Isaac, You Din't Tell Us

Gravity. We don’t think about it as we grow up—until a teacher talks about Isaac Newton. In science class we learned about the law of gravitation. But the subject soon leaks from our minds, except for some who get obsessed by it, like Einstein, who spent his life wrestling with gravity. Among his victories was the prediction that the sun’s gravity would bend the light coming from stars.

Stephen Hawking also fiddled a lot with gravity. Talked about it in his book A Brief History of Time (you know, the book that lays unopened on coffee tables throughout the land). Hawking’s thing is black holes, astronomical bodies with such intense gravity that not even light can escape. 

Like most people, I’ve been indifferent to gravity over the years. But now I am a senior, a person allowed to sit in the first-row seats on Portland busses, the ones labeled “honored citizens.”

Now gravity has my attention. It’s changing me, and it’s pissing me off. In my insecure youth, acne eventually subsided. But my big ears persisted, and I grudgingly made my peace with them. But now they’re getting bigger, even as I get shorter and hair abandons my pate. I’m having to adjust all over again. Matthew Parris, columnist in The Times of London, asked: "Are there any pills you can take to shrink them? Never mind penis enlargement. I'm looking for ear reduction."

Research has shown that ears lengthen about 0.2 mm per year. It’s not that the cartilage grows. No, it just continually loses the battle against gravity. Isaac, you didn’t tell us.

And there’s another thing neither you nor our teachers mentioned. We learned about those three delicate bones, the semicircular canals, and that spiral thingy. But we were not taught about the utricle, a chamber at one end of the canals. It contains little crystals of calcium carbonate that are waiting like errant mines for a chance to drift into the semicircular canals and raise hell: when we move our head, inertia causes the crystals to rub against the canal walls, sending confusing signals to the brain.

This happened to me—the room spinning, dizziness, nausea. It was BPPV, benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. Your first law of motion, Isaac, the one about inertia, was making me miserable.

I wonder if not being taught about the utricle and those sneaky crystals was a conspiracy of my elders, an attempt to paint the body a rosy hue, lest I dread the onset of old age? Well, probably not. When young we’re not concerned with the downward trajectory of aging. We are then all about the future—onward and upward. The lyric “cigarettes, whisky and wild wild women” comes to mind.

One more complaint. My ears are letting me down. And modern electronics hasn’t filled the gap very well. The only change I notice with my expensive hearing aids, custom tuned to bump up the high frequencies, is that I now hear a whistle made by my toilet tank valve when flushing. This life enhancement I can do without.

OK. Enough complaining. There are many books that tell us how to be happy. I haven’t read them. But I imagine they say at least this: look on the bright side.

I can do that. Let’s see: I can hear. Those vibrations coursing through my inner ear bring me mocking birds in the morning, interviews by Terry Gross, Norwegian Wood by Lennon-McCartney, and cicadas in the evening. At night my brain shuts off my ear switch until the next morning, when I hear again the lovely symphony of life.