Blind on one side, deaf on the other April 12, 2021

Yesterday I made it to the front of the serpentine, single-file line at the neighborhood Whole Foods when the man behind me started yelling and gesticulating. “The cashier up there is waiting for you!” he vented in a Scottish accent. “What, where?” I asked, ashamed that I had missed whatever visual or acoustic signals the clerk had sent. Even though I was on alert, I simply didn’t catch on. 

It was an old-lady mistake, one I pride myself in not making, but the aging body is starting to let me down. My vision is cloudy as a cataract obscures my right eye, and my hearing is impaired from repeated damage to the left ear. I’m just not ready to commit to lens replacement or a hearing aide, but I see it is folly to ignore the problems. 

The experience was yet another sign that I am not as equipped for even the little things in life as I once was. My decline has been haunting me for the past few weeks as I have been helping out at a local high-school, where diffident students struggle to communicate with me, their masks muffling their sound and depriving me of the visual backup of lip-reading. 

I have become my father, in fact. He was blind in one eye and deaf in the opposite ear. I can see now how these deteriorations, though neither painful nor life-threatening, can erode self-confidence and eat away at connection.