Huh?   What’s that you say?

                                                                                                        By Dave Hamby

            I know I’m hard of hearing.   Almost thirty years of working in a body shop and numerous weekends at the race track have pretty much assured that.   When someone says something that just doesn’t make any sense, I ask them to repeat themselves.   Not everyone with a hearing impairment does that.   I don’t know if they’re unaware of their hearing problem or if they think saying “Come again?” is bad manners.

              I only mention this because I spent five hours yesterday with 10 or 12 fellow Sertomans selling tickets to a girl’s softball tournament.    Of the gang there I’d have to be considered one of the “young fellows.”   This, as I zoom in on my 50 th birthday.

              Now Sertomans are a friendly bunch and because of that there were a good number of conversations going on all at the same time.   The whole area really was noisy.   Often two fellows who were talking to each other would be discussing two different subjects, each not understanding what the other was saying.

At one point in the evening the guys sitting right next to me were in an animated discussion, one talking about the new Double-A ballpark in Frisco and the other talking about the new Pizza Park in north Pflugerville.   The conversation went something like this:

Pete:   “Yeah, I really like the go karts they have there.”

Repeat:   “Huh?   Yeah, of course they have golf carts, jus like they do here at the Dell Diamond.”

Pete:   “What?   Are you talking about the18 hole putt-putt golf course?”

Repeat:   “Yeah, that’s what I heard too.   Tickets were going to be a whole lot more expensive, but I heard they were only going to be sixteen bucks, not eighteen.”

              When they asked me my opinion I ventured that the Space Shuttle disaster was indeed a real tragedy.   They both nodded their heads in agreement.

              I first witnessed this phenomenon quite a few years ago.   I was with my friend Bill, age 79, and Ed, age 72, in Bill’s Mercedes heading up state highway 12 toward Austin.  

              It was a beautiful spring day.   Bill was driving and he had his sunroof open so we could enjoy the wonderful Texas weather.  

Ed noticed we were in some familiar territory and asked Bill, “Hey, isn’t this Wimberley?”

Bill replied, “No, it’s Thursday.”

Ed looked at Bill kinda funny and then said, “Me too, lets stop up here and get something to drink.”

Now as I’ve been telling this story for 15 years, I’ve since had it repeated to me with Ed suggesting we get a beer and Bill replying, “That wasn’t a deer, that was a dog.”   Being as how the three of us were all tea-totalers, that embellishment really didn’t happen

              Now I’ve attempted to do something about my inability to understand everything that’s said to me.   I even went to a doctor and got a hearing aid.

              This was at my wife’s recommendation, no, let me correct that, at my wife’s insistence after an incident at our home.

              She was out in the front yard tending her garden and I was inside enjoying a baseball game on television.   The telephone rang and when I answered, it was for her.  

“TERI”   I yelled.   “ TELEPHONE!”   There was no response.

Again I shouted to her and again there was no response.   I headed out to the front yard and yelled for a third time.   For a third time I got no response.  

Finally I spotted her in the garden and yelled, “ TERI, for the fourth time dang-it, TELEPHONE!”

She looked up at me and yelled back, “ And for the forth time dang-it, I’m busy. Take a number and I’ll call them back.”

It only took a few weeks before I was fitted with a pair of hearing aids and able to hear things I hadn’t heard in years.   Things like the knocking noises coming from my car, the rude remarks store clerks mutter under their breath, and most of all, my noisy kids.

While that in itself caused me to regret getting the hearing aids, the reaction from other people when they saw the devices in my ears was what prompted me to get rid of them.

Customers would come into my office and start talking to me, notice the hearing aids, quit in mid sentence, make waving motions with their arms while mouthing “never mind” and go talk to someone else.  

Other folks upon noticing my hearing aids would lean real close to my ear and start talking real loud and real slow.   They just weren’t able to grasp the concept that these devices amplified sound and it was no longer necessary to talk loudly.   It’s the fellow without the hearing aids you need to be shouting at.

It was after the second or third time I fell out of my chair while trying to jerk the hearing aid out of my ear that I decided I really preferred the quiet life of the hearing impaired.

Now my kids will disagree and tell you they wish I’d get hearing aids again.   They get tired of having to repeat themselves.

Personally, I think anything worth saying is, like a good story, worth repeating, sometimes two or three times.