This week my daughter, Cindy, brought me a bright blue sweatshirt. The logo features a steaming cup of hot coffee. The words printed above and below the coffee cup read like this: Fueled by coffee…and True Crime.

That’s me in a nutshell—I’ve had at least 10,000 cups of coffee in the last twenty years and I’ve probably watched that many true crime shows, too.

I’ve read any number of Harlan Coben’s books, and we’ve seen several TV limited series based on his stories, ones that have come to various streaming services. So last week when Harlan Coben’s The Final Twist premiered on network TV, I tuned in and was surprised to find that rather than a treatment of one of his fictional stories, it turns out to feature various true crimes. Our recorded second episode is playing on our TV as I write this, but that show is also the reason I’m writing this tonight, because seeing Harlan Coben doing the introduction reminded me that he is one of my heroes.

For years I kept asking Bill to stop mumbling and to turn up the volume on the TV set. He told me over and over that needed hearing aids. I told him I DID NOT! Then in 1999, at the American Library Association conference in New Orleans, I was on a panel with Harlan Coben. Panelists were seated at a table located behind the loudspeakers. The first time the moderator asked me a direct question, I didn’t hear a word she said, and I’m sure my answer was bizarre. Thankfully, Harlan realized what was going on. From then on, he kindly translated the questions for me.

I was exceedingly grateful for that and wrote him a letter, sent in care of his publisher, thanking him and saying how grateful I was. I don’t know if he ever received it, because he never responded, but maybe someone who knows him will pass this along to him because, all these years later, I’m still grateful

But that isn’t the end of the story. Bill continued to mumble. The volume on the TV set continued to be way too low.

Then, a year or so later, our other daughter’s relatively new in-laws came to Tucson and we all went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant that featured lots of very hard surfaces. During the course of the meal, I heard her father-in-law say something about “camels in Virginia.”

That one stumped me. “Really?” I asked. “I didn’t know there were camels in Virginia.”

He looked at me as though I was a complete idiot and said: “I LEFT MY CAMERA IN VIRGINIA!”

Enough said. I invested in my first pair of hearing aids shortly thereafter, and the first thing I noticed on the way home was that the turn signal was actually making a clicking sound. I hadn’t heard that for years.

I should have paid better attention to Harlan Coben years earlier. I could have spared myself a good deal of embarrassment. But if any of this sounds familiar to someone reading my blog, get over yourself. Go ahead and buy yourself that set of hearing aids you’ve spent years saying you didn’t need or that you were afraid would make you look “old.” Most people won’t even notice them. What they’ll see is someone who has finally rejoined the conversation.

The good news is hearing aids are a lot less expensive now than they used to be and trust me. You’ll be thrilled when you use your turn signal and hear it clicking away for the first time in years.