What's That Pig Outdoors? (37 page)

But what about “small-d” deaf people, those who lose their hearing in childhood or adulthood and choose to stay with spoken English as the language of preference and remain members of the hearing culture? This is a more difficult question to answer. “Hard of hearing,” a term the Deaf seem to prefer for us, isn't really suitable for those, like me, who are profoundly or totally deaf. And “deaf” doesn't seem a precise description for those with mild hearing loss.

“Hearing impaired” seems to be the most accurate term for people like me. After all, my hearing
was
impaired all those decades ago—impaired into nonexistence. This is why I still think of my deafness as a disability, not a culture. I am acutely aware of what I lost to meningitis: the melodies of Chopin and Berlioz, the sigh of wind in the trees, voices on the
telephone, the murmur of my wife and children, the siren of a rapidly approaching fire engine out of my sight, the rumble of a freight train down the tracks, the warning roar of an airplane engine starting up down the ramp. At these times deafness is definitely a handicap.

I've come to agree, however, that “handicapped” or “disabled” are not useful terms to describe those who don't feel they suffer from not hearing. If the Deaf don't miss what they've never had, where's the disability? The real handicap, they will argue—and not without justification—is not within themselves but in the obsolete and benighted views many ignorant hearing people have of the deaf. Not for nothing did the existential philosophers declare that hell is other people.

Another view might be that “disability” is a relative term. Most of the time deaf people of all kinds are not handicapped. We walk happily through most ordinary days, going to work and talking with our friends and families, without thinking about our lack of hearing. Once in a while we are painfully reminded of it. When that happens, it can be devastating. In 2006 Tara Rose McAvoy, an ASL speaker and Miss Deaf Texas, was walking along railroad tracks, rapt in her text pager, when a speeding freight train, its horn blaring, struck her from behind and killed her. Not long before, I had been walking down an airport ramp to my airplane, my eyes to the right admiring the other planes lined up on the tarmac, when I suddenly looked forward and saw uncomfortably close up the whirling propellers of a big twin whose engines had just been started. A few more seconds of inattentiveness and I would have been hamburger. On those occasions both Ms. McAvoy and I were definitely handicapped by our deafness, but I was luckier.

Perhaps a good umbrella term for us might be “Deaf and hearing-impaired”? That might work for those who know all about us, but it'll only confuse the ignorant public, who'll just think the phrase is redundant. So go the vicissitudes of identity politics. We can't please everybody. But we
can
respect their choices, whatever they may be. Over the years, simple usage may shake better words out of the bush of language, just as “journalist” has replaced the quaintly sexist “newspaperman,” which I used with abandon twenty years ago.

Arguments still rage among us. More and more very young deaf children are receiving cochlear implants, and many in the Deaf world continue to view the procedure as an engine of genocide. Increasingly, however, if parents conscientiously follow through after the surgery as they should, their youngsters thrive. Some authorities advocate the learning of ASL at the same time as the surgery, so that if the post-op therapy is unsuccessful the children won't miss out on early language development. They also point out that having two native languages never hurt anybody. That sounds eminently reasonable to me. As these children grow older, they may have two cultures to choose from and even switch between.

These days quite a few
hearing
infants get a jump start on language development by learning ASL-based “baby signs” from their hearing parents. Infants can recognize and use gestural language long before they can verbalize. Colin's wife Melody is one of those parents. She taught some rudiments of ASL to Will, our first grandchild, whose hearing is perfectly normal, when he was about six months old, and used it with him until he was seventeen months old. When Will turned out to be slower than his peers to speak, Melody worried that ASL was hindering his voiced language and, at the suggestion of a child development specialist, stopped it. At eighteen months Will began to talk and never shut up. In that family it's sometimes hard to get a word in edgewise when he's around.

Did knowing baby sign advance Will's speech or hinder it? Melody is suspicious about the timing of the stop in the signs and the boom in his spoken language, but she also thinks they probably didn't do enough signing for it to slow his speech. And there was one occasion in which the ASL was a godsend to both mother and son.

When Will was fourteen months old, he contracted a horrible bug, the Norwalk virus, and vomited and passed diarrhea for ten days, losing an alarming amount of weight. One day he lay in his bed whimpering weakly. At first Melody did not know whether his crying was from pain, fever or hunger—but when he made the sign for milk, she knew he wanted to nurse. She was grateful for that instant of communication.

