I’m on the pickleball court, playing against my ten-year-old son. He’s a great player. I am not. Given our height and strength differential, we are just about evenly matched. The court is part of recreation facilities of a lightly gated community on the Long Island Sound. Our family’s rented a house here for two weeks, at the end of August, 2025. B and I play pickleball every day, and this is our last morning. We’ve both upped our game by a factor of ten since we started. He’s hitting backhand shots like Andre Agasi. It’s 8:30 in the morning.
Who am I kidding. I don’t know enough about tennis to make that reference. How about a more contemporary player. Serena? Who’s that Spanish player, starts with a N.
I want B to win the final game. I don’t want to cheat or let him win. I want to play for real and for him to beat me fair and square. But he’s exhausted from a late-night block party, and not playing well. We play to 11, and I’m up 8-3. I bite my tongue and start missing shots on purpose, hoping he’ll catch up. But I’m also tired, and my attempt at a bad serve misfires and becomes an accidental ace. This happens twice, and suddenly it’s game point, 10-3, he knows he isn’t going to win, not even trying anymore.
I almost get mad. Who am I mad at?
There’s a moment in the British crime drama Code of Silence when Alison (Rose Ayling-Ellis), a deaf woman who works in food service, vents to her mother after a bad day. We viewers can see that the mother (Fifi Garfield), who is also deaf, has been hiding unpaid bills from her daughter. Alison has just been fired from a waitressing job—her second gig—because her boss believes that being deaf makes it impossible for her to do the job properly. Exasperated, she asks her mother, in sign language, “do you think about what life would be like if things were different?”
“You mean if we were hearing?” the mother signs back.
“No. I don’t want to be hearing. I just want them to be a little bit deaf.”
She doesn’t want to be hearing? I read the line—the signed dialogue is subtitled for the majority of viewers who don’t sign—and I think, “I don’t buy it.” In this cop show full of convenient coincidences, this is the first thing I don’t believe. If a cure for deafness suddenly came to be and you could be hearing, you’d jump at the chance.
Nadal! Rafael Nadal, that’s the tennis player I’m thinking of. I’m complaining about playing pickleball with my son every morning for two weeks? What kind of charmed life do I lead that this is what I complain about. Is Nadal from Spain? Who’s that player “both flesh and not?” I should know this.
But then the follow-up line changes everything. “I just want them to be a little bit deaf,” she says. Oh, I see. I missed the point. We all miss the point.
There’s a kid out here in this odd almost-beach community, a kid my son knows as well as a ten-year-old ever knows a summer playmate. The kid’s dad, I call him Clark. Clark is chief of staff to a democratic congressperson from some west coast state.1 They live in DC most of the year, spend summers on the Sound. What’s his life like? Does he work 80 hours a week? Is the glued to his phone? I imagine for him three phones, this man. One for work, one for his personal life, and one for the life he almost has. Each phone has its own vibration pattern, so Clark can tell which part of his life is intruding on a given moment. Only one person has the number for the third phone. When it vibrates, Clark turns into Superman. An extra-potent shot of dopamine. And then it’s back to Clark, who’s setting meetings, running errands, scheduling, missing soccer games and parent-teacher conferences, reminding people with bigger paychecks than his how to pronounce the name of the ambassador’s cousin’s second wife. Oh, when then that third phone buzzes! And then one day, a rare Sunday at home, all four of them at home, Clark, his wife (the heiress to a tuna empire), their high school daughter who’s recently interested in Marxism, and the kid my son bikes with, all at home at once. And the third phone rings. Not vibrates, but rings. And they all know immediately, this is not a ringtone anyone’s heard before. They all know, somehow, this is a new sound, and life is about to change forever. And they all pretend not to hear.
We’re already all a little bit deaf, I think. That’s what none of us realize. Not in the way Alison wants us to be, maybe. We have no idea what anyone else is saying. Nearly all the time, we’re not listening at all.
I googled him, but I won’t dox him here.