Henrietta Hay's Column

So! The most famous baby boomer in America is now wearing hearing aids. Big deal! Actually, I would think that Bill Clinton might often prefer not to hear what is going on around him. Ronald Reagan played that part to perfection.

As a person who is both chronologically challenged and auditorily deprived, I can sit back with great interest and even a little amusement and watch the baby boomers turn 50 and discover that, "Oh my gosh, we're middle aged. Look what all those years of listening to rock music at full volume has done to us." And now after years of suffering high frequency hearing loss, the number one boomer has given up and gotten help.

People used to turn 50 one at a time, so to speak. We started acknowledging signs of aging more gradually and far less publicly. Men's hairlines started to recede and we all pretended not to notice, and women survived menopause without discussing it on television.

Now a huge chunk of the population is turning 50 in the same year, including the President of the United States and the First Lady. Realization of impending aging has become a public matter, and thanks to growing up in a very noisy world, impaired hearing among the boomers is a very common problem.

There are those who say that hearing is the most important of our senses. Helen Keller said that when you lose sight you lose things. When you lose hearing you lose people.

You can't hide a hearing loss the way you can cover up that white hair. I know that from years of struggling to hear what people around me are saying, years of saying, "Huh? Say again," over and over. If I'm not careful, and even if I am, I can often seem to be playing with a little less than a full deck. I really dislike saying something profound, or at least something I thought was profound, only to find that somebody else just said it and I didn't hear it.

Living with a hearing loss, as I have done for many years, is at best a frustrating problem. Fortunately I have good friends who understand and help me to listen. They interpret for me when people mumble, and help me when I say, "What?" for the hundredth time. I know I am a nuisance, but my friends pretend that I'm not. My friend the philosopher knows by osmosis when I have not heard something and am trying to pretend that I did. She will often re-phrase what was said so that people won't know that I didn't hear it. That's the kind of friendship, that our boomer friends will need to develop.

For some reason which I have never quite understood, Americans have equated hearing aids with "getting old." It's OK to wear glasses or use a cane, but hearing aids are a sign of old age. What's so shameful about wanting to hear what is going on around you, whatever your age? Actually, you're more conspicuous without a hearing aid than you are with one.

With the aging of the boomers, the picture is changing. They are showing more good sense than my generation did. At long last the desire to hear is becoming more important than vanity, at least in the case of the President. He is setting an example which is being noticed and followed. Since the news of Clinton's new aids, the Hearing Industries Association says it has been besieged with calls -- from middle-aged voices.

Hearing aids are not perfect, and they're not cheap. They don't help people with certain types of hearing loss. But for those whom they do help, they are lifelines to communication. Of 26 million hearing impaired Americans only 6 million wear aids.

A couple friends of mine summed it up. The sophisticated male boomer says, "Hey, if Bill can wear hearing aids, I guess I can." His wife, the practical one says, "This is a good time to invest in hearing aid companies."

Thanks, Bill.