what I think about them. But this is a little different, because it’s talking about music and music technologies, which I feel very engaged in, and very passionate about. So maybe the answer for me is just to avoid these kinds of events, which is what I’ve actually done for many years …
One way that this is strange for me is that one of the features of “electroacoustic” music as defined by EMS seems to be an avoidance of melody, harmony and metrical sense. So, the entire theoretical focus is on how to classify and organize the traditionally “extra musical” sound features which remain. Which ends up with a strong focus on the “morphology” of “space” and “spectral” identity. Which means, how do sounds move in a 2 or 3 dimensional space, and how do you classify timbres. All this in order to permit analysis of the work in an academic setting.
But for me, the question comes up: what do I do with this spatial morphology if I can’t hear the location of a sound? Is this music something I’m specifically excluded from because of my limitations? Or, is there some way for a listener with my limitations to hear and appreciate the music even if the spatial information is inaccessible? If I listen to music by Gabrielli or of Henry Brandt, it isn’t necessarily inaccessible because I can’t hear antiphonal effects. I do of course miss something, but the music still contains enough emotional content that it can reach me and move me even if I miss that spatial parameter of location. Somehow, this doesn’t seem to be the intent of the “acousmatic” composers.
There’s also a kind of catechismic espousal of one of Pierre Schaeffer’s dicta that “acousmatic listening” involves divorcing a sound from it’s source, from the physical object which creates the sound. It makes the music more “pure.” It also seems, and has always seemed, patently stupid to me. The primary interest I find in sampled and processed sounds is in the relationship to the physical source of the sound, and the complex layers of meaning that arise from this recognition. Why on earth would I want to make something so “pure” that it loses this dimension? There’s enough about music which is abstract, that I always want to hold on to those things which make the meaning more tangible and concrete (pun intended).
Although by being diligent about attending the conference I didn’t really get to make any new explorations of Shanghai this time, I did at least get a chance to play a concert at a club with my young Shanghai buddies, WANG Changcun, Mai Mai, and Xu Cheng. It was really refreshing, after several days of totally cerebral discussions about an extraordinarily conservative and proscribed musical genre to hear each of their solo sets: Wang Changcun played some very rhythmic deconstructed samples, Mai Mai played a drone e-bow guitar, sort of a la David First in NYC. And Xu Cheng did another sort of sample deconstruction piece, noisy and interesting. And quite different from Wang Changcun’s. A bit of a breath of fresh air for me.
One last interesting thing … I sort of didn’t notice my ear. Maybe it’s because the sound system was mixed to mono, like most club systems. At least that’s what the sound guy told me, since I couldn’t tell. But basically, I just set up, and played. I was really into the music, and the 45 minutes or so of playing just went by, and I hardly noticed it at all. Felt like it went well, and I just didn’t notice the distortion in my ear or anything. Not that it wasn’t there, but it just didn’t matter.
taking direction …
At the MacDowell Colony for four weeks … arrived Tuesday, now it’s Friday night. A studio of my own in the woods, with nothing to do but work. I’m fed well, can ride my bike to town if I need anything, and have to walk to a little library to use the internet. Quite heavenly. Have immediately finished editing together a version of Numb, and have begun writing more musical material for the rest of MONO … and hope to have the piece structured and plotted out before I’m done here. Also, of course, I need to prepare for concerts in China next month and a write a paper to deliver in Shanghai … but I think MONO is my main job for the month. Tonight or tomorrow I’ll post another call for collaboration in the form of stories, after I post links to Numb and MONO Prelude.
One of the things one does here is talk to other resident artists about your project, so now people are aware of my history with hearing loss, and what I’m doing with it, on some level. This is what we talk about at breakfast and dinner. But this evening, back in the studio, I had a little reminder of my reality.
I’m in the studio, listening to the recording of Numb I’ve been editing together (picture of the ProTools file above). I suddenly become completely paranoid that the stereo imaging isn’t happening. I spend about a half hour sending tones through one speaker then the other … and it doesn’t really matter which one I’m sending it through, I really can’t tell which one it’s coming from. I can see it on the meters on the computer and in the mixer, but it sounds to me like all the sound comes out of both speakers. I finally calm down enough and do some simple diagnostics to convince myself that the sound I’m sending through each individual speaker is what I mean to send there, but it’s an intellectual exercise in debugging. I can’t hear it.
