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Give everyone thine ear, but few thy voice

Perhaps it’s just a phase I’m going through, but there are times when I don’t recognize my own voice. I don’t think there’s anything like a common thread involved, however. I mean despite a few minor discrepancies each morning, I don’t have much trouble recognizing my reflection in the bathroom mirror, or my hands as they reach for a new pair of socks. I’m pretty good with remembering not to turn the hot water tap too far to the left when I get in the shower, and I don’t think I’ve ever forgotten to use deodorant. But then again, the need to perform these actions are quotidianly mandated; since I have retired, my voice is not.

It seems strange doesn’t it? For all these years I have taken my voice for granted, never suspecting that it, along with sundry other organs, would desert me while I am still needful of them. My voice, once so easily recognizable on the phone, or shouted over the din of excited children in a busy Food Court in the mall, now struggles to make it through my lips as an identifiable signal to my friends at a nearby table to save me a seat. What I once did effortlessly with sound, I have begun to assign to hand signals and apologetic shrugs. I have even delayed my response to a phone call while I rehearse a series of ‘hellos’ that don’t make me sound like I have been caught napping midday, or am just recovering from a serious illness that alters any intended invitation to go out for coffee.

Perhaps the fault lies with me, though: it makes sense that you have to start your car every once in a while to keep it lubricated, or turn on the furnace from time to time so it doesn’t forget why it’s there. Although I don’t wish to be construed as an animist, or anything, still, things need purpose. A toaster was designed to toast, right? It needs to toast things, or it is no longer a toaster. I suppose it could function as a book-end or a paper-weight, but come on! I’m sure it would be a reluctant proxy hoping to shatter itself on the floor: anything to escape. Similarly, my voice can function with a whisper, but it’s hard not to see that as a punishment, like being sent to your room for swearing at someone when you’re a child.

At this point I feel it is incumbent upon me to explain that, far from being absent, my voice still croaks on command. But, equally far from the mellifluous sound it once produced, I am usually forced to commence with a preliminary throat clearing before anything resembling a voice emerges scratched and bleeding from the brambles growing somewhere inside my throat. I’ve never been much of a gardener; my preference tends to be for the untended wilderness of a forest and I find myself staring in awe at the untamed vegetation struggling for sunlight on the ground beneath the trees. I mention this not to disparage those who yearn for an orderly disposition of plants, but because my imagination envisages a similar growth within -somewhere north of my trachea.

I mean, apart from the discomfort inflicted upon my listeners who feel an instinctive desire to help me by coughing or emitting quiet ahems, I feel well. I do not have a fever, nor, when I listen to my chest through the stethoscope I saved from a previous life, do I hear any rattles or râles that might indicate a pulmonary source. I am repeatedly Covid negative and do not have ‘productive sputum’ as I was taught to call it once upon a time. And, as I have not been in the habit of singing hymns either to myself or congregationally, I disturb no one -either in the course of a day, or in an unmarked pew at the back of a church. I am, by and large, socially harmless.

Nevertheless, it has occurred to me to wonder about my condition however. My aged friends do not seem similarly afflicted, and although there is an unwritten tradition not to probe too deeply into the vagaries of other elders, I sense that my condition heightens their own thoughts of mortality. We are, after all, barely clinging to the persona we once flaunted to the world around us. But amongst ourselves where we wear our ages like ill-fitting clothes, fashion is only a memory, and health a source for careful badinage -or quiet prayer. And so, with my rasp, I sometimes hesitate to mingle, lest I become a reminder of what is waiting patiently down the hall for each of us…

Still, all that aside, maybe there are some advantages to having an unreliable voice. For one thing, people take it as a sign of fragility, and as a result I am seldom punched on the shoulder anymore as a sign of hail-fellow-well-met when I am recognized in a crowd by someone I don’t remember; that’s something, I suppose. And people don’t ask me as many silly questions as they used to; although at first I’d hoped that was a sign of respect, I now suspect they just think it’s painful for me to talk, and so they’re happy they don’t have to fend off my equally uninterpretable answers.

Perhaps, though, I should talk more to myself out loud like I used to. When I began to wear hearing aids in my dotage, I lapsed into the habit of whispering about things when I’m alone -I mean I’m right here, eh? I figured I no longer had to talk loudly to hear what I was thinking. For therapeutic purposes, I suppose I could regress even further into the past and begin sounding out the words as I read. And yet, although that might be embarrassing in a restaurant, I suppose I could get away with it in the Food Court. The guys I meet for coffee there on Wednesdays don’t usually listen to me anyway…

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