Alan Liere: Beans in my ears

I was sitting in a goose blind in Alberta waiting for the first flock of specklebellies to come dipping and diving out of the stratosphere, and I couldn’t get a childhood tune out of my head. I had heard the words first as a tyke, usually on a Saturday night when my mother gave me my weekly scrubbing in the bath tub. While Lawrence Welk was doing his bubbly thing on the TV in the next room, Mom would sing to me:

My mother said not to put beans in my ears

… beans in my ears

… beans in my ears

My mother said not to but beans in my ears …

Those were the only words I remembered, but I think the rest of the song had something to do with the fact that during my Saturday night semicleansing, Mom always told me I was so dirty that if I put a bean in my ear, it would grow a crop in no time.

On this particular day in Alberta, I did not have beans in my ears, nor did I have an inordinate amount of dirt. What I did have was a cinnamon Gummy Bear – half of one actually, slightly gummed – in each ear.

On the day before, I had used pieces of toilet paper to plug my ear canals in hopes of minimizing the damage from each shotgun blast. Oh, sure, there were better methods for reducing the boom, but wadded up toilet paper didn’t get misplaced or forgotten as often as my custom-made ear molds, and they cost practically nothing unless I got one so far into the ear canal (I did) it had to be removed by a laughing intern in minor emergency.

To my dismay, I had arrived in the gloaming this morning to discover neither I nor any of my Canadian friends had so much as a scrap of toilet paper tucked away in our coveralls. My $150 custom ear molds had disappeared four days before, probably stomped into the mud of a harvested pea field. Because I had quit smoking, I didn’t even have the filters from a couple of Camel Lights to block at least some of the shotgun’s percussion.

When one has lost as much of his hearing as I have from ignorantly shooting without protection, one becomes conscientious about saving what little remains.

Unfortunately, I waited much too long to enter this mindset, and by the time I had my first molded ear plugs, it was already difficult for me to carry on a conversation in a moving vehicle or even understand the messages on my phone.

Women’s voices are now almost always impossible for me to decipher, anyone with an accent is hung up on immediately and an attempted conversation with anyone in a noisy, crowed room is frustrating and embarrassing. I know there are a lot of people out there who think I’m “simple” because of inappropriate responses I’ve made to questions I didn’t process correctly.

I quit watching movies and TV (except football) at age 70 because I couldn’t understand any of the dialogue, and long before that I quit going to nightclubs to dance and hope to interact with members of the opposite sex because much of what I thought I heard on the dance floor was often grossly misunderstood. Once, in the middle of a raucous country-western song, a pretty young thing approached my table, made a hand gesture, and lipped something I interpreted as an invitation to trip the light fantastic. “You bet!” I said, bouncing to my feet and strutting onto the dance floor. Turning back to face my new partner, I found she and her friends were actually removing the chairs from my table and hauling them across the room to theirs.

Sheepishly, without making eye contact, I picked my way between dancers to the men’s room where I entered a stall and sat through three more songs, too embarrassed to return to my table.

On the positive side, I gleaned two witticisms etched into the wall of the metal stall that have helped focus my life and make me what I am today: “Save Your Empties” was one. The other, which I found particularly profound for a nightclub restroom in the low-rent district, read:

If you would not be forgotten,

As soon as you are dead and rotten,

Write things worth the reading

Or do things worth the writing.

So there I was in a layout blind in Alberta, knowing I would soon be covered up with geese but not wanting to give up my last little bit of auditory discrimination to shoot them. I was seriously thinking of packing mud balls in my ears when I found a long-forgotten cinnamon Gummy Bear in my shell bag – the last remnant of a Halloween stash from the year before. It was hard and dirty, but I put it in my mouth and chewed it just a little – long enough to make it soft and sticky while still retaining some of its shape. Then, I bit it in half and pushed a piece into each ear canal.

To my delight, they stayed put, and the cinnamon smell was not at all unpleasant. I shot particularly well that day, blessedly, saving a few sterocilia and making another trip to minor emergency at morning’s end unnecessary.