Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love by Myron Uhlberg Page B
Authors: Myron Uhlberg
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facial expressions, and body movements. Simply put, it is for me the most beautiful, immediate, and expressive of languages, because it incorporates the entire human body. In the case of sign, a picture truly is worth a thousand words. The signs of my father and mother went from their hands and faces and bodies directly into my consciousness. Thus as a child I never perceived language as a series of discrete units that added up to thoughts. Instead, I absorbed meaning whole, all at once, through my eyes.
Printed words were another matter entirely, and as I came to learn more and more of them, I discovered their unique charms. When reading a book, I could linger over every word, and sound it out in my mind for the sheer pleasure it gave me. Each word was like a musical note and could be enjoyed both for its own sake and for the sound it made as it combined with an adjoining word. Best of all was the melody I heard in a perfect sentence. This was a language of the mind; sign was a language of the heart. Sign was a beautiful painting, absorbed whole, evoking emotion along with meaning. Written language—my second language—was a language that required the brain for translation.
Reading was to become the passion of my life, our local branch of the Brooklyn Library my childhood refuge. Armed with a library card, I could escape to this quiet sanctuary anytime I became overwhelmed by the demands that my father placed on me. Here in this musty, sweet-smelling place, filled with the faint odor of soy sauce, I could open a book and be magically transported to the ends of the earth.
And so I came to spend ever-increasing amounts of time in that library, surrounded by all the words I could ever hope to learn, listening to the music of those words in my mind, all the while enveloped in the comforting scent of Chinese food.
To this day I often find myself taking an exploratory sniff at a library book, as though in expectation that a faint odor of chow mein will rise off the pages.
9
Falling in Love
I fell in love for the first time in the second grade. Actually, I didn’t so much fall in love as choose, pragmatically, to be in love. (This would not be the case in later life, as I have been married three times in all—certainly I am more optimistic than pragmatic.)
On the first day of school I spotted a new girl in our class. Our desks were arranged alphabetically, and as I was a U, I sat in the rear of the room, while she, a W, sat at a desk to my right, immediately under a window. My earliest memory of her is the glowing halo that ringed her golden curls as a beam of sunlight fell on her head. She looked like an angel. Her small, straight nose was flecked with freckles, and completing the picture, her generous, ever-smiling mouth was filled with tiny, unbelievably white teeth.
Not until she stood up at her desk for the first time, having been called on by the teacher to read a poem, did I realize that she was much taller than me. And in all the years we traveled from grade to grade, ever upward, right into and through high school, I never caught up. She turned out to be the tallest child in our class and in every class she was ever in. Her name was Eve.
The second thing I noticed about Eve that day was her left hand. Actually, what I noted was the absence of her left hand, as she kept it in her lap the entire hour. And when she stood to read, she pushed it deep into the pocket of her tartan dress. This seemed odd to me, and awkward, as it meant that she had to hold the heavy book of poems she was reading from with only one hand.
A week of classes passed before the mystery was solved. One morning she sneezed. She was dipping her pen in the inkwell of her desk with her right hand when the sneeze overcame her, so reflexively she brought her left hand to her mouth. It was then that I saw that her left pinky curled over the adjacent finger. The pinky looked like the shepherd’s crook in a picture book I had
Printed words were another matter entirely, and as I came to learn more and more of them, I discovered their unique charms. When reading a book, I could linger over every word, and sound it out in my mind for the sheer pleasure it gave me. Each word was like a musical note and could be enjoyed both for its own sake and for the sound it made as it combined with an adjoining word. Best of all was the melody I heard in a perfect sentence. This was a language of the mind; sign was a language of the heart. Sign was a beautiful painting, absorbed whole, evoking emotion along with meaning. Written language—my second language—was a language that required the brain for translation.
Reading was to become the passion of my life, our local branch of the Brooklyn Library my childhood refuge. Armed with a library card, I could escape to this quiet sanctuary anytime I became overwhelmed by the demands that my father placed on me. Here in this musty, sweet-smelling place, filled with the faint odor of soy sauce, I could open a book and be magically transported to the ends of the earth.
And so I came to spend ever-increasing amounts of time in that library, surrounded by all the words I could ever hope to learn, listening to the music of those words in my mind, all the while enveloped in the comforting scent of Chinese food.
To this day I often find myself taking an exploratory sniff at a library book, as though in expectation that a faint odor of chow mein will rise off the pages.
9
Falling in Love
I fell in love for the first time in the second grade. Actually, I didn’t so much fall in love as choose, pragmatically, to be in love. (This would not be the case in later life, as I have been married three times in all—certainly I am more optimistic than pragmatic.)
On the first day of school I spotted a new girl in our class. Our desks were arranged alphabetically, and as I was a U, I sat in the rear of the room, while she, a W, sat at a desk to my right, immediately under a window. My earliest memory of her is the glowing halo that ringed her golden curls as a beam of sunlight fell on her head. She looked like an angel. Her small, straight nose was flecked with freckles, and completing the picture, her generous, ever-smiling mouth was filled with tiny, unbelievably white teeth.
Not until she stood up at her desk for the first time, having been called on by the teacher to read a poem, did I realize that she was much taller than me. And in all the years we traveled from grade to grade, ever upward, right into and through high school, I never caught up. She turned out to be the tallest child in our class and in every class she was ever in. Her name was Eve.
The second thing I noticed about Eve that day was her left hand. Actually, what I noted was the absence of her left hand, as she kept it in her lap the entire hour. And when she stood to read, she pushed it deep into the pocket of her tartan dress. This seemed odd to me, and awkward, as it meant that she had to hold the heavy book of poems she was reading from with only one hand.
A week of classes passed before the mystery was solved. One morning she sneezed. She was dipping her pen in the inkwell of her desk with her right hand when the sneeze overcame her, so reflexively she brought her left hand to her mouth. It was then that I saw that her left pinky curled over the adjacent finger. The pinky looked like the shepherd’s crook in a picture book I had
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