If we don't know that ASL actually advanced Will's speech, it doesn't seem to have hurt at all. The lad definitely inherited his forebears' commodious vocabulary and knack for language. At this writing he is seven
years old and speaks with a degree of sophistication a year ahead of his peers. But Will's once fuzzy, lisping enunciation, quite normal for his preschool age group, for a long time made him often hard to understand. This was especially true for a deaf grandfather who lives in another city and sees him for only a few days several times a year, and thus could not get quickly used to lipreading his speech patterns. But he has never had trouble understanding mine, and as he has grown I have had far less trouble understanding his.

When he was a toddler my deafness annoyed him in an important way. When his back was to me, I could not tell if he was talking—to his friends, his parents, or his toys—and at these moments I tend to speak up, inadvertently interrupting whoever might be talking. Like everyone else, he hated to be interrupted, and he'd whirl upon me, hold up a hand, and bark like a pint-sized drill sergeant, “Stop talking!” As toddlers his father and his uncle never had this problem, for unlike Will, they had been an intimate part of my life since birth and understood from infancy the quirks of their father's deafness.

Incidentally, during my father's last months in a nursing home, those quirks prevented easy communication with him. His hearing and his cognitive abilities had deteriorated, and he could no longer understand my speech—and I had difficulty understanding his, for his lip movements were no longer clear and precise. This frustrated both of us. Otherwise we were content just to bask in each other's presence. I watched ball games on the television with him, and every time a Cub struck out with two out and the bases loaded, he and I would glance at each other knowingly and shrug, sharing a lifetime of heartbreak at Wrigley Field.

Whether we choose (or are born to) Deaf culture or the hearing one (or both), all of us who do not hear are enjoying a continuing phenomenon that had become visible only about a quarter of a century ago: thanks in part to the ADA and thanks in part to deaf people's own efforts, society in general has become more accepting of our abilities and our idiosyncrasies. And so have we ourselves. Though there are still noisy extremists on both sides of the Deaf/deaf divide, a greater number of us today seem to be willing to acknowledge the right of others to subscribe to differing philosophies.
I in particular am no longer so dubious, as I was when writing the first edition of this book, about the potential of native ASL speakers to break glass ceilings—too many Deaf doctors and lawyers and professors have come along in the last generation for any reasonable American to hold such an obsolete and condescending idea any longer.

And there are encouraging signs that more and more people in the signing and oral camps are recognizing that a united front of diversity accomplishes a lot more than Balkanized infighting. Increasingly groups of parents are adopting the idea that every case of deafness is different and that there is no one blanket solution for everybody. No matter one's choice of communications philosophy, they say, it should be honored.

Perhaps, however, learning English skills—written, not necessarily spoken, although it is difficult to separate the two in the dynamics of language acquisition—ought to be stressed for all deaf children. English has become the standard business language of the globe, and those who do not use it with ease tend to be at a disadvantage. In fact, an enormous economic gap has developed between those who can speak English and those who don't. This is the primary reason that people in such emerging nations as China have become obsessed with learning English as a second language.

Americans who can write clean and clear English have a definite leg up on those who don't, so far as employment is concerned. Now that the computer keyboard is quickly becoming the most common way for people to communicate in business, a deaf desk worker who writes English well is bound to have an advantage over the hearing one who doesn't. For this reason there's a lot to be said for the bilingual-bicultural approach to deafness—provided that emphasis be divided honestly and equally between ASL and English. Too often, I believe, American schools for the deaf have focused heavily on sign at the expense of English, partly because it has been the path of least resistance and partly because of the demands of cultural ideologues. There are signs of change, however.

Despite my success in the hearing world, I am still deaf, and occasionally “deaf moments” spice my quiet life. One occurred when I recently drove Debby's Civic through the neighborhood and down the nearby Central Street shopping area. Everything seemed normal, but why were people
stopping and staring as I drove by? Two small boys ran out of a store and pointed. Shock enveloped the faces of an elderly couple at a corner. As I rounded the next turn onto a side street, an old lady flashed me a snaggle-toothed gape.

This was unsettling. People seem concerned and even angry. What could I have done that provoked such intense scrutiny?

Then I noticed the red light winking on the dash. It was a warning light I'd never seen. Maybe the engine was seizing and its dying screams were troubling the passersby. I pulled over, stopped the car and fished the instruction manual from the glove box. Riffling through a couple of dozen pages yielded the information that the red light means the security system is resetting itself. Oh, good, I thought. Soon the reset will be completed and all will be well. I started up again and drove off.

More stares. More gapes. And the red light was still blinking. Slowly the truth began to dawn on me. Two blocks later I pulled over again and rechecked the manual. Go to Page 127, it said. Insert the key in the outside door lock and turn it twice to turn off the alarm system.

I did so, and the small crowd that had gathered relaxed and wryly shook its collective head. “No crime happening, folks,” I wanted to say. “Let's move along. Nothing to see.”