Well, the weather has turned and I’ve poured and consumed my traditional end-of-summer ceremonial gin and tonic. The cheaper gin is now stored away till next summer, replaced by Bombay Sapphire, which now becomes available for more sophisticated martinis.
Activities have changed from working in the yard to sitting inside re-reading such classics as “Wind in the Willows” and “The Poetry of Robert Frost,” not to exclude the rhyming of Robert Service as well.
On the subject of gardening, the recent rain was welcome, but it wasn’t enough. Earlier this week I dipped a trowel into a portion of the garden that hadn’t been planted yet and found that the rain had only soaked less than an inch into the ground, not nearly enough to reach the roots of most plants.
Changing the subject, I recently received a nice note that was delivered to The Chronicle’s offices by a reader, concerning the fun I’ve been having lately with mistakes made by TV’s computerized closed captioning. Esther Day described, perfectly, the problems which we — with slightly impaired hearing — find so irritating. An email from Margaret Wildhaber, a fellow Jeopardy fan, confirmed my diagnosis of the problems with the whole process.
I’ve deduced, though, that there must be some human activity connected with the process because, occasionally, when an obvious mistake is made, the printing will stop while the correct word is typed in, and then the whole process jumps ahead so fast trying to catch up that you can’t read it.
Just be thankful if you don’t need the service.
What I really want to write about today does have a connection to the above. It’s an action of mine that I now look back on with more than a little shame and remorse. It happened at the opening and dedication of the new science building on the Centralia College campus. Or, it may have been shortly thereafter; my memory is blurred on this point.
There was a distinctive circular auditorium in the building, and afterward, in one of my columns, I expressed my displeasure with the facility’s sound system. I was appalled at what I considered to be the unacceptable quality of sound I was hearing. Most words were totally garbled and/or unintelligible, and I said as much in my ramblings.
It’s taken a long time for me to realize and accept that what I was experiencing was the onset of deterioration of my own hearing capacity. Most people (normal people, that is, and I’ve never claimed to be one of THEM) are unaware of the role that the human brain plays in the process of hearing. When echoes bounce off the walls of any enclosure and reach one’s head, the brain separates and/or cancels them until intelligibility is maintained.
When a listener has two functioning ears, one ear is effectively and temporarily shut down if sound reaches it at a fractionally different time than the other one. It’s done so smoothly and rapidly that we aren’t even aware of it. Take away one ear, though, and combine that with age-related deterioration of the “little gray cells’ (as Hercule Poirot likes to call them) you wind up with the problem that caused my initial displeasure at that nice modern and cute lecture room on the college campus.
So, all of the foregoing is an attempt to apologize to Centralia College for the column I wrote some time ago, and, at the same time, to try to weasel out of by implying “it wasn’t really my fault.”
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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.
