What's A Wippycrack?

by John Maher

I was driving down Whitney Avenue in New Haven at dusk on a wet Thursday, my wife beside me. We were heading for dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant.

Along with steering the car through traffic that was fleeing the city, I steered my mind among my wife's many observations and my own reflections on the politics of academic life. It was a demanding exercise, especially when a Subaru insisted on cutting between me and my wife's remarks about the neighbor's five barking dogs. My thoughts careened into a cluster of five untenured professors whose insecurity prevented their moving decisively out of the way of controversial academic issues.

It was a regular obstacle course, these images of fact and fancy colliding in my consciousness. Then I heard:

" ... and it's because of the wippycracks."

"What's a wippycrack?" I asked, turning my head towards her so she'd know she had my full attention.

"What do you mean, 'What's a wippycrack?'"

"You just said, 'It's because of the wippycracks' and I'm asking you, what's a wippycrack?"

She stared at me, startled.

"That settles it!" she said. "You really must do something about your hearing. What I said was that Tom is a domineering husband and the reason Joan is a nervous wreck is because of the whip he cracks. Did you get it this time? The WHIP HE CRACKS!"

"I got it," I cried.

I got it, all right: the latest evidence of my decline from middle age to senility.

I first grew aware of my problem about a year earlier. I was driving to the university listening to one of those "All News" stations (10% commercials) from New York. As I drove I thought of my wife's garden of last spring. Along with vegetables she had planted flowers: impatiens, begonias, sweet william. Suddenly the station's weather forecaster predicted " ... a warming trend. Increasing clouds this afternoon, " he said, "with snow likely, followed by sweet lorraine."

Now I was all ears. A warming trend bringing snow and the blossoming of sweet lorraine. What a delightful prospect.

I had heard of sweet william. But sweet lorraine? There was a song by that name. Had I misunderstood? True, meteorologists sometimes talk about crocuses poking up through the snow. Then it dawned on me. What usually follows a warming trend with snow? Sleet and rain, of course! I got it.

Most misinterpretations like this aren't critical. They don't require split-second decisions. There's time to consider, to reinterpret, to ignore. No harm is done.

For instance, a friend was praising a movie recently called Narrow Street. I asked if it was playing in town. She asked what I meant. I repeated the question only to find she was talking about Meryl Streep. I was pretty close on that one.

Then there was the time we were at lunch with my cousin and my aged aunt. As we looked at the menus, I caught a comment from cousin Marjorie about "apple fliers." But when I asked where she saw such things on the menu, I was told I must have heard her comment on her stereo system.

So it goes.

And it's not just my hearing. My mind seems sometimes to have a mind of its own. It's as if it's trying to look at all of the films at Cinema 1 through 5 at once.

I've grown tired of saying "What?" all the time. So, instead, I make a point of guessing at the words I hear or just muttering "OK" or "Right."

This tactic has not stopped people from becoming exasperated with me. "Why don't you get your hearing fixed?" they shout. My son, Sean, barks, "Get the wax out of your ears!" I tried ten drops of hydrogen peroxide as he recommended but aside from a tickling sensation, there was no change in my hearing.

I can't use the old dodge anymore about being the absent-minded professor. It's gone too far for that. Nor can I tell everyone that I feel reluctant to get a hearing aid because the doctor had told me that it wasn't an amplification of sound I needed; it was discrimination among sounds, especially among words loaded with sibilants like "s, sh." I don't mind admitting my disability. Everybody knows about that already. And they know I'm aging.

My earlier defense, when I failed to hear something, was to say, "Stop mumbling. Speak up!" Injunctions like these now fall on deaf ears.

Children with good hearing have been faking understanding for a long time and nobody complains. My wife illustrated this the other day by reciting the bedtime prayer of her son, Chuck, when he was a toddler:

Now a lady down asleep
Paid award a soda keep.
Fie sh'die a for awake,
Paid award a soda take.

I am intrigued by what a three-year-old kid might mean by such a rhyme.

At 70-odd years, I find the world is growing softer and quieter. And just as it seems to children, it is more ambiguous. I kind of like it better this way. There are more surprises for me just as there are for little kids who hear sounds they've never heard before. My teakettle sometimes plays a two-part invention by Bach. And there's more poetry with strange images, the likes of which I haven't enjoyed in three-quarters of a century.

There's a transformation of life. As the old and misread Easter hymn has it, "Up from the gravy a rose/ with a mighty triumph for his foes."