My New Ladder Is Ready To Climb

I was turning onto Yosemite when the tears started coming.  Kathie even put her hand on my shoulder and asked me if I wanted her to drive.

I was fine.

I assured her.

The thing is I cry over almost anything lately.  I think/hope it comes with being in my seventies.

How terribly strange.

I had to stop watching reruns of The Andy Griffith Show because they had me crying so much.  Opie does it to me every time.  That's a slight exaggeration, but it makes my point.

We were just coming from my latest hearing appointment.  I've ordered hearing aids.  They'll be here the first part of November.  Kathie and I have from now (October 3) until then to figure out how to pay for them.  I'm almost in favor of forgetting the whole thing.  I have managed to cope with my abysmal hearing for over forty years.  I'm seventy-one.  What's another forty years asking Kathie what everybody is talking about?

Whenever I say stuff like that, Kathie and anyone else within earshot roll their eyes.  I guess they're right.

So, we ordered the things.  There were four or five price ranges, each reflecting the quality of the hearing device in question.  We chose the top.  I figure if I have to have hearing aids, I might as well have the best.

I got to choose the color.  It was a lot like buying a car.  The selections were limited, but if I wanted to get a children's hearing aid, the colors would be a lot brighter.  I went with the grey.  There was a flesh colored choice, but it looked too much like something that fell off a Barbie Doll.

But back to the tears on Yosemite.  This hearing thing has been the first thing in my life (rheumatic fever when I was six doesn't count) that required repeated visits to the doctor, the first sign that I'm getting old.  I know that sounds stupid--I've been getting old for years--but that's how I looked, am looking, at it.

You have to understand that it has been a terrible month, maybe even a little longer.  I had to have a root canal and a subsequent crown.  We had to buy a new television.  We had to buy a new lawn mower.  Then Kathie's crown broke.  And now we have hearing aids to buy.

There is a movement going through Congress to add hearing aid coverage to Medicare, to no longer consider hearing aids as merely cosmetic(!), but Mitch McConnell is working happily to keep it off the floor.

So I guess all that stuff coalesced in that one moment on Yosemite.

By the time I got  home, I was all better and ready to climb up my new ladder to paint my house.

It is what it is in the suburbs.