What the Floor Said
On Friday night I stood in the town hall with a cup of coffee in each hand and watched a woman I had known for eight weeks hand her daughter an envelope, and I could not hear one word of it. I could see them well enough. I read Gerda’s back, which is a short, straight back in a cranberry cardigan, and I read her daughter’s face, which went from folded arms to something softer in the time it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer. But I did not hear a word.
My name is Ivan Ratzlaff. I am seventy-six. I farm two quarters north of Wessling, 320 acres, with my son Wesley, and I have lived on the same section road all my life. I am a widower. My wife Dolores died on a Monday morning in March of 2023, in the middle of hanging the wash, and I found her. I will not say more about that today.
You heard from Gerda Stromberg that I am a little deaf. I want to correct the record. A little deaf is what I let people believe, because it is a polite thing to be. The truth is that I have not heard a note of that band in two years, and I have not missed a single step.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
Let me explain how a man does that.
How I Lost the Band
I ran a diesel tractor with no cab from 1968 until the year Wesley talked me into one, and I ran the grain dryer every October for thirty-one years. That dryer has a fan the size of a barn door and it never once shut up. At the elevator they say there are two kinds of old farmers, the deaf ones and the liars.
My right ear is gone. It went by degrees, and by the early nineties I had stopped using it for anything but a place to rest my hat. My left ear held on much longer. Until the summer of 2024 I could still follow a waltz through it on a good night, if I stood close to the stage. That summer it fell off a hillside. Now it catches a voice if the voice is low and slow and facing me. A woman’s voice goes right past it. A man’s gets through on a good day. Music is another matter. I can tell that music is playing the way you can tell somebody is talking in the next room, by the shape of it and none of the words.
What I can feel is the bass. A stand-up bass puts out a note that goes through the floor, through the legs of a chair, up through the soles of a man’s boots, and it does not need an ear to find me. The bass drum does the same. Those are the only parts of a band I have left, and I have spent a good many Fridays learning to live on them.