Misunderstanding    

 

      Without much effort on my part, I seem to have become a hard of hearing old man in a wheelchair. The chair is the result of a fall that broke my neck, The hard of hearing is because of advanced age combined with lapses in job-related human maintenance. 

     In my 20’s, I worked with a tree crew in Palo Alto, California operating a chipper machine that noisily converted tree branches into wood flakes. This was before OSHA and common sense entered the workplace. We wore no hearing protection.

     I was in my prime, my early 30’s, when I rolled logs to the headworks of a sawmill that cut three-sided logs for home building. The big circular saw bit into the lodgepole logs just to the left of where I stood with a peavy ready to roll another one off the stack. If I ride shotgun with you driving, chances are I will miss some of what you say. 

     In my 40’s, I worked as a wastewater warrior, a pump chump, or as the guys at the bar liked to say, a brown trout fisherman. My job was to maintain a newly built sewer system around a high mountain lake. The system had miles of pipe to keep clean and 18 steel cans around the shoreline that contained big electric pumps that flung the wastewater from station to station all the way to the treatment facility.   

    I began to understand the way that hearing difficulties impact everyday life when I climbed out of one of those cans situated at the edge of a church camp, when there appeared a woman with a Friar Tuck haircut, long woolen skirt, stocking rolled arund her calves, and brown granny shoes. She smiled and I heard her say, “Before you work any further, I would like you to see my mayonnaise jar.” She walked away toward the housing units. 

     It is difficult to express the fear that this statement generated. What icky stuff was this person hoarding in a mayonnaise jar? What if I had stumbled onto some strange cult where people kept their waste in jars? Would it be out-of-range rude of me to decline the offer? Should I run?

     At the upper limits of my scary fantasies, the woman appeared again, this time accompanied by a fellow with the same haircut and a dude version of her outfit. She patted him on the shoulder and said “Sir, I would like you to meet Father Damian, my manager.”

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