I had one good ear that afternoon

I had one good ear that afternoon, and it let me hear Golaski’s voice. What I also heard: the brush of my feet in grass and dry leaves and the pops of breaking twigs. Wind: the stop and start of it you can’t predict, or control. Skittering insects, chirps of forty birds, fifty clicks, chitters, squees, throat clearing, a rusty hinge squeal, a piping, pinched flutes, calls like a finger on a wet glass, return calls. The green insect almost too small to see— you couldn’t make out its shape, just a speck of green… the sound of lake water lapping a shore, the coos of doves interwoven with less familiar birds, the harmless buzz of insects with beautiful names: nyenje, usubi, nyuki.

John Cotter, Losing Music: A Memoir (Milkweed Editions, April 11, 2023)


Book Review by Lisa Zeidner titled “In his moving memoir, John Cotter anticipates a world without sound. ‘Losing Music’ offers readers a compelling portrait of what life is like with the rare and incurable condition Ménière’s disease. (Washington Post, April 12, 2023)

Comments

  1. so touching and heartbreaking

    Liked by 1 person

  2. Not sure why I’m in tears…and yet.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. very nice descriptions

    Liked by 1 person

  4. Sounds like a moving read, pal. That faint sound you just heard? Another book hitting the bedside table reading list…. 😉

    Liked by 1 person

  5. What a beautiful way to experience life. It’s sad that most of us take all these things for granted, until we lose them.

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: