D is for Deaf: When dad was a little boy
learning to sign, to swim upstream and sail beyond the narrow confines of "normality."
Mom learned to sign in secret. Dad learned to swim on a sloped, sunlit hillside at California School for the Deaf in Berkeley. In a large, rectangular pool at the residential school just miles from the San Francisco Bay. His second-floor dorm room boasted a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, a snapshot of possibility that might otherwise never have been.
Dad was a military brat, the oldest of four and the only deaf person in his family. Fast forward to today, he’s Deaf with a capital D signifying his identity as a member of Deaf community and culture. But it wasn’t always this way. Technically, he’s hard-of-hearing which means that with the assistance of technology, his ears can register sound and he can carry on a conversation audibly. He’s so shy, however - almost painfully so - that you get the impression he’d rather not. Mom is his complete opposite in this way. Though sound is not available to her, she’s spent a lifetime reading lips, and she’ll talk to anyone, anytime, anywhere through a mixture of signs and slow, exaggerated movement of silent, mouthed words (she’s got to slow it down for the hearing folks).
When I was growing up, dad’s hearing aids could most always be found on the dusty, cherry dresser he shared with mom. He tinkered with them more often than he wore them. Crouched on the edge of the bed, atop floral-print quilted cotton, his fingers, ink-stained from decades spent dragging pages hot off the University of Oklahoma presses where he worked, would struggle to tune the tiny dials of the plastic, flesh-colored equipment made to amplify his audible world. As he sat calibrating the potentiality of this muddled dimension, his eyes squinting as if they could somehow assist, a high-pitched squeal would erupt periodically from the tiny machine that could be heard from every other room of our 1300-square foot home, announcing to everyone (except for mom): dad’s fussing with his hearing aids again.
Intermittently, he’d place the piece over his ear, carefully position the earwax-stained mold up close and personal to the critical drum, and utter sounds to evaluate the efficacy of this tenuous technology. Still squinting, he’d call out in a scratchy, nasal tone, “‘ello… ‘ello… ‘elloooo.” Inevitably, he’d end up placing them back on the curved corner shelves which framed the mirror atop the matching dresser, where they made their home among other trinkets that held dad’s fascination (or in the case of those tired, old hearing aids, his frustration): foreign coins, pocket clocks that had stopped, class rings and a motley collection of the parts of many other things. Unlike mom, when it came to listening in on the world, I don’t think he ever felt like he was missing out. If he did, he didn’t let on. Looking back, it’s crystal clear: silence was his solace.
Eventually, grandpa’s time as an aircraft mechanic in the U.S. Air Force took his family from the idyllic California coast and landed them in the extremes of Alaska Country: the endless days of its summers, the impossibly long nights of its winters and the majesty of its White Mountains which made their permanent mark on my daddy. It’s a place I’ve only ever visited in my imagination, when as a little girl I watched with wide eyes as he told me how the snow falls from September to May onto curiously short paperbark birch trees whose growth is stunted from the enduring cold. Where grandma freeze-dried cloth diapers on the clothesline of the commonyard of multi-family base housing that’s since been leveled. The same place my uncle strayed from the snow-plowed paths and got stuck in a frozen pool of water nearly half his height, summoning a search party of military personnel, and making the local news that night. Whether snow, sun, unending day or bitter, ceaseless night, dad’s greatest joy as a momentary Alaskan boy was traveling the neat network of underground tunnels to the indoor pool of Eielson Air Force Base, where the manufactured heat created yet another clash of extremes.
The childhood delight of swimming and splashing in the waters of wherever we call home - whether pond, pool, creek, or fire hydrants let loose to flood sweltering city streets - seems a rite of passage, and you might say, a birthright. But for dad, taking those first eager trips in swim trunks through the maze of tunnels to the pool, it was made clear this was a privilege granted to hearing children alone.
Dad sat on the sidelines taking in the smell of chlorine as he witnessed the silent, gleeful splashes of his siblings and friends, watched their mouths form the shape of ecstatic squeals for this momentary immersion into a wondrous, watery world away from the monotony of military life. Who knows what got into dad’s little brother (my Uncle Robert who would later outgrow him by a long shot) but the story goes that one day he stood up to that righteous man in red who was content to let his big brother sit out. He couldn’t have been much more than ten years old or sixty pounds soaking wet, but he somehow mustered the courage to tell the lifeguard, “My brother can’t hear, but he can swim!” His entreaties earned my dad the right to prove himself worthy of what most today would agree should have been granted outright. The lifeguard leaned in, “Alright, kid, if your brother can swim from one end of the pool to the other and back without stopping, I’ll let him in.”
At the school for the Deaf, my dad had learned to swim and to sign. But a mastered language lends no sway in a world where no one speaks it, let alone one that’s all too quick to dismiss you altogether if you’re different. The two brothers turned toward one another, bonded by blood but still somehow a world apart, they managed to relay the message strung together in their own sibling-speak: an idiosyncratic blend of exaggerated gestures, a plethora of pointing and shouting slowed to a snail’s pace.
All the kids in that concrete paradise cleared out as the little Deaf boy with big ears readied himself for the challenge. This was his moment to prove himself and he was up for it. With a pounding heart, he plunged. The warm waters parted, making way for his lean, adolescent body, with no consideration of its abilities. Only the generous allowing of space for his utterly unique shape. As his scrutinizing witness, forming both judge and jury, watched on with whistle in hand, I wonder if the screams and cheers of the children silent to dad’s ears registered in his body as his determined stride carried him through the undiscriminating welcome of the water.
He made it to the other side of the pool and back, without stopping, without question, just as he had done countless times under that limitless, west coast summer sun. On that defining day, the dark of Alaska, of a little boy’s whole world, grew brighter.
Meanwhile, back home in Oklahoma, in the crowded halls and concrete courtyards of an inner city school, for the very first time, a little girl caught quiet glimmers of a forbidden, foreign language not yet known, but one she instantly recognized as her own.