Some people are blessed with beautiful singing voices. Others are blessed with rich parents. I got blessed with poor hearing.
If I heard my pastor’s sermon correctly (although I probably didn’t): “Bless’d are the poor of hearing, for they shalt surely inherit twenty-seven hot virgins packaged in two blue Ferraris, and a partridge in a pear tree!”
Although the rewards in the afterlife are clearly substantial for the hearing-impaired, the benefits in the now-life aren’t too bad, either. My hearing impairment has helped me in the classroom, on the football field, and during my family’s annual road-trip.
In the classroom, I’ve repeatedly been allowed to come in 15 minutes late because “I couldn’t hear the bell.” I use a similar defense to explain why I put “James Bond VI” down for the question about England’s monarch in 1643: “I couldn’t hear you clearly during yesterday’s lecture, Mr. Farshead.” When my kindergarten teacher began reading books aloud, the other kids were forced to listen to predictable stories about “learning to trust and cope” while I enjoyed tales about “burning lust and dope.”
On the football field, I called Hail Mary passing plays on first down whenever I wanted because the coach and I often had what Cool Hand Luke would describe as “a failure to communicate.”
During my family’s road trips, I easily tuned out my three screaming siblings and Mom’s choice in music (which I believe also serves as the elevator soundtrack for sinners as they descend into hell).
Early on, my pediatrician mistakenly concluded that “a child with ears the size of my neighbor’s satellite dish should have no difficulty hearing later in life.” But 18 years ago, doctors didn’t have access to Google and therefore couldn’t find data pertinent to “hearing impairment.”
Today, however, if you read all the data closely, as Tom Cruise and I have, it becomes painfully apparent that size doesn’t matter when it comes to hearing well. The data also indicate that a BEPBE (Big-Eared Person with Bad Ears) is 4.235 percent more likely to believe that Christina Aguilera’s eyes are prettier than Britney Spears’.
When my parents discovered that I, at the age of 5, was among the fortunate BEPBE, they immediately drove me to Chuck E. Cheese to celebrate. Then they took me to buy some “super cool hearing aids.”
Hearing specialists tested the limits of my hearing capability. This sophisticated testing basically entailed counting the number of times I uttered “What?” in a brief conversation. To ensure that I was prescribed the most powerful and cutting-edge hearing aids on Earth, my parents tutored me to say “What?” with the proper emphasis. For 20 minutes in the waiting room, I practiced gradually increasing the volume of my “What????” to “WHAT!!!!” to express the frustrating speed at which my hearing was deteriorating.
Needless to say, the specialist urgently scribbled out a recommendation for two hearing aids, which my parents embraced as if it were a report card with all A’s.
When I first donned the hearing aids, I experienced such amplification that I actually forgot that my pathetic bicycle with playing cards in its rear spokes was not, in fact, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. There’s clearly something cool about putting sound directly into your ears these days. Wearing hearing aids as a child has allowed me to stay ahead of the curve, because the way people damage their eardrums with excessive and constant noise from their iPods means that every true American will be wearing hearing devices in seven months or so anyway.
When an unsophisticated but attractive coed asks me, “What are those things in your ears?” I inform her that I’m a secret agent who uses these hearing devices to listen for ticking bombs. If she’s not immediately bowled over by this “top secret information,” I warn her that I’m picking up a “disturbing signal” and offer to whisk her off to my nearest bomb shelter, for which she is usually immensely grateful.
I believe my poor hearing is a rare example of a combined spiritual and secular blessing. Spiritually, it gives me an out when God calls in His deepest voice for me to do something particularly ridiculous. “Michael! Go unto the blackened heart of the city and sacrifice your dog Scruffy so that all those blinded by modern florescent lights may witness your devotion to the Lord and be moveth’d!” To which I justifiably respond, “What!?!!?!!” Secularly, my poor hearing has deceived many a girl into whispering her most ardent desires into my “particularly bad left ear.”
Amen.
Michael Koenigs (mckoenigs@hotmail.com. ), a graduate of Regis Jesuit High School, is a freshman at Harvard.
