ESCAPED: one hearing aid, Cedarvale Park, Toronto.
You can certainly say I deserved to lose my hearing aid in Cedarvale Park yesterday, given how deaf I have clearly been (see below) to the Covid-19 pandemic. And you can say I deserved to lose the hearing aid, an over-the-ear device, because of Covid-19. That’s because I wear a mask every time we take a walk, a mask I bought for two bucks from the local corner store from their stash under the counter. For black-market mask-buying I deserve what happened, which is that I unlooped the mask from behind my ears a few times and during one of them my hearing aid must have unlooped itself from my earlobe and flung itself into the grass, crawling free along the pathway like a tiny robotic snail.
Hearing aids, like jewelry, belong to that group of possessions that combines terribly expensive and terribly small, the result for absentminded idiots like me of setting money on fire. My collection includes a diamond stud at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, an anniversary ring (recently found after I moved the sofa) and a cameo brooch. I have lost three star-of-David necklaces, which can only be anti-semitic.
This particular hearing aid is — was — made for such people, because it works through an app on my iPhone that monitors its whereabouts and turns the hearing aid into the perfect earbud. Listening to it, I’ve giggled my way through dental surgery listening to funny podcasts, and snoozed to Headspace sleep stories. “Come visit the guests at the Pooch Palace. Daisy the whippet joins you on the lobby sofa and lays her head on your knee. She will be here all night if you should need her.”)
So the app on my iPhone is programmed to find the hearing aid if I lose the actual device. Of course I hadn’t connected the hearing aid to the app in ages, but Jonathan held my iPhone in front of him like a Geiger counter to activate the signal and it told us the hearing aid might be at a certain point on the pathway next to the street. Wearing our Covid masks, we walked slowly, in a serpentine fashion, with our heads down in deep focus. We eventually attracted attention even from the depressed eyes-averting black-market mask-wearing dog-draggers in the park. Several of them shouted at us whether they could help. One man asked where we had already walked. We told him we had started at the far end of the park. He said he had nothing better to do these days and headed off towards the west.
We discovered five minutes later that the signal wasn’t really working. The hearing aid was still at liberty. We thanked everyone and went home. I reported the loss to my hearing-aid company, which told me it’s closed until the end of the pandemic. I’m still deaf. The man with nothing better to do is, for all I know, still walking.