The Sound of Silence
Me and Southpaw
When I was very young, we moved from Flushing, NY to the southside of Chicago, as my father was starting a new job as a civil engineer in the city. The South Side was affordable, if not desirable, and I only know it from black and white snapshots in an album my mother made for me. Somehow, the Chicago White Sox became imprinted upon me and I’ve been a fan ever since. I played a lot of baseball in my youth and even though I haven’t lived in Chicago for more than 50 years, I still follow the team and try to attend a few Spring Training games every spring. This year was no different, or so I thought.
We were going to attend a game between the Cubs and the Sox with our dear friends Bob and Carole Steele, devout Cubs fans. It was cold, rainy and miserable and after lunch together, they made the decision to stay warm and dry and skip the game. We got to the ballpark late but the game was delayed. After an endless number of ceremonial first pitches, a fan goes out onto the field to say “Play Ball.” It is usually some eight-year old, but today it was some old guy. I couldn’t hear them very well, but I thought they introduced him as Mark Stearns. I watched where he was sitting and when I went to the concession stand, I saw him and asked him where he was from. A few questions later and I confirmed it was the same Mark Stearns who I grew up with and who I used to go to Sox games with throughout my youth. I hadn’t seen him for more than 50 years and there we were at a White Sox Spring training game in Arizona. We sat together the next day and reminisced about the doubleheaders of our childhood. We seamlessly continued conversations that we had started five decades before. It was long before there was a mascot named South Paw, but it was so wonderful.
The Sound of Silence
Winter is our time to enjoy life in Tucson. We always have guests who enjoy some combination of our hospitality and warmer weather, but mostly it is our time to hike in the desert, enjoy the winter birds and venture no further than our backyard. That didn’t happen this past winter. In October, 2023, we were home for only four days. In November, we had guests for eight days and a week of unplanned travel. In December, I had three surgeries in less than a week, the last of which, an elective surgery, took three times longer than planned and was followed by two months of inactivity and another month of limited activity.
I have a tenuous relationship with elective surgeries. My father had elective surgery and ended up an invalid for the last decade of his life. I guess they owed me one because my elective inner ear surgery likely saved my life. The surgeon corrected previously undiagnosed brain and nerve issues, that left undone, would have left me with facial palsy and a dying brain. He patched a gap in my tegmen bone that separates my ear from my brain and repaired an unattached nerve. My brain had already begun to sink down into my ear cavity and die.
During previous surgeries, with a different surgeon, I had protheses installed in both of my ears after cholesteatomas had destroyed my inner ear bones. The prothesis in my left ear had come loose and was extruding from my ear and I had severe tinnitus. I met numerous times with the surgeon seeking a solution, but he had none. My new surgeon wouldn’t promise any improvement but was willing to replace the extruding prothesis. The drama and trauma were revealed once the surgery began, so it took many more hours than planned. I likely have a lot fewer living brain cells than I used to, but a lot more than I would have if I had not chosen the elective surgery.
The rest of December was spent going back and forth for follow-up appointments and eventually getting fitted with a bone anchored hearing aid for my right ear while my left ear continued to heal. It has an external sound processor that attaches magnetically to a small titanium implant in the bone behind my ear. It’s far from perfect, but better than being deaf. Previously, when hiking in the Arizona desert, the wind was my friend. It cooled, carried bird songs and created blurry backgrounds for my photographs. Now, it provides me nothing but static. If indeed, the answer is blowing in the wind, I will not hear it.
My goal was to be ready for a scheduled week of hiking in the nearby Superstition Mountains starting in late February followed by an exploratory trip to the Joshua Tree National Park Wilderness Area. Prior to that, visits from Steve, Dana, Jim, Pam, Lily, Bob, Carole, Ami and Matthias, interspersed with Cynny traveling to North Carolina where her father was in failing health, kept us busy.
From mid-February to mid-April, our itinerary was packed and every moment we were not on the road, Cynny was in North Carolina, caring for her mother and saying goodbye to her father. Upon returning from Joshua Tree, we spent a few days with friends in Glendale, AZ for Spring Training, a day in South Coyote Butte and a day at The Wave with cousin Molly and a few days in Portal, AZ. We then had a visit with Jay and Judy in Las Cruces, NM, spent a few days in Big Bend NP and a few days in San Antonio and Kerrville, TX watching a very cloudy solar eclipse before heading for a few days of hiking in Madera Canyon, AZ and then home. In between were two more trips for Cynny to North Carolina and we just completed another.
Since I haven’t posted a new gallery since last November, I decided to post this update and put together a few photos from our recent travels. There’s nothing special about them aside from the fact that I was able to travel and photograph again. I just learned that there may be another inner ear surgery in my near future to replace the prosthesis in my right ear. C’est la vie.
Condolences can be sent to Cynny at cynnyscott@gmail.com and donations to honor her father, Professor Tom Scott, can be made to the North Carolina Botanical Garden, PO Box 309, Chapel Hill NC 27514-0309.
