[This continues the post from a few weeks ago, when I first got into the issue of my hearing.]
The school year 1963-64 (7th grade for me) was notable for a bunch of reasons. Certainly there was the JFK assassination, which I didn’t really “get” at the time. It was the year when I first read Catch-22, first read James Thurber, first read Will Cuppy. Although I can’t pin it down, exactly, I think it was in 7th grade when I first decided I wanted to Be A Writer (whatever the hell that meant).
And I got my first hearing aid.
For about six years, since my 1st-grade teacher Mrs. Burkholder noted the hearing problem (or rather, the lip-reading solution), Mom and Dad had been schlepping me across the Delaware River every now and then to Philadelphia — specifically, to Jefferson Hospital.
There, the docs had tried their darnedest to isolate the source of the problem: damaged auditory nerves? cochlear injury or simple insufficiency? something with the brain itself, maybe? was it congenital, built into the genes, or did “something happen” somewhere along the line to make what had once been normal hearing less-than-normal?
Bottom-line answer to all those questions was that I had what’s commonly called nerve deafness, regardless of what caused it. And since they couldn’t — still can’t — actually repair or replace auditory nerves, the only reasonable solution was a hearing aid.
Running After My Hat passed one milestone this week: the hundredth post. (I’m not sure which surprises me more — that it’s (a) that many, or (b) that few.)