Fuzzy World

The gigantic head of a Star Wars storm trooper was approaching me in the oncoming lane.

I knew that couldn’t be right. Turned out it was a white Kia Soul. For a few seconds, though, I was definitely in a galaxy far away.

Sometimes there is a gap between what we perceive and what is really there. One of my favorite comic characters on Saturday Night Live was Gilda Radner’s Miss Emily Litella. Miss Emily appeared on Weekend Update, supposedly rebutting a previous editorial.

“What is all this I hear about a Supreme Court decision on a deaf penalty? It’s terrible. Deaf people have enough problems.”

“Miss Litella, that’s the death penalty.”

“Oh. That’s very different. Never mind.”

To many people of my generation all you have to do is say, “Never mind” with a sweet smile, and the memory of Gilda in her cardigan is right there. We thought Miss Emily and her fuzzy reception of life was a hoot.

We were young then. We did not realize there might come a time when what we heard or saw might not be immediately clear to us. It is inevitable that when you’re young, you’re clueless. After a few decades you are a lot more clued in, but as you age, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the wisdom you acquire and the accuracy of your perceptions.

I do not hear clearly any more. In a restaurant for example I will sit there smiling and nodding, trying to catch the general drift of the conversation, but I’m not hearing most of it. People’s voices are muffled by the background noise of conversation and the clatter of plates and cutlery.

The cell phone is tricky, too, if the battery is low or reception is bad, or I have the volume turned up to high, which makes people’s voices muddy. Today a friend said something that ended with the word, “Clear,” and I replied, “Yes, we’ve got a little sun up here, too.” There followed a silence on her end. “Is that what we’re talking about?” I asked. “No,” she replied.

My vision has taken on a similar capriciousness. I see the giant head of a storm trooper instead of a boxy motor vehicle, for example.

I’ve been reading words and phrases wrong for years, and I usually enjoy my mis-readings. They are mostly nonsense and are almost always funny, even though the real word may be quite serious. Recently I’ve noticed an uptick in the dyslexic jokes my brain tells me.

I’ll add “New glasses” to my list, right under “Hearing aids.”

A quirk that has arrived in the last year or so that really bothers me is the tendency of my fingers to type a word similar to the one I intend to write. I want to say, “nice,” but my fingers type, “night,” and go tippy-tapping on their merry way. As most writers know, it’s hard to proofread your own copy. You know what you meant to say, and that’s what you see. This is pretty embarrassing for someone who has worked as an editor.

Speaking of embarrassing, I was walking down the main street in Vashon this morning, and saw a woman come out of a store front which I thought was a hair salon. I looked closely at her hair, and said, “Your hair looks nice,” which is what a person might enjoy hearing when they’ve just had a haircut. Then I noticed that the store from which she came was not a hair salon. The hair salon was another half block down the street. I can’t imagine what she thought of a stranger complimenting her hair out of the blue. In my defense, her hair did look nice. So I don’t have to move away. Yet.
So that’s life these days, hearing what isn’t said, seeing what isn’t there, writing what I didn’t mean, reading nonsense instead of what’s written. If you’re sitting there diagnosing me with dementia, all I can say is, you just wait. Your time will come, if you’re lucky.

 If you’re sitting there nodding your head and saying, “Oh, yeah,” you are my sister or brother, and we’re all in this together. It’s a fuzzy world, but I’m sure we can be happy here.