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I had frequent earaches as a child. Miserable things. My father had them, too. He loved to explain what they did for earaches in his day, pre-antibiotics: they’d take a scalpel and puncture the eardrum to release pressure (otherwise they feared the infection would break inward, into the brain). They did that to him multiple times.

It was his favorite “walking five miles uphill barefoot in the snow to school” story.

Years later, as a teenager, he was practicing for the statewide cornet championships. He was at that point, he said, the third highest ranking cornet player in Tennessee. He said he was a master of triple tonguing. Anyhoo, you can see where this is going: his poor scarred eardrum exploded during practice (I’d like to think during a particularly enthusiastic triple tonguing session). Thus ended his dream of being…the second or first cornet, I guess.

Many years later, he had a surgical eardrum replacement. A tympanoplasty (technically a myringoplasty, since it was just the eardrum). They took a little piece of one of his veins and scraped it really thin and stuck it in his ear. These days it’s done with microscopes, but this would have been about 1966, so they probably did it with rocks or something.

I remember seeing him in the hospital with an enormous head bandage that made him look like a spaceman.

He got some hearing back, but he was pretty deaf and could never get on with hearing aids. This was unfortunate for my stepmother as he loved to make music and believed himself to be a great talent, but could only hear the loud instruments. Bagpipes. Banjos. French horn.

I’m not going anywhere with this story. I just wanted to talk about my father’s ear. Mine is a little better today, I think.