crickets

For some fifteen years or more I've been a member of an online discussion group for readers and writers of mystery fiction.  It started out as a Usenet newsgroup, and migrated over to Facebook when so many ISPs stopped offering access (and, not incidentally, when a lot of the newsgroups more or less imploded under the weight of the trollery.  Eternal September indeed).

It was, and is, an interesting group.  We don't share all of our opinions or likes and dislikes, but we love our mystery fiction and we can be fiercely loyal to each other.

One of the people in that group was a guy called Jeff.  He was a big teddy bear of a guy, smart and funny and sarcastic - but kind too, and a huge, huge fan of the sports teams of Syracuse University, so much so that he was called Orangedood.  In fact, I'd never have actually bet that orange toilets existed until I learned (and saw a photo of) the one that Jeff had in the basement bathroom of his and his wife's house.  

Jeff was also profoundly deaf.  His hearing loss wasn't sensorineural, so he couldn't use CIs, it was conductive, and so he had BAHAs, bone-anchored hearing aids.  They looked something like my CI, a device that sits on a magnet on the back of the head.

Jeff is gone now, lost to cancer a couple of years ago.  But after I received my CI, his wife Beth, another wonderful member of our mystery group, told me a story.  BAHAs are like CIs in that it's a new way to hear and there's rehab to learn to listen that way.  Things don't sound the same, but over time you learn it and it starts to sound normal.

But, Beth said, the day Jeff came home after getting his BAHAs, she found him standing on the back porch of their house, just standing there with tears running down his face.  He turned to Beth and said, "crickets.  I don't even know the last time I could hear crickets.  I hear crickets".

So Beth told me that story, and I said, I don't know if my sound will be crickets.  Maybe it will be different.  Maybe it will be the purring of my cat.  I've never heard that.

Well, last weekend I was holding my cat Spike and he was purring and I heard it.  I didn't feel it through his chest, I heard it.  

Crickets, Beth.  I heard my crickets.  💖