My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Can You Hear Me Now?

There is a special form of hearing loss that afflicts couples. They don’t have to be old, or even middle-aged—just married for a while. Ed’s condition is most noticeable when he’s reading the newspaper over breakfast. I’ll say, for instance, “Oh, look at the cedar waxwings in the birch tree!”

Ed will keep looking at his paper for three or four seconds. Then he’ll go: “What did you say?” By now the birds have moved on to the next backyard. Or worse, they’ll still be there, forcing me to repeat my inane, mind-numbingly dull comment, a comment not worth repeating to anyone, and in particular, a man transfixed by the latest on Roger Clemens’s salary negotiations.

I have come to believe that Ed’s hearing loss is also limited to the specific tonal register of my voice. His brain has learned, over time, that this particular vocal range is best ignored because there’s a high likelihood it will be a) saying something mind-numbingly dull or b) accusing him of not listening. If someone else—Roger Clemens, for example—were to sit down at our breakfast table and make reference to the cedar waxwings, Ed would look up and respond.

“You bet I would,” said Ed when I pointed this out. “You don’t take Roger Clemens for granted like you do your wife.” He added that there is no such team as the Cedar Waxwings. Then he went back to his paper.

Ed believes that I, too, have a unique form of conjugal hearing loss. I can’t make out the first two words of almost anything Ed says to me. I say he mumbles. He says it’s me. He printed out a page from a website called Ten Ways to Recognize Hearing Loss. Number 6 said: “Do many people seem to mumble?”

“Not many people,” I said. “Just you.”

Ed didn’t hear this, as he’d walked into the kitchen. This is the other problem with married couples’ communications: They attempt to carry them out while standing in separate rooms or on separate floors, preferably while one of them is running water or operating a vacuum cleaner or watching the Cedar Waxwings in the playoffs. Just last night I was at the sink brushing my teeth when Ed responded to something I’d said with the line: “Yours is not to do or die.”

“WHO died?” I yelled through the bristles.

“DO OR DIE!!”

“WHO’S DEWAR?”

This is how our conversations go these days. I don’t believe it has anything to do with our ears. We’re just too lazy to walk down the hall and address each other face to face, like civilized, respectful adults. Ed recently saw a specialist about ringing in his ears, and I went along to get a professional’s view on spousal hearing issues.

Dr. Schindler came into the examining room and sat down on his little wheeled stool. He was wearing one of those strapped-on headlamps, for looking down throats or coal mines.

Ed smiled at him. “You have something on your head.”

I shook his hand. “I’m here because I have a question about hearing and marriage.” Then I launched into the story of how Ed doesn’t listen at breakfast, and how he thinks I don’t listen when anyone could tell you he’s mumbling.

Dr. Schindler said that he wasn’t a counselor. The look on his face said, What part of “otolaryngologist” do you not understand? Wisely, he did not actually pose this question, or we would all still be there.

Then the doctor began talking about age-related hearing loss. “Around 40, we start to get worse at filtering out background noise…” Ed and I are both deep in denial about this so-called “aging” thing. Ed cocked his head toward Dr. Schindler. “Did you say something?”