The Silent Space
Given a choice by the gentleman, my third-grader son
elected to have me join him in the soundproofed room
to take his hearing test. Shy-seeming to the audiologist
his mother and I knew him better than that,
how he wasn’t truly shy so much as unimpressed
with common ceremony. We were wholeheartedly
wrong, it appeared, for since he had hardly
heard much in one ear for all of his young life
he’d been innocently distanced by such loss,
sending antisocial signals he wasn’t guilty of.