So, if I can’t hear it, why do I care if the stereo is working for other people? On the one hand, it seems antithetical to everything I believe about how I write music: for years I’ve striven to write what I really hear, not what I think I’m supposed to hear. But this seems different. In fact, the rest of the world takes great pleasure in the spatial movement of sound, the separation of sources and their isolation and distinct identity. I can imagine it, but I can’t hear it. That is, I hear it internally, but not with my ears. So trying to realize it seems as important as it did when I had two ears, but now I can’t just deal with it intuitively and with my senses. I now have to treat it as a kind of intellectual task, something I need to do and to trust that it will work as I imagine it.
Numb at first …
So, I think it’s time to re-start this blog, but this time with a broader focus. In previous entries I tried to talk mostly about the actual experience of my hearing loss. From here on out, I think I’m going to focus more on the music I’m writing now, which is very much in response to the situation I chronicled in earlier entries.
Last week I did the first trial performance of the 2nd piece for MONO: Numb. It’s based on a text by an anonymous contributor to the project who lost the sense of touch on the skin of her breasts and belly after cancer surgery. The preparation for the performance was pretty dicey. The way the piece is set up, the text begins scrolling across a video screen while a string trio with digital processing plays. About a 3rd of the way through, a soprano starts speaking parts of the text as they go by, and the text loops and is combined with or processed by the music of the trio. Eventually more and more of the text is sung, until a real “song” emerges for the last couple of minutes.
I planned to use a kind of processor called a vocoder, which effectively superimposes the artifacts of speech on a carrier signal – in this case, the carrier signal is the strings trio, often playing in rhythmic unison with the speaker/singer. The effect is to make the strings seem to talk or sing. As I usually do, I got this all worked out in the studio, making “virtual” string parts on the computer, and recording the singer. The first two rehearsals, one with strings along, and one with strings and singer, just didn’t work. The players were fine, but I couldn’t hear the processing at all. The second rehearsal disintegrated when I ended up with the microphones and processors feeding back uncontrollably, and the players said they couldn’t take it any more and split. What a nightmare! And no matter what I did, I couldn’t duplicate the effects I had in the studio in a rehearsal with live instruments.
I spoke (via email) with my friend and incredible sound engineer Jody Elff, who was on tour in Seoul, South Korea. Back and forth, it seems I was doing everything right, but Jody responded that what I was trying to do was difficult, and that monitoring and balance, as well as adjustment of the parameters of the vocoder and compression of the incoming signals from strings and voice were key elements which I’d need to get right.
The reality of performance, though, is that there’s never enough time in rehearsal to get it all right, at least not for one-off performances like this one. And when we were rehearsing, I just didn’t trust what I heard. I had to ask the players what was coming out of the speakers, because I can’t tell what’s coming from the speakers and what’s coming from the instruments. It’s all just coming from the same place for me. There are a few players who are close friends and long time collaborators, with whom this might work. But not in this situation, where the musicians expect things to roll out as planned. It was the first time most of these players had played my work, and they don’t have a long term commitment to it or investment in it, other than as professionals who are playing what they’re asked to play (and who play spectacularly, I might add). But dealing with my hearing limitations isn’t what they signed on for. This was another situation where I should have hired a sound person to make the necessary adjustments and tunings of the processing for me, someone who knows my work and whose ears I can trust. But there was no budget or time for that with this gig.
The solution was to go back to the studio, where I have more or less unlimited time, up to 24 hrs a day, and use recordings of the players to make a separate track of the processing, generated by the interaction of the strings and the voice as I’ve recorded them. This way I can minimize the problems with my hearing. I can monitor just the processing, or just the live recording, and I can take everything apart to listen to it, and to make sure that the sounds I want to have happen are happening. What a weird way to make music! But it works. The fact remains that I have a very clear aural image in my head (or somewhere within my body) of what the music should sound like, including what the digital processing should sound like. In performance, I just don’t trust what I hear in terms of processing, so I don’t have any reliable instincts on how to tune it in real time … which is something that have I counted on, and assumed, for years.
Ultimately, of course, this isn’t about me being able to do what I do in real time in performance. It’s about making the music work, and sound the way I want it to sound. This “pre-recorded effects” solution worked like a charm. The sound guy on the gig was able to do a great job of keeping my effects-track in balance with the sound from the live players, and the audience had no inkling that the effects weren’t happening in real time. And the nice thing for me was that I seemed to get great feedback from the audience about the piece, which many people said they found moving. Which was, after all, the main idea.
