It use to be I couldn’t hear in the morning until I put on my glasses. Now I can’t hear until I put on my glasses and drink my coffee…and turn up the volume, and focus on what is being said, and think of words that rhyme with what I think you said because what I heard didn’t really make sense at all.
For example, just waking up, listening to the distinctive Robert Cray croon the blues on NPR, thinking how much I love this slow-waking-up routine I have, when suddenly he sings “her butt fell like rain.”
Really? What would that even look like, to have one’s butt fall like RAIN?
So the game begins. The internal name that word game I play every day.
Did he say: her butt felt my pain? her fell when my lain? oh, oh, I know…it wasn’t BUTT it was maybe LOVE. Her love fell like rain? Ugh. What, Robert, were you pressed for a kinda-rhyme so created one that made no sense?
Her love fell like rain. Maybe. Still sort of forced.
So I resort to googling the lyrics to try to solve the riddle, and find:
I suspect foul play.
I suspect foul play!? OMG. It’s getting worse.
I imagine a hearing aid, right above my favorite lead gray dangle earrings shaped like dream catchers. Grown-up hippie jewelry. I wonder if they come in colors? Has anyone invented a hearing aid yet that could pass for an earring?
A grown-up hippie who went to too many rock concerts and maybe shouldn’t have listened to Led Zeppelin ad nauseum with headphones on.
It’s an interesting world I live in now. Hearing what someone didn’t say. Trying to respond to questions that weren’t asked. Nodding trying to buy time before you have to answer and possibly make it known that you had no clue what the question was.
It’s an adventure to live in the world with this new challenge. To deny. So I still get in my pony, top down, cranking the tunes so I can belt out the lyrics I really DO know…because I learned them when I could hear.
Four more months until I reach the mountain of 50 and begin my descent.
Ready or not…hear I go!
Take Off Your Shoes 