So Near But Yet So Far....

OilMan in the soundproof booth seemed very far away as I sat just outside the window watching his auditory testing. Sometimes not being able to hear very well can distance one a lot. He isn't the most voluble of men but I have begun to notice  him sinking into the woodwork when he is in large groups. It took the combined efforts of my neighbor Cindy's daughter, who is getting her doctorate in audiology, and me but between us we finally convinced him to have his hearing tested. 

The neighborhood was abuzz with activity of the loud sort when we drove off for his appointment with the audiologist this morning. 

Our next door neighbor seems to have a leaf phobia, which isn't a good thing when the leaves of the oaks fall on her very long driveway almost continuously at this time of year. Not only does her gardener blow every leaf off her drive, but also out of the gully between our houses, the dirt next to the gully and even off her roof. Then she makes the poor man gather up all the leaves, which make wonderful mulch, and cart them away. Sometimes she comes home and does a bit more blowing herself....

The guy on the corner is a contractor, but as OIlMan says, he doesn't think he'd want him to build anything for us. He has a rather wonky structure attached to his house for storage and seems very good at digging things up and making a mess, but not so good at clearing things up again. The weeds outside his fence are eye high but have never seen a weed whacker. There appears to be a leak in his irrigation and he has begun digging muddy trenches next to his driveway, and plowing up his back garden with an earth mover with the infernal "reverse beep". Whoever decreed that these machines should be equipped with a beep loud enough to be heard a mile away when they are reversing should be required to live in hell for all eternity with that beeping.

Even further away, someone was pumping cement into a garden project of some sort. We didn't get close enough to see what was happening to the cement, but we could hear the sound of the pump from our house.

It was quite touching when OIlMan told Dan, the audiologist, that what he really wanted was to be able to hear the sound of my voice better so he didn't have to keep saying, "What?" Dan showed us on a  complicated chart that the main hearing loss is indeed at just about the level of my voice....There was a disconcerting moment when I mentioned that OilMan seemed to have a horror of inserting things...'In his ear?' said Dan. 'Anywhere' said I, thinking of his inability to wear contact lenses. 'Let's just stick to the ear' said Dan after a brief pause and we all started laughing....

I have put a picture in the extras of Dan showing OilMan how to put in hearing aids. They are tiny and almost invisible. He assured us that they are very tough and almost impossible to break. The most common cause for the need for hearing aid replacement he said, is getting eaten by dogs....

OilMan seems quite happy with the experiment thus far, and I will be happy if he doesn't have to distance himself from the fun because he can't quite hear....I can also begin to understand why people go into audiology, especially young, personable and well informed ones like Dan.