Next week I do a repeat performance, with the full crew of singer, strings, video and two dancers. It’ll be preceded by MONO Prelude, which by now feels like an old friend. And in which I do the processing live. I’m eager to see how these two work together in order to put together ideas about how the whole piece will go. The fact of starting with the focus on me and my senses, and then expending to other people and their sensory challenges is really the direction I want to move in with the piece. We’ll see how it goes.
imperfect pitch …
So, this is my view from the hotel room in Shanghai. My last day here I am finally losing some of the jet lag. For lunch, I headed out of the hotel, dreading going into a who-knows-what restaurant and spending too much for something not so good, because I don’t know what to order. Or more dreadful yet, I had thoughts of heading up to Huaihai Lu to get MacDonalds, because it would be easy. Instead walked down Fuxing Lu, found a noodle shop where I walked in, and despite them no knowing any English and me being able to say little more than “I am alone” and “I want to eat something.” I got settled at a little table on the sidewalk with a couple of Chinese guys who seemed to find me very funny, and helped me figure out how to season and stir up my noodle ramen (which is what it sounded like they called it), with hand pulled noodles being made by a lady on the sidewalk next to me. Incredibly delicious. I’m brought back to the taste of “muslim food” in China, funky tables and stools blocking the sidewalk. Yum. Oh yes, and while I don’t know how much the MacDonalds would have cost, this was a total of 11 kwai, or just under $2. And then I spent another 2 kwai on a delicious sesame covered sticky rice ball from a little hole-in-the-wall bakery vendor for dessert.
Dinner last night with an ex-student now living in Pudong (new eastern extension of Shanghai) and found that his wife has had a similar experience with hearing loss, but as the result of a tumor. As we sat down to supper, she said “I can’t sit here” and moved to the opposite side of the table. I suspected at that point that something was going on with her hearing, and the story came out in our discussion. Then I received a very moving story from another ex-student via email about her hearing loss, resulting from a fall, and her on-going recovery through application of traditional Chinese medicine, qi gong, etc. I’ll begin performing MONO for real next week, and am now really thinking about how I move from my solo prelude into the body of the work.
Final hearing issue: I got a recording of the concert from last Thursday, and trimmed it down and posted it yesterday. Vicky texted me, saying it was low & slow. I went back and listened. Sure enough, the file was somehow playing at the wrong sampling rate, which made it sound like it was a slightly slowed down tape. Took much a big chunk of the morning to fix. But the lesson is that even when I CAN hear, it doesn’t mean much if I don’t use my brain. Don’t know how I didn’t notice that it was at the wrong pitch in my first listen …
the sole & the soul …
I’ve been slowly working my way through the initial responses to my request for stories about loss of sensory perception. The responses have been very fascinating … Besides the 13 entries so far on this blog’s “leave your story here” page, I’ve got literally over 100 email responses of various sorts. I’m trying to respond personally to every one, and hoping that out of this initial barrage of information I’ll be able to extract a text to use in the first portion of MONO which I need to be performing in a couple of months … more on that later.
Meanwhile, I’m having to deal with a mini/temporary change in my physical situation. 4 days ago had some elective surgery which is (hopefully) going to alleviate a constant pain in my left big toe. For I don’t know how many years … 8? 12? 15? … my toe has hurt most of the time. It’s worse when I run or walk a lot, and since I thrive on both walking and running, it’s worse a lot. Anyway, after many holistic attempts to deal with it, I was finally convinced that surgery was the way to go. That picture at the top of this entry is my left foot in its bandage, which evidently stays on, as is, for a couple of weeks. Initially I tried to avoid taking the oxycodone pain medication … big mistake. After writhing in pain the first night I reached the doc, who said I was under-medicating myself, and gave me specific instructions. Since then, with the pain pretty well under control, I’m noticing how the restriction of my physical movement impacts how I am psychically and emotionally. Other than being stir-crazy because I can’t really leave the house for a couple of weeks, I find that I can minimize my awareness of the pain and discomfort if I keep busy. It’s sort of been fun not editing my impulses to sedentary pursuits. I borrowed a bunch of videos from Chloe and set myself up in front of the TV. But I haven’t watched a single one of the borrowed videos. What I’ve actualoly been doing is studying Mandarin (getting ready for my October trip to China), studying Spanish (for Mexico trip next year), going through some admin stuff I need to do for the opening of school, working my way through my 100 email responses to my story request, and trying to figure out how to get moving on actually composing the first bit of MONO. I don’t seem to do very well with just vegging out … but I sort of knew that. And if I keep going on these activities that keep my mind engaged, I seem to not need to oxycodone nearly as much, and the isolated time flies a bit more freely.
