Reunited, and it feels so good
Reunited, ’cause we understood
There’s one perfect fit
And sugar, this one is it
We both are so excited
‘Cause we’re reunited, hey, hey

Reunited, a Peaches and Herb song from my high school years. So distant from the music I preferred—Springsteen, Beatles, Thorogood, CSNY, the Stones, and of course the breaking new wave bands—but in the seventies, in the car, you listened to the radio. You listened to whatever they played. I never liked Reunited, I still don’t, but here it is, in my brain on repeat.

My high school reunion approaches. Easily the most hyped since my twentieth. Maybe more. I’m not sure why, this is my forty-fifth. It lacks the cachet of a milestone. Seems to me that four decades later, celebrations should be ten years apart. Yes, forty-five years is a long time, I haven’t seen any of these people since 2000, but c’mon guys, shouldn’t we wait until fifty? 

Anyway, I’m not going.

Oooh, I think I heard your groan from here! Yes, call me a buzzkill. A loser. A party-pooper. I’m all those things and more. And I’m even curious to see who those people from high school turned into. But I won’t pay the price. I’m not talking about the price of the event, although at $150 for dinner, that seems a little steep, especially for a nondrinker who can’t milk the open bar to get his money’s worth. I’m talking about the agony of the evening.

A few months ago, a guy named Richard emailed me out of the blue. He graduated with me, he said, did I remember him? I don’t. He was out for dinner with high school friends and my name came up. He decided to look me up. This has happened many times over the years. As a prolific blogger and regularly published columnist with a somewhat unique last name, I must be just about the easiest person to find on the internet. Richard lives about an hour away from me. Did I want to get together for drinks? I don’t.

Last month Steve emailed me. He found a tribute I wrote about a high school friend who died of ALS. Same questions as Richard, do I remember him? Do I want to get together, maybe at the reunion? Nope and nope.

Before you assume I was one of those super popular high school kids that everyone revered even though I didn’t take the time to learn anyone’s name, let me assure you, that wasn’t me. I dwelled far left-of-center on the high school popularity bell-curve. If I didn’t know someone, it’s because I assumed they had no interest in meeting me, so I never spoke with them. It’s also possible that my memories of the people I sort of knew in high school were lost in a 1995 bicycle crash that damaged my brain in ways I’m still discovering.

A few days ago, my brother texted me. “I gave your email address to Josh Casson so he could contact you about your reunion. I don’t want you to be surprised when he shows up in your inbox.” Sigh. I’m getting tired of turning people down. I wonder what they think. That I’m bitter about my high school experience, and I haven’t gotten over it? That I didn’t like them forty-five years ago, and I still don’t like them now? That my life turned out badly, and I’m embarrassed to show up? Is that last one so off the mark?

In my email exchange with Steve (the one I don’t know), I wrote: I had sort of dismissed the idea of going to the reunion, crowds and small talk aren’t really my thing. I’m sober and have symptomatic Tourette Syndrome (doubly so when anxious) so it seems like a hard night. TMI? He found me through my blog. It’s likely he already knew this.

Someone giving advice in the comments section will say, “Just go and be yourself. Who cares what those people think?” I called it agony earlier. Hyperbolic, possibly, but for those who suffer from social anxiety, mingling is miserable. And while I’ve grown more comfortable with my Tourette tics over the past few years, the thought of putting them on display in front of one hundred people already in full judgement mode seems too much to bear.

No, I’ll skip this one. Especially since I know we’ll have another reunion in just five short years: The big 5-0. I’ll make that one a priority. And after dinner, when the dancing starts, I’ll ask the DJ to play Reunited. Sorry, just kidding. Instead, I’ll request Call Me by the Blondie—the smash hit recording of my senior year from a band I still listen to today.

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels

Last weekend I bought new hearing aids. Well, I bought them weeks ago, but I had to wait for this past weekend for them to arrive. This is my third pair. I started wearing them eight years ago, and each pair died in exactly four years. Since 2017, I’ve dropped six thousand dollars trying to hear the people around me speak.

