This week I visited my otolaryngologist. He is the one who gifted me with better hearing seven years ago, a blessing that continues to enrich my life. I might go so far as to say that my gratitude has increased, both from the awareness of impaired hearing among friends, and from noticing more people who rely on their hands to communicate. Don't get me wrong, ASL is beautiful and expressive, but having a voice and ears seems like more bounty than I deserve. 

The practice recently changed its location. As in last week. The offices are roomier, brighter, and do not yet have diplomas and anatomically correct diagrams of the ear canal on the walls. The staff are still unpacking and adjusting to a new space. I overheard them giving directions on the phone to patients wandering the halls across the street. 

The doctor checked my outer ears, and reminded me to put a few drops of oil in regularly. I kind of forgot about that during the pandemic. Then he sent me to the audiologist for a test. The space was much bigger than the old one, the one where I could touch both walls from my chair. But the procedure was familiar. Wait for the quiet beep. Click the button. Concentrate to decide if I can discern anything louder than my own heart. It turns out that hearing is an ability worth preserving. Cherishing, even. She handed me a pair of charts documenting my performance now and shortly after the surgeries. The lines reminded me of a mountain, with a sharp decline in the higher registers. 

As I sat in the sound proof closet, I wondered about the skill of listening. It is a cousin to hearing, as compared to an identical twin. I wondered about a metric for evaluating our capacity to truly tend to what other people say. What if relationship health included a test in which we focus on what someone is telling us, so that we can assess our receptivity? Would those numbers nudge us to lean in, and blather less?  Would a graph resembling a canyon alert us to the need to try harder to tune in? 

Maybe we could even add a drop of love. Then fewer people we care about would be lost.