What did you say?

When I told a friend that I ran into in the grocery store that I had just joined Costco, she replied, “You’ve gone to the dark side, and then she admitted that she’d done the same. “We joined because I needed glasses.”

I confided that I joined to enhance my hearing. After yet another meeting of an all-female board—all with sweet soft voices I couldn’t hear, I said, “no more.” I’d been putting it off for too long. I’d even made an attempt to grow out my hair to hide my secret, but that was a miserable failure.

My son, in his late fifties, was having trouble hearing students in his business classes.  We agreed to go to the Costco Hearing Center together. We’d both heard good things about  the place, and given how long we had to wait for an appointment, so had many others.

We stepped into two different booths to have our hearing tested by two extremely nice and competent ladies, and a little while later emerged with diagrams that looked surprisingly similar when we compared them.  I don’t think Costco has too many mother-son duos in search of hearing aids.

After being fitted with these intricate little wonders, we cruised around the enormous Costco building and before long agreed that we were sold. We signed up and made appointments for fittings in a couple of weeks.

The devices were so welcome and so comfortable that I almost went home with them. It wasn’t until I was about to leave the building that I realized that I still had the demos in my ears.  Oops! I returned them pronto.

This morning I went to a three-hour workshop on ageism titled “Changing the Narrative.” I missed a good bit of it—including the words others were chuckling over--because I couldn’t hear them. But very soon, all that will change.