Our sweet Montgomery is losing his hearing. Last night, channeling the inattentiveness I inherited from my father, I stepped on Monty’s snake toy. It is Monty’s snake, not Sven’s. Little brother Sven was never allowed near it.
Except now, Sven probably could grab the snake if he really wanted to. Monty didn’t even twitch from his deep slumber when my foot elicited the jarring sound. He has had the snake almost his entire life, now well over a decade. I used to squeak it to call him, rather than expending the vocal energy to call out his name. I could squeak it inside the house when he was outside the house and he’d shoot straight to the door demanding to grab it and take it far away from my, or anyone else’s, grubby mitts.
But Montgomery’s hearing is going—perhaps gone. It’s sad, but it’s also part of having pets, and I’ve had pets my entire life. Monty looks like how I remember my first pet looking. Kinky (blame my parents for the name) was also a short, squat little fluff of curly black hair. My memory of her is hazy, as she died when I was a very little child, but it is inextricably tied to my memories of my paternal grandmother, who also couldn’t hear very well.
When, in my 30s, I first met my father’s cousin—who was complicatedly estranged from or removed from or deeply enmeshed in my family, depending on whose story you believe (I believe his)—he mentioned my grandmother and said she was entirely deaf. As his younger, I hesitated to correct him, but I did. “That can’t be true because I remember talking to her.”
His memory of her was probably fuzzy due to extreme familial stress, and my memory of her was certainly fuzzy due my brain, which had barely begun developing when grandma died. Constructing the past together was messy and joyful. Like children. But with wine.
He’s gone now, though, so I can’t walk through it further with him. I’m left with my memory, which is tied in my child-brain to Kinky. So, I don’t know if Kinky lost her hearing in the same way as Monty or if I’m superimposing my grandmother onto her. I might also be superimposing the absence of my dad’s cousin onto the whole pile of connections, as I clearly remember his parents at the house when Kinky was alive.
Montgomery used to be a barker. Like, a really loud barker. He can still sing, but it happens less often.
I have often wondered if I chose to be a musician because of my grandmother. The sense of hearing has long fascinated me. It is a terrifying sense. We can’t control it. We can’t close our ears the way we can close our eyes. The cloud of suppression created by the absence of sound is different from the blank screen we can create on command with our eyelids.
Music is a way of controlling the scariest sense.
Every Spring since I was 19, I lose hearing in my left ear. Some weirdness of my physiology combined with the re-emergence of flora just shuts it down.
It has always come back.
My father’s hearing is going too.