October 7, 2016--Two Updates

Update Number 1--Hearing Aids:

Later today I am scheduled for my third "adjustment." The audiologist, Gary Schwartzberg, will ask about anything that might be bothering me. Not an existential question (for that I could report about a lot that is bothering me) but a diagnostic one--how is my hearing in crowded restaurants, while watching TV, how does music sound--too sharp, too flat--are there "hearing situations"where sounds are more unpleasant than I feel they should be? Things of this kind.

Less specifically, he will want to know how I am adjusting to having the hearing aids themselves. He will ask this with an awareness of my family experience--especially about my father who resisted them for years, feeling that if he agreed to wear them they would turn him into an instant old man. Little realizing that he already was, at about 80, an "old man."

I will remind the doctor of that and add that there were ironies with my father and hearing aids that I want to avoid, confessing that for me many inter-generational inheritances have not been benign.

My experience, including, like my father, avoiding the subject for at least three too-many years, though the need was manifest, is something I want to move on from and I am eager to remain alert to other genetic traps that may be lurking.

I also plan to report that having my aids now for three weeks has not turned me into an old man but the opposite--now that I can hear like a more normal person, I feel younger, more vibrant and engaged with life.

Checking that I am not on a grandiosity trip--the reverse of where I had inertly been--I asked Rona about my state of being and she reports that not unlike me who cried when I heard her real voice again she feels some renewed youthfulness (or at least the late-in-life semblance of it) and that this is also making her feel younger and more optimistic. Yes, we have that kind of braided relationship.

In the meantime, awaiting the next adjustment, I'm spending a lot of time listening to Bach's unaccompanied cello suites. Able again to experience the divine.

Update Number 2--Lawn Signs:

When last I reported I noted how few election signs were appearing on lawns throughout the Midcoast. I speculated that perhaps Mainers weren't that enthusiastic about the choices. On the other hand, local friends said it was too soon to draw any conclusions. About a month before Election Day, they claimed, there will be the usual profusion.

This has turned out to be true. Reading the signs (pun intended) there is a clear pattern--Hillary in a landslide.

But a complicated one.

There are about as many yard signs as four years ago but unlike then when Obama had a slight lead, Hillary signs dominate. By yesterday morning's count there were about 30 for Clinton and only 10 or so for Trump.

The complicated part--

There are at least another dozen places where there are arrays of signs for local Democrats for the state legislature or Congress but none for Hillary. One or two of these have Trump signs. This suggests some ticket splitting because of unhappiness with the choices.

But again--Hillary in a romp. Or . . .