Diorientation

A few days ago, six hearty men packed up the contents of our apartment, prior to its renovation, and delivered most of them to a storage facility but some of them to us here at our new quarters. We expect to live here for the next five or six months, and although it's fully and handsomely furnished, we needed yet more storage space. So we came with three bureaus and three small filing cabinets, along with numerous cartons containing the contents of our kitchen, dining room, and linen cupboard (we had asked the owners to remove their dinnerware, cutlery, cookware, and linens), plus all our clothes, a dozen or so books, our files, office supplies, and so forth. As far as material goods are concerned, we're now fully equipped for life in our new surroundings.

It would be pleasant to assume that my mental equipment is equally sufficient, but after the first few days here I have my doubts. I keep looking for things in the places that they occupied in our former home. At breakfast, I reach behind me for the sideboard drawer in which I keep my pills, only to remember that the sideboard is now in a warehouse and that the pills are now in a cupboard across the room. When preparing for bed I go to our bedroom to organize my clothes for the next day, before remembering that my clothes now occupy a dresser in the hall and a closet in the study. I spend the day looking for things in all the wrong places.

Perhaps that's understandable. Habits form quickly and die hard, after all. But what habit can account for my losing one of my hearing aids? Suddenly my right ear felt naked. Where was my earphone? I had been opening boxes, stooping and lifting and putting things away, hampered by my still having to use a walker to protect my broken foot. Perhaps my hearing aid fell out while I was engaged in these unaccustomed acrobatics. "It must be somewhere in the apartment," my wife said, as we stood amid the crumpled white wrapping paper covering the floor and that she had been periodically carrying out to the recycling bins. What if the device had fallen onto a pile of papers, only to be hidden by yet more papers as these were thrown onto the floor, then scooped up, and taken away?

To replace the device would cost more than two thousand dollars and in the meantime I'd be even deafer than I am now. I felt guilty and depressed. What a start to our new life here! But there was no point in indulging in self-flagellation. I would look for the missing hearing aid. I wasn't exactly searching for a needle in a haystack, but the device is very small, the apartment large, and the number of places it could have fallen seemed to me almost infinite. First I checked my clothes, to see if it had fallen somewhere in there. Then I looked around all the boxes on which I had been working. Finally, I gave up. "It will appear or it won't," I told myself, "so pull yourself together and continue to unpack." This I did, but with a heavy heart.

But in the end I did find it. It had not left its little box. I had neglected to put it into my ear in the first place. When I opened its box and saw it, I felt immense relief and not a little chagrin. I understand that the elderly are often disoriented by a move. I hope that it was disorientation and not mental decline that caused me, for the very first time, to put in one hearing aid but not the other. Time will tell. In the meantime, I will continue to unpack.