As an added annoyance, I buy my hearing aids from Costco. It’s a fifty-minute drive from my house, and I need to purchase a special annual membership to even enter the building. I typically go on the weekend. Every visit, it’s a sea of oversized SUVs jockeying for parking spaces or just trying to get the hell out of the massive traffic jam of a parking lot. It’s a hassle, but each time I buy new hearing aids, Consumer Reports ranks Costco’s models as the best, the cheapest, with the best customer service. In contrast, my father’s last pair, bought from the boutique hearing center Miracle Ear, cost over seven thousand dollars.

It’s been four years since I bought a Costco membership.

Sales lady: “You can buy a Gold Membership for sixty-five dollars, or you can buy a Platinum Membership for one-hundred thirty-five dollars.

Me: “I’ll buy the Gold.”

“Wait, with the Platinum Membership, you get two-percent cash back on purchases up to twenty-five-hundred dollars. Since you’re buying a big-ticket item, you’ll actually save money with the Platinum.”

I pulled out my phone and punched numbers into the calculator app. “Two percent of twenty-five-hundred is fifty dollars. I’ll still lose money.” The sales lady gave me a smile that seemed to say Thank you for figuring that out, I feel horrible about ripping off people all day, all week, all year.

The woman who fitted my hearing aids warned me that they would take a few weeks to get used to. She got that right. It’s so much easier now to hear and distinguish voices, but where my hearing aids really excel is picking up clatter.

Clatter (n): a continuous rattling sound as of hard objects falling or striking each other.

When I was a teenager, I frequently came home from my nighttime restaurant job stoned. My parents slept lightly, and some nights, they got out of bed to check on me as I settled down for a snack and some late-night TV. I had to hold it together for those few minutes of conversation so they wouldn’t figure out I was high. I quickly learned it was best not to wake them. I crept around the kitchen, silently fixing my snack, every tiny noise—the microwave closing, the metal ice cream scoop set into the sink—sounded like a bomb exploding.

My new hearing aids remind me of this. In the morning, as I make my lunch before heading off to work, I grab a bag of pretzel sticks from the pantry and wrestle to open the bag for the first time. The stiff plastic, designed to tear all the way down the side of the bag and spill out half the pretzels at some point before I finish eating the contents, crackles so loudly (in my hearing aids) you would think I had a clothes dryer in my kitchen spinning a case of broken beer bottles.

When I fetch a scoopful of ice from my freezer and dump it into my water glass, I’m reminded of the Coca Cola commercial that plays at one-hundred decibels through the Dolby Surround Sound^® system at my movie theater. The cat chomping his kibble, water running in the sink, the creaks and snaps of hardwood floors, the air escaping a fresh bottle of club soda, each of these causes such a racket that I wince. The volume of these sounds is almost comical, like something you’d see in a campy horror movie where the teenagers need to keep quiet to save their own lives.

I’m supposed to get used to this over the next couple of weeks. My brain will somehow quiet these sounds so they aren’t so prominent, so painful to my ears. While I want to say that’s impossible to believe, I remember visiting Susan’s grandparents when we first started dating. I woke up five times each night with passing trains. Nothing is so clatter-some as train wheels on train tracks at three in the morning. I commented to her grandmother that she must be exhausted all the time from interrupted sleep. She said, “Oh, I don’t hear those trains anymore. I haven’t heard them for years.”

Maybe we all ‘hear’ this clatter all the time, but our brains have learned to selectively adjust the volume to make it less disruptive. Maybe as an intoxicated teen, I heard those sounds at their actual level because I gave them my full attention (and because I was paranoid and high). Now, my hearing aids include all sorts of phone-app activated settings to filter out background noise. I suppose this would be a simple short-term solution, but my brain won’t learn anything that way. I’ll endure the clatter until it magically goes away.

~ ~ ~

A Bonus Post?

A couple days ago, I stressed about not blogging in over two weeks. Awake at two a.m., after banishing my cat from my bedroom before he started his wee-hours-of-the-morning routine of poking my elbow with a claw and then hiding under the bed, I conjured this potential mini blog post, thinking it was funny, thinking I was clever.

English is Weird:
My feed’s gone stale, my blog seems dead,
so here’s a verse for you to read.

I thought I touched a universal nerve about homophones requiring context to pronounce the words correctly, and what happens when dual contexts conflict? The next day, I realized how stupid this was. I wrote it down but kept it to myself. Until now.