Between sending out the request for stories and my foot surgery, the other thing which happened is that my siblings and I had a celebration to remember the life of my Mother, Joan Rolnick, who died last April 28 in Missouri. The celebration was in New York City, with many of our spouses, children, grandchildren, cousins and their families, as well as with many of my Mom’s east coast friends from a long life in which she was very involved with people. We told stories, sang songs, ate wonderful food, cried a little, laughed a lot.
The day after the official celebration, a bunch of us went up to Connecticut, walked into the woods behind the house where she and my Dad lived for 30 years or so, and scattered her ashes on the forest floor, on top of a rocky knoll, dappled in sunlight. We passed the bag of ashes around a circle, each taking a few handfuls of ashes and tossing them into the air or onto the ground. The bag ended up with Jakey, not quite 4 years old, and probably Mom’s favorite great-grandchild. Chloe claims that Jakey understood that the ashes were “Mimi Joan,” though I don’t see how he could really understand that. Nonetheless, the moment was incredibly moving and pregnant with meaning. Jake spent a long time going through the ashes, playing, throwing them, finally emptying the last of them onto the leaf-strewn ground. The newest generation emerging from the dust of their ancestors. And as the dust blew around and the ashes coated his little hands, there was a tangible sense that she lives on in him. I’m confident that this is the memorial she wanted. I’ll keep it with me for as long as I live, and I hope Jakey will as well.
out into the world …
Today was Thurs … on Tuesday I posted my request for stories. Starting almost immediately, I’ve been inundated with responses. Only about 9 responses on the blog as of now, but literally dozens coming to me by email. Now, of course, I need to digest them. And there are a number of things which look like they’ll take a while to actually take shape and get to me. All very interesting to me.
Also interesting is the process of figuring out what it all will mean in terms of the piece. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the last couple of days trying to imagine the first segment of the piece, which I’ll need to have for concerts here and in China in October. It’s the first time in a long time I’ve had the task of writing for a computer alone. That part is almost more daunting than the task of making the piece make sense in terms of being about hearing loss, or about other sensory changes. Virtually all of my writing for computers over the last 7 years or so has been about the interaction between instruments or voices and computers. So I need to decide whether I’m continuing to work that way with myself as the performer, or if there’s a new direction for me to follow. Am I going back to playing samples from the keyboard, as I did in the 80s? Or recording and processing myself live playing percussion or speaking?
Also, as I’ve been writing more and more instrumental and vocal things, I’ve developed a very personal process of working out and exploring my musical materials … not sure how I’ll do that working with samples … and not at all sure I want to be working with synthetic sounds, or at least not totally with synth sounds.
And then there are all the story responses I’m getting. While I’m thinking of them mostly in terms of long term structure for the larger piece, maybe I need to start right in with one of the stories, using the words, or some paraphrase … ?
Short ear note: today, for the first time in a while, I forgot to put in the hearing aid. Because I was mostly in the studio, it didn’t make a lot of difference (since I turn it off when I make music, anyway). But when I went out in the street a few times to run some errands, I was shocked at the sound, or lack of sound. Where I normally have very loud distorted sound on my left side, particularly on city streets, I now had silence on the left. Chatted with people on the street, and had to turn my head to hear them with the right ear. On the one hand, it’s a void I can feel, physically. On the other hand, the noise I hear through the hearing aid is so harsh and loud, that it’s kind of peaceful to just hear left-eared silence.
moving on …
I’m back, after about 10 months. Even got a new picture, and expect to have more. Because things change. Many things have changed in 10 months. On the ear front, I’ve accepted that I’m likely to have to deal with hearing with one ear from here on out. I continue to hope for a miraculous change. But I don’t expect it. On the other hand, it’s not exactly true that I only hear with one ear now. That little purple crescent with the little clear bud on the end is my hearing aid. It gets sound into my left ear with enough amplification so that I can hear something.
