Bliss of Not Hearing

“The Better to Hear You with, My Dear” Above is a quote from The Big, Bad Wolf who was lying to poor Lil’ Red Riding Hood. He had already eaten her sweet, little Granny and was picking his teeth, getting ready to devour poor Lil’ Red as well. All of us old timers remember that traumatic story. The moral to the story is that Big, Bad Wolves may have big ears but they are very hard of hearing. Big Bad missed his lunch of eating Lil” Red because he could not hear the Woodcutter working close by, chopping wood with a big, sharp axe... a fatal miscalculation for a Big Bad Wolf.

Well, Mr. Bob and I can both hear again thanks to modern technology! We can even talk to each other. Our “Blessed Silence” is gone forever! (Unless we run out of batteries.) Don’t let it out, but there is a big, noisy world out there that the two of us have been missing out on for a long time.

Maybe not hearing stuff wasn’t such a bad thing, because some noises are deafening. Even the evening news is loud, scary and terrifying and no fun to watch, er.. hear. (Please pass the aspirin) People are killing people in living color while we hear the crunch, the sirens and their pitiful screams. With so much panic and alarm, can guns suddenly not be apropos? Will a license soon be required to carry a baseball bat or a golf club for protection? How could the word “terror” not be politically correct anymore? Bad guys are building pipe bombs in their basements, scaring little kids half to death and are pushing sweet, little Grannies, kicking and screaming, off the roof, to insure that the old gals will not live long enough to collect their Medicare, thus balancing the budget. Even worse, Bad guys throw their litter in the streets, never recycle, and drive those big, gas-guzzling automobiles. (OK. OK, we drive one of those, too, but don’t let it out or the Earth Goddess will come to shove us off the roof, as well.)

There are times when we wistfully think about the “good old days” when we lived in a muted world where we understood only a part of what was said. We used to just fill in the blanks, regarding what we did not hear, with our own opinions. That was a peaceful, quiet place where choo-choo-trains, fire trucks and emergency vehicles could speed by without even waking us up.

Amen. – Verta Brown