Senior Citizen Appreciation

     For my two hour senior citizen appreciation paper, I wore extremely dampening ear muffs over my head for two hours. Being hard of hearing was a lot harder than I ever could have imagined. When you hear about composers, like Beethoven, composing a symphony when he was entirely deaf, you feel impressed, but being impressed is definitely not the same thing as truly appreciating something because you’ve been in the same position before. I was only deaf for two hours, whereas some elderly folks’ sense of hearing can diminish over the course of many years, much like Beethoven.

     So that I could truly learn to appreciate my sense of hearing, the first thing that I decided to do (after putting dampening ear muffs on) was to go and practice the piano. Normally, playing the piano is my favorite hobby. I just love jamming out to upbeat songs as my fingers lightly glide over the smooth, white keys.
Truly enjoying your favorite activity is extremely hard when you can barely strain to hear it. I’m sure that my parents, in the next room, were awed by how well I could play for not hearing, but I wasn’t impressed with my own playing in the slightest. When I tapped the keys in a soft rhythm while playing pianissimo in dynamic, I literally could not hear a note to save my life. To dampen my spirits as much as my hearing, when I reached the gloriously loud and exciting parts of a sonatina by Clementi, I could still barely hear anything, even though I knew that I was playing obnoxiously loud. The only song I could really hear was when I was pounding out “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” by the Beetles. No wonder the Beetles are still so classic, they are easy for the elderly to hear.

     When you’ve played an instrument for a few years, it becomes easier to play by ear. I winced more than a few times when I could actually hear myself playing a wrong note. The worst thing about it was that I couldn’t hear the piano well enough to try and fix my mistakes by ear. If I didn’t have a piece memorized, it was extremely hard to hear if I was actually playing the correct notes in the first place. Suddenly, I knew that it was time to stop trying to practice the piano. I got the point and I appreciated my ears a lot more than I had thirty minutes earlier, when I had reluctantly put the ear muffs over my ears.

    Not being able to play piano was only the beginning to my newfound discovery of my appreciation of being able to hear. Around the house, my parents can rely pretty heavily on me to do chores and help take care of things. Although they both knew and understood the gist of my psychology assignment beforehand, they became a little exasperated as I embarrassingly but honestly muttered, “What?” repeatedly when I couldn’t hear them. Sometimes, they had to repeat a phrase four or five times before I understood what they wanted me to do. The other times I would just do a random chore while in their line of sight to please them, I became rather good at guessing what they wanted me to do when I stubbornly didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t hear them.

     Most unfortunately, my parents and younger brother weren’t the only ones that I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t even hear myself. It was as if someone had put a gag over my mouth and I really had to spit out my words to be heard. There was absolutely no way for me to tell how loudly or softly I was speaking. It was embarrassing how loudly I was forced to talk. Now I really understand why senior citizens sometimes yell when they’re talking; it’s not necessarily because they want you to hear them, it’s because they can’t even hear themselves. That was by far one of the hardest parts of the assignment.

     I am a person who loves to play the piano, and quite apparently, I talk a lot more than I realized; that’s why not being able to hear was so hard for me personally. Not only do I appreciate my own sense of hearing more from this experience, I appreciate the diligence of the elderly in trying to hear others and be heard no matter how embarrassing it is.