Unfortunately, the ear itself is still fucked, so everything I hear there sounds like it’s being blasted through a big kazoo. It’s useful for hearing speech in an environment where people will be all around me, and for being aware that there is sound coming from the left (useful when I’m riding my bike in Manhattan traffic). But for any kind of musical listening, or focused quality listening to the environment, it’s just unbearable. Like the whole world is a blown speaker. So in those situations, I turn it off. When I first got the hearing aid, I was distressed at how painful, physically painful, it was to play the piano. Then I discovered that I could turn the hearing aid off, and the piano turns back into something more or less similar to what it was when I had two ears.
What else has happened in the 10 months since my last blog entry? My mother died. My 3rd grandchild, Damon, was born. The CD of The Economic Engine was released, got good reviews including in the NY Times Arts & Leisure Section. I’ve gotten progressively more used to performing with one ear. And I’ve finished up two more big pieces, Faith for piano and computer, and Extended Family for string quartet (and no computer). More about those another time … they’ll both be having a number of performances in the Fall.
The real reason I’m restarting the blog, though, has less to do with what has happened, and more to do with what’s coming up. And that’s work on another big project. This one’s called MONO, and I imagine it’s going to occupy me here for a while.
The most direct way it relates to the blog is that I’m using the blog as a place to collect stories from other people who have suffered some kind of loss or change in one of their five senses. The idea is to use material from these stories to create a narrative to hold together a series of pieces which examine how we perceive beauty and meaning even when we have “lost” some part of the way we perceive.
There’s a blog page set up for people to leave stories: if you’ve suffered some kind of sensory loss or change, please tell me about it here. There’s another page describing the MONO project. I’m about to send out a major email blast to try to get people to share their stories with me. We’ll see how it goes.
back at it …
I’m going to try to get back to this. Things have not been progressing in terms of hearing. In fact, over the last week or two, I’m noticing that my tinnitus is seeming louder than ever. I keep being in situations where I’m talking to someone and it seems like half of what they say is buried in the constant white noise. This gets disturbing.
On the other hand, since my last blog entry I’ve spent several days editing material for my next CD. I can hear the musical qualities of the recordings, certainly the playing and quality of performance, whether or not the notes are right, etc. But I certainly have no idea about stereo, and have to rely on the engineer, Jody, for that. Also, with one ear and the constant white noise, I have a feeling that I don’t really know about the ambience or reverberant space we’re putting the performances in. So that’s another thing I need to depend on Jody for. A wierd way to make a CD. On the other hand, it’s music that never existed before, and this is the best I can do to get it out into the world. So I need to try to get the people whose ears I trust to help me as much as possible. I need one more session in the studio to get both pieces where I think they’ll be pretty much done, then I can post them to the players and get feedback from that direction.
Another thing which is being strange is the fact that I’m back teaching. I haven’t brought up my hearing issues with my advanced class yet, but am going to have to tomorrow, probably. When they start playing their work for me, I have to let them know that they need to be thinking about stereo placement and movement of the sound … but I also have to tell them that they need to critique that aspect among themselves, since I can’t hear it. Also, along with the increased white noise recently, there’s been a bunch more kazoo sounds … so I’m wondering how that will impact my teaching. Somehow, with my own music, it’s different: I know what I want it to sound like, and the question in my mind is always whether or not what I hear on a recording matches the internal sounds … or as close as I can get, given my current limitations. With student work, where I don’t know what to expect going in, it’s likely to be different.
One last thought: since my last post I actually heard back from someone with a similar kind of hearing loss (SSNHL), who is also getting the steroid injections. Although I’ve heard a lot from people who have suffered from temporary hearing loss, either as a result of trauma or infection or long-term subjugation to very loud sounds, this is the first time I’ve actually heard from someone with a loss which seems very similar to mine. While I can’t take heart in someone else’s misfortune, it IS heartening to hear from someone else with the same problem. She says she’s going to see a homeopathic doctor, and I’m interested to see what kind of response she has. I’m definitely interested in following up on any alternative treatment which seems like it might be helpful.
where to now? …
NOTE: I actually wrote this post around Aug 12, but forgot to post it then … better late than never.
I’ve now done the diuretic treatment for nearly a month, and no change. So I think this one is another dead end.
