Wonders

There are moments in life when we learn the world is not what it seemed, not what we had previously assumed it to be.  Sometimes those moments are full of discord and upset.  At other times they are miracles of wonder.

I remember one such episode as if it were yesterday, although 38 years have passed.  It was the day I picked up my glasses.  I don't remember much about the actual day, about picking up the glasses, or about walking to back to my dorm from the optician's.  What I specifically remember is walking into my room and looking out the window.  It was spring; the trees were filled with buds and blossoms. I could see individual flowers on the trees, I could see the leaves beginning to unfurl, individual leaves, not just an impression of greenness.  I could see the leaves from a distance, not just from proximity, when I was standing near a tree. I suddenly realized that the world was not meant to look like a late Monet painting, and I was entranced.  Whenever I look back on that day, that same feeling of entrancement floods my memory.

I am certain that I had once seen well.  I hadn't needed glasses as a child after all. I did have a tendency to cross my eyes, and it turned out that I had some congenital abnormalities in my vision or the way my brain processed the input from my eyes.  But I am also sure that my eyesight faded so gradually that I never thought it about it, never really recognized what I was missing.  Until it was revealed. 

That same sense of wonder returned to my mind this past month, the day I picked up hearing aides, although this time I was awed not with sight, but with sound.  Much as with my glasses, I knew I needed help hearing and I was ready to have the hearing aides.  I have seen too many people who wait too long, whose brains are no longer able to cope with the additional stimulus, who cannot adapt to what was lost.  I was determined that I would not be one of those people, so I went into the appointment knowing I would walk out with hearing aides.

Even so, I was not prepared for the symphony that awaited me once I walked outside the door.  The birds were singing and I was enveloped in a cloud of song, sweet sopranos, base rhythms, melody and harmony intertwined.  I have always loved the sounds of the birds, loved even the sounds of the leaves in the wind, finding music surrounding me every day, but I had not realized how much sound I had lost, how enveloped on a cushion of sound I could become, and my first wish was was simply that I not forget, that I not allow this marvelous cacophony to fade into the background, that I not stop paying attention.

Yes, at times I was uncomfortably jarred by certain sounds — the beep of my car telling me I was too close to something, the first time my phone rang, the sounds of traffic in downtown Knoxville while I was at big ears.  But I adapted.  And there were other sounds as well.  The soprano sax was sweeter, soft female voices were easier to interpret, I could hear the chirp of a bird despite the traffic, the splatter of drops of water. The melody of the earth is still present no matter how we try to pave it over.  I could focus upon, and pick out the sounds from specific voices or instruments, much more clearly than I had before, much like the way I hear music in my head when I read a score. I walked around town, I listened to music both in concerts and on the street, and I felt like indeed, I had big ears, big ears that were reveling in all the miraculous sounds, large and small, that surrounded me.

I hope I never lose that wonder.  I am sure that there will be more days in which I am preoccupied, in which I don't pay attention to the many wondrous details surrounding me.  But I hope that I recall to stop, to look. to listen, as much as possible.