I’m always penning stories about the dark days of the Great Depression and passing them on to you and your kids. It was a time to remember, the way you remember all the wars and those who lived through them.

Well, all the movies in those days, and the stories from the 1930s that spawned them, had such colorful characters to fill the screens with, and I spent a lot of time in the movie houses that showed them. Those years gave us such famous writers as Dashiell Hammett, who in turn gave us characters like Sam Spade, who was distracted by Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor in the “Maltese Falcon” movie), and Ernest Hemingway, who created a bevy of drunks and women who glittered in all the decades. Isn’t it strange how none of my chosen writers had one iota of hearing problems?

This is about such problems that filled my years, the Broken ’30s. Ahh, yes; the fabled 1930s, full of the passing broken railroad box car riders, the victims of the times.

These were the men and women who captivated me most. They came around the back of my house to the back porch, where Mom, my baby sister and I sat. They were so much alike in how they appeared and vanished, as they all did, and how they gave me their words to use.

This one fella pulled off his cap and, with a smile, held up his hand. His lips seemed to move, but no words came out. Mom was always ready. She went into the kitchen and came out with a baked potato left over from supper. When she handed it to him he started waving his fingers. He had wide eyes and an open mouth empty of words. Soon I learned he was “talking” to her, and she “talking” to him. Mom’s deceased mother, you see, was stone deaf (I knew that), and Mom always mentioned her on every holiday, every gathering. Mom grew up knowing how to sign, but there was no one to use it on. I didn’t know that until this one wandering soul revealed it like a summer stroke of lightning up the trees.

And then, in my late life, this happened. I was thinking about my grandmother while sitting in this tiny room at Elmwood Primary Care in Waterville, where I was about to have my ear passages cleaned out. I have been suffering hearing issues for some time. I heard that “dizziness” was a possible side effect of the cleaning. For me this was scary. I fear dizziness, but in some hidden passage in my labyrinth of dark secrets I feared that my grandmother’s deafness had somehow waited until I was her age to pop up.

You see how I am? You’ve long been aware of my hidden fears, and I hide them so poorly. So, I asked around to a few close friends who confessed that they, too, had their ears cleaned. Of course, none of them had a single bad moment of discomfort or suffered the dreaded dizziness.

Relieved of the fear, I sat erect, quietly chanting Hail Marys and Our Fathers while Dawn, my older daughter, held my hand and whispered comforting passages she made up to calm me.

So it’s over. My ears are clean, empty of creaking sounds and ready to accept all those words that fall from your lips. No longer will I have to ask “What?”

Can you hear me? What?

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.