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Noise wasn't a bother back when my chief vocation was being a loud and obnoxious teenager. My young and agile ears heard what I wanted ("Time to eat!") and filtered out the rest ("Pick up your shoes!" "You're washing dishes tonight!").
I could wallow in pandemonium all day and half the night without missing a beat or losing a single string of bedlam or hubbub.
Fast forward four decades and noise has grown into one big jumbled roar. Confronted by boisterous cacophony, I'm the one shouting, "Turn down that racket!"
It's confusing. I no longer can pick out more than one or two words in a jubilant gathering -- and not the ones from the conversation I'm supposed to be listening to. My disturbed ears latch onto snatches of stray phrases from across the room.
"Huh? You're a cougar?" I holler, trying to keep up in the conversation.
The woman hisses. The talons come out. "What did you call me?"
That's when random sentences from the game hunters regaling each other in the far corner take a spin around my ear drums: "So I trailed that big cat up on mountain and down the other."
"Oops," I say to the growling lady whose ears are flattened against her head.
I read once that as men age, their hearing declines much more rapidly than women's. Something about losing too many of the fine hairs in one's ears that pick up sound vibrations.
Really? I have more hair than ever in my ears. Mine seems to be acting like ear muffs rather than sound enhancers.
I used to be part of the chaos. Now I want no part of it. It all rings like the caterwauling of the Tower of Babel to me.
At a fast food counter the other day, I kept asking the cashier, "What? What?" as he whispered my options.
There's background music pumping in the foreground from a dozen too many overhead speakers. Two guys hoot at videos at one table, with the volume cranked on the cellphone so they can hear over the background music in the foreground. Other patrons shout and guffaw -- I mean talk and giggle, but quite loudly to be heard over the YouTube videos and the background foreground music. Ovens, intercoms and other machines beep, hiss, crackle and squawk. Employees yell back and forth at each other. The cacophony is an assault on my cranky, get-off-my-lawn ears.
I ended up with chocolate sauce, marshmallows and pickled beets on my tacos. That's not what I heard myself order. Then again, I can't hear.
At a party full of commotion last week, my daughter yelled to my grandson, "I bought you a new dress."
He nodded thanks. I yelped, "What?"
Turns out what she actually bought was a new dresser. "You know, a chest of drawers. For his clothes. Which are not dresses."
The grandson was not impressed when I confessed to what I thought I heard. I had landed way out of earshot of his fashion senses. Good thing that he sees me as an ancient codger who doesn't know anything anyway or that could have gotten ugly.
This is why I stay home these days and enjoy the silence of my house -- with the TV volume cranked up. The sportscasters mumble too much.
Whisper sweet nothings to Cole at burtseyeview@tribtoday.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.