Another Reason to Like My Wife

My wife got her hearing aid today, a nifty red model that sits on top of her external ear structure with a tiny speaker on a wire running down into the ear cavity. But it has already caused her some distress because of all the ambient noise it picks up, some of it quite distant.

As she walked back to work in downtown Oakland, her world suddenly grown bigger, she said she heard a crying child, and the sound was clear and full of pain, but where the child was she could not tell. Just one more thing she would have liked to do something about, if she could. There are several kinds of deafness, and hers has always been the least important.