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A Christmas Without Carols
How I made it through my first holiday season after a severe hearing loss
December 2010. Christmas was coming, my first as a guy with only slightly more hearing capacity than a candy cane. First and only, I kept telling myself. First and only.
My wife, Marty, asked me what I wanted for Christmas. “Well, not CDs,” I said.
Music had been my wish-list default for years. I don’t use a whole lot of tools that require electricity. I haven’t hunted since my Mississippi youth. I don’t golf. Fallen arches had long ago put a big crimp in my tennis game.
Christmas gifts for me meant good chocolate, funky socks, and new music.
What I wanted most, however, was old music, familiar music.
I still have the copy of the Elvis Presley Christmas LP that my family acquired when I was 10 years old. It has a few scratches but it’s still playable, and I wanted to hear it during the season to be jolly, just as I had for decades.
No go.
I put it on the turntable but I could barely track the cadence of familiar songs, much less comprehend the melodies. I could hear Elvis singing in my head — “I’ll hah-have a blue Christmas without you” — but what I was missing was not my baby, but my working cochlea.