Wendy and I are on Cape Cod now for a week of vacation, during which I hope to move forward on a new piece for piano and computer called Faith. Right now, I don’t have a lot of faith in the likelihood of improvement in my hearing. However, I continue to be thankful that I can continue to compose and perform, and even that my every day life isn’t substantially affected by this problem, other than the very public need to continually ask people to be on my right side so I can hear them, and the more private problem of the constant white noise on my left. I’ve developed a sort of standard response when people say “oh, how terrible that this has happened to you.” I usually reply: “Well, we can still have this conversation. I can hear you, and I can continue to do my work. It’s a problem, but isn’t not a tragedy.”
Yesterday, Wendy and I took a four mile walk along a bike path from “Head of the Meadow” beach, along a salt marsh, ending up at the foot of huge sand dunes. Beautiful and un-earthly landscape of sand and shrubs. At least 13 rabbits crossed our path. I could clearly hear the various birds in the marshes around us … and was also very much aware of the intrusion of the white noise of my tinnitus. It’s now really constant. I had sort of assumed that at some point this aspect of the hearing loss would fade away. At this point, I’m beginning to suspect that the white noise, like the hearing loss may be here to stay.
So, while I don’t have much faith that anything can be done to improve my hearing loss or my tinnitus, I do have faith in my ability to keep on with my work and my life. And that’s probably enough. Now back to writing the piece.
picking up where we left off …
It’s been several weeks since the last entry. Initially because there was so little change, and then because writing about my hearing situation seemed less important than other things going on: Wendy had some surgery, I had to focus on a final push to finish up revisions of Economic Engine and get it ready for a September performance.
About a week ago I started taking a diuretic, on the possibility that my hearing problem might be some form of Meniere’s syndrome, which is supposed to respond to this kind of therapy. I”m not sure how long this is supposed to go on, but I’m not particularly hopeful that it will be effective. As I look at the diagnostic indicators for Meniere’s, they include sudden onset and a “roaring” tinnitus (both of which I have, if “roaring” describes my white noise generator). However, the defining indicators seem to be vertigo and the fact that the hearing loss comes and goes – neither of which describe my situation. Anyway, I will see the ENT doc later this week and try to figure out where we go from here.
Where we are now is pretty much unchanged. Very little, if anything, gets in my left ear. Though there are occasional moments of sensing a sonic “presence” on my left, and a slight sense of “stereo-ness.” But mostly there’s just a sense of aural emptiness on my left. And the white noise, which is constant through everything. Listening to music, participating in conversation, walking down the street, there’s always a constant white noise from the left, always louder than anything in the environment.
When I’m writing, the white noise is still there, but I seem to be able to focus beyond it and hear things internally. Thank goodness! But when I stop, I immediately become aware that the white noise has been there all along.
Was at a family reunion in Missouri this past weekend, and had a couple of strange moments of self-awareness concerning my hearing. One was how my daughter and all the cousins of her generation referred to me and Wendy as her “deaf parents,” humorously and lovingly, but a reminder that I am not going to avoid various artifacts of infirmity as I age. Despite the fact that I can still run 3 miles and have lots of energy, there are unavoidable negative consequences of continuing to stay alive. Though thankfully, none negative enough to cancel the positive aspects of staying alive.
The other funny situation was getting a call on my cell, with someone looking to talk to my son-in-law, Josh. I had the phone up to my good ear, said to Josh “It’s for you,” and I thought he said “I’m not here.” What he said was “I’m right here.” When I started telling the person on the line that Josh couldn’t talk, he looked really confused, then we straightened it all out and I gave him the phone. What I realized is that when I’ve got the phone on my good ear, I really can’t hear anything else clearly. So telling me what to say while I’m on the phone doesn’t work. I’ve got to take the phone away from my good ear in order to let the external sound in. Can’t do the 2-ear multi-task anymore.
Another good one was when I accompanied Wendy to the surgeon’s in the follow-up visit after her surgery. There were some drains which had been left in the wound, and he was to remove the drains during the visit. Wendy was wearing one of my brightly colored Hawaiian shirts. When the doc came in, I heard him say: “better take off that fancy shirt and put on a gown. I’m likely to make a mess when I remove your brains.” Sitting in the corner, I repeated back what I’d heard, and we all cracked up. Once we’d stopped laughing he assured me that he was going to remove her drains, not her brains. I was quite relieved.
