Sunday School. Dave was speaking.

Dave was in high school when we lived in New Hampshire and we knew him and his family there from church. It was quite a delight to have him end up here, well after we did. We were young parents then; he’s the father of his own young family now.

Your average microphone amplifies all frequencies, which isn’t as useful as you might think for those who are actually hearing impaired since impairment is nearly always in the upper frequencies, and when you’re hearing s and f and th sounds at a thousandth the power that everybody else is, amplifying the lower pitches too simply blasts those consonants right off the hearing chart; so for us, all a mike really does is amplify the vowels. The vowels do shape the consonants around them so at least you can make a guess at what the actual words are, so that’s something at least, but it takes all one’s concentration, and seeing the person’s face to help fill in the gaps is almost a requirement. Skip the mike? Well, there’s a reason they call it speaking up: the pitch of the voice does exactly that. Eh, it’s a given–pass the mike.

I have so often wished it were polite to knit in there, for patience’ sake…

I had the new hearing aids on.

I craned my neck a bit to see who they’d passed it to. Dave was at the far end of the room, I’d say about 20 feet away, barely visible past everybody, and I suddenly noticed two things:

The usual soft babble of baby noises and occasional chattered aside to the point at hand were absent; all was still as he spoke.

And I was hearing every. single. word.  And clearly. Granted, Dave has a deep voice and that always helps. But in that room that I have sat in for many a Sunday for many a year, where I have heard zero whispers there or anywhere, where I so often haven’t been able to hear the person seated two seats away–no chattering with me, folks, I’m so well behaved, and too often have heard only a little of what those actually holding the mike were saying…

There it was in his hand.

Every. Single. Word.

So this is what it’s supposed to be like.