Do you remember when you
were a kid and played the Telephone Game where you’d whisper something to the
person next to you and they would whisper it to the next person and it would go
on down the line until it reached the last person who had to repeat the message
out loud?
Hilarity ensued because
usually the message spoken had very little in common with what the originator whispered
in the first place.
Yeah, life is sometimes
like that with me.
Why? Well, because I’m
half deaf.
(The proper response
here is, “WHAT?!” Yeah, ha ha. Stop it!
I’ve heard it before.)
But I’ve been 100% deaf
in my left ear since I was about four and contracted German Measles, which
damaged my auditory nerve. For years, I’d just tell people I was “half deaf.” Very
often, they thought it was the beginning of a joke. Or that I was simply hard
of hearing and would continue to talk quietly into my left ear, which was a
lesson in futility.
Being deaf in my left
ear hasn’t really hindered me in life all that much, other than I get a little
surly if I’m stuck on the far right hand side of a table in a noisy restaurant,
which means I pretty much can’t hear anybody throughout the meal.
There aren’t too many
outward signs that I can’t hear, other than I tilt my good ear toward the
speaker’s voice to try to hear better. But I don’t talk loudly the way some hard-of-hearing
people sometimes do. And I tend to enunciate pretty carefully. Perhaps I’m
trying to help out other half-deaf people or something.
Oh, and sitting in the
passenger seat of a convertible means that, (a) conversation is pointless, and
(b) my hair will look Bride-of-Frankenstein-ish by the time we arrive at our
destination. The second thing really has nothing whatsoever to do with being
half-deaf, but I just thought I’d throw it in there.
Other than those few
things, though, I haven’t had too many problems with my faulty hearing.
But I realized the other
day that I fill in the blanks a lot. Sometimes I’m a half step behind everyone else
when the punchline is told and I fake the laugh – at least until I can fill in
the blanks to the words I missed and I finally “get” it.
Probably over the years,
people have attributed my slow response to being blonde.
Ah well. The price you
pay. It’s not like I’m going to wear a sign.
The other day we were at
the funeral home for Mrs. B. Friends and family were greeting each other and
catching up, or shedding a few tears, or watching the slideshow Nick and Frankie had prepared where the images of Mrs. B's life flashed by on the screen.
One good friend, let’s
call him Mikey P, walked into the room. He sees Joe for the first time and
walks up to greet him. Joe, being on the verge of tears half the morning,
hugged Mikey P tightly and they said a few words to each other.
When Mikey P released
him and stepped back, he looked at us and then looked around the room, arranged
a confused look on his face and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought this was the
Rabinowitz funeral…I’m in the wrong place!”
And we all burst out
laughing.
We had all been feeling
sad and his comment immediately released the tension and allowed us to laugh.
It was perfect. Plus, Mrs. B would have
loved it.
But here is where I
start making stuff up. I have no idea what name Mikey P used. I just filled in
the blank with “Rabinowitz.”
Fortunately, with that
kind of example, the name itself didn’t matter.
But it sometimes makes
retelling stories a little difficult for me. I hear parts of stories and I just
make up the rest.
People will listen to me
tell a story and think, Huh? I was standing right there – that’s not what
he said at all!
So when I was at their
house working on the eulogy for Mrs. B the other day, my friends Nick and Beth
started talking about some guy named “Rustin.” I was completely baffled. First
of all… “Rustin”? What kind of name is that? I figured I must have misheard
them.
Fortunately, I’ve
learned in life that it sometimes pays to ask that stories be repeated. The
parts of the story that I do hear
sounds too good to play the fill-in-the-blanks game, so I asked them to start
over again for me.
In this case, they did.
It turns out that when
Nick posted on Facebook that his mother had passed, he and/or Beth accidentally
tagged some guy named “Rustin.” Now, Rustin
is not a Facebook friend. They don’t even know the guy. And they weren’t exactly sure how he got tagged.
What’s worse is that
they didn’t know how to un-tag him.
Because Mrs. B was so
well loved, there were many responses from friends sending thoughts, wishes and
prayers to the family over her loss.
Many were sweet memories that evoked tears as well as smiles.
But we laughed knowing
that Rustin was seeing every one of those comments and “likes.” Oh, how that
probably confused him.
Rustin's Facebook cover photo depicts five guys in a shooting
stance, leveling guns or rifles at a target. And there he is, all the way out
in Washington State getting dinged every time someone in Ohio sent condolences
for a little, old Italian lady he never met.
After nearly a hundred
comments on Nick’s post, Rustin finally chimed in and said he was sorry for
their loss. And, for some reason, that cracked us up. What a great thing – to give us a chance to
laugh and to make our sadness recede for just a moment. Beth typed in a “thank you” for his
condolences, which made us laugh even harder. And when Nick suggested that
maybe Rustin and his friends could give Mrs. B a 21-gun salute, we were
practically rolling on the floor.
Too funny.
So, Rustin? Even though you'll never see this, we want to thank you for
the laughs, man. It helped get us
through some sad moments.
And sometimes – just
sometimes – it’s a good thing to hear the real story and not try to play
the Telephone Game to cover my half-deafness.
“WHAT?!” (Ha ha. Stop
it!)
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