Odd Couple

When you are yours are out driving about, do you ever find yourself speaking so quietly that the other person can't properly hear you? Perhaps you don't, but Cuppa and I both fall into this mode from time to time. I theorize that we speak softly because we are sitting in close proximity, and in the home environment, that volume would be all that was required.

However, and this is something that I have discovered about people as I have encountered some hearing loss over the past number of years, people have natural volumes at which they speak — their own comfort levels. This volume seems to be almost autonomic, for I have found that if I have cause to remove my hearing aids, people seldom modulate the volume of their voices. If they do remember at first, because I have just brought notified them that I have removed my hearing aids, "So would you please speak up?", they forget with amazing promptness.

Hearing aids aren't really the point, but I speak of such because that is what has caused me to notice this tendency. I also think that it is an automatic reaction to adjust one's volume depending on the distance between the communicants. So when we're in the car and close to the other person, it is natural to speak softly because we are proximate. One simply doesn't pause to consider the road noise factor; we don't compensate because speech volume is autonomic.

All of the preceding ramble is my way of backing into a description of a good laugh that we shared in the car today. I'm not sure that any other couple in the world would ever do this. We're odd, I suppose.

To get to the point, I made a low-volume statement of some sort. I have no idea now what it was — certainly nothing important at any rate. When Cuppa asked me what I had said, I realized that it wasn't worth repeating, so I simply passed it off and told her that I was just muttering.

So then I started to really mutter, just gibberish. And she did too. And it was funny. And it got even funnier when we threw a few chuckles in. We'd mutter as if we were telling a joke and then laugh to ourselves. Pretty soon we were both so genuinely amused that we began to laugh for real — really hard too. The kind of laugh that feels really good.

What a pair of old crazies! What an odd couple!