The sound of friendship

When we were 13, Sonya and I stood up in our canoe with one foot on each blazing-hot gunnel, held our paddles across the boat like a tightrope walker's pole, and bounced.

The idea was to dump the other paddler in the water. Sometimes I fell off; sometimes Sonya did. Then we’d clamber back in and paddle to the Grand Glaize Bridge to buy Zippo lighters and turquoise jewelry.

Sonya and I have been friends forever— over 60 years. I see us as bridesmaids at each other’s weddings. I see us as young mothers playing bridge together, with our kids, two each, scampering about the floor. We went to movies, plays, birthday parties, and playgrounds and on scenic train rides together.

Many years later, I see us driving with our husbands to nostalgic B&B’s all along the east coast. Through all those years, we shared the stories of our children, our husbands, our jobs, our struggles, and our dreams; we made satisfaction and joy together.

After we both retired, I started noticing that Sonya often complained that the TV was turned too low and she said I mumbled. I suggested, then nagged, that she have her hearing checked.

“I hear fine,” she said. “Anything I don’t hear isn’t worth hearing!”

It was her granddaughter that finally got to her. When she couldn’t hear little 6-year-old Lily, she finally agreed to go to the audiologist. And she got hearing aids. But, no matter how much I begged her to use them, she used them mostly when she was with the grandbabies and sometimes for important occasions. Other times, she had her reasons: “They sound funny” or “They make me look old” or “They itch.”

Her hearing worsened, however. When she hit 70, she started having trouble even with her hearing aids: she couldn't hear in crowded places or restaurants or concerts. Mozart’s clarinet quintet, she said, sounded like “a cat fight.”

Nearing 80, she told me 16-year-old Lily was playing Julie Jordan in Carousel. When I told her that the high school auditorium had a sound system she could connect right to her hearing aids and she could really hear Lily sing “When I Marry Mister Snow,” she snipped back “I don’t do that technological stuff.”

That was my last suggestion.

As time went on, Sonya stopped attending even the most special concerts; she quit her long-time book group. Even at home, with the family, right in her own living room, she would be largely silent, smile and nod when everyone else did, but really wasn’t hearing them at all.

Slowly Sonya sank into silence.

I regret I let her fall.

Joan Estes Barickman is a resident of Heritage Hills in Somers.