He is wise who can instruct us and assist us in the business of daily virtuous living.
Thomas Carlyle
Throughout the family turmoil during my early years, my mother continued working with me, teaching me all she believed I needed to know. By age four I was a facile lipreader and my vocabulary was expanding rapidly. I rarely had the “Help me find that thing” episodes I’d had when I was a little younger. I now had many words to express myself with, and I made use of them all. This was unusual for someone so young and profoundly deaf, but it was due to my family’s conscientious effort to help me become an independent person.
Many have said that when dealing with people with disabilities, the worst thing you can do for them is to overprotect. With children, especially those who are disadvantaged, challenging them will make them stronger. But challenging doesn’t mean leaving them to fend for themselves. It requires continual awareness and effort to give them the skills and direction they need to succeed.
When we stayed with her, Grandmother Coblentz was critical of the way my mother treated me. “You’re giving him too much attention,” she said. “He always wants your time. He knows all the ways of getting your attention. You’re spoiling him rotten.”
My mother knew Grandmother was right—I did know all the tricks—but she refused to change her ways. She understood that when Dunbar or David came home from school, she could ask “How was school?” as a greeting and keep ironing. But when Jonathan or I arrived, she put down her iron and greeted us face to face, sometimes from her knees at eye level. It was a way to acknowledge us rather than leave us feeling ignored.
It was in Pea Ridge that I started learning about the world outside my family in a real way—what many deaf children learn at a much later age. Too many families overlook the practical aspects of their deaf children’s education, even when they are careful to see that their academic life is in order. Perhaps subconsciously they believe their children will be dependent on others all their lives. But children who learn to conduct the daily transactions of life—cashing checks, making purchases, paying visits—are training for independence. My family understood this basic fact well.
The people in rural Pea Ridge were warm and friendly to me. The town was so small that it had only a few stores, a post office, a bank, and a gas station, all of which were surrounded by farmlands.
When I was four, I went to the local bank with my father. I saw him write a check and turn it in to a teller, who in turn gave him some money. The next time I was at the bank I found a little piece of paper and scribbled on it. Then I handed it to a lady at the teller’s window. She gave me a nickel. I was thrilled with the nickel and showed it to everyone. My parents didn’t want the tellers to get into the habit of passing out money every time I scribbled something, so they persuaded the bank people to stop. In a way, they had to guide my educators as well as my education.
Every time I walked by the local barbershop, I ran inside, knowing that the barber, a friend of my father’s, would give me a stick of gum. I looked forward to shaking hands with him before he gave me the gum. He recognized me as an individual. As a little deaf boy, I suppose I was somewhat of an oddity, maybe like a mascot to some people. This had its disadvantages as well as advantages, but mostly it worked in my favor, since people often paid attention to me when they may not have otherwise. This did not always please my parents, since they felt that if I were to make it on my own someday, favoritism now might slow me down.
A few times I insisted that my mother let me go by myself to the dime store to buy something. She wanted me to learn to be independent but was concerned about my crossing the street. From time to time she let me go. She would give me a dime and pretend to be busy with something. I would walk across the street, not knowing that my mother was watching me furtively and anxiously from the living room window. She was very conscious of allowing me this slightly dangerous but necessary exercise in independent living.
It was my father who impressed on me the importance of being careful while crossing a street. I was a little terrified when he explained how a car could swoop down and run me over. I looked many times in both directions before crossing the street. It’s hard to explain the disadvantage not hearing can create for such simple, everyday activities.
Despite my parents’ efforts, some of the adults in Pea Ridge favored me over the other children in town. Many children were invited to participate in the annual Easter egg hunt. We raced against each other to find as many eggs as possible in an open field. But the adults stationed in different places secretly tipped me off about where the eggs were hidden, so I found many of them quite easily. In the end, I won first prize.
Looking back, I’m grateful that I didn’t live in Pea Ridge all my life. If I had, I might have turned into a spoiled adult who puts no effort into cultivating friends and developing a vocation but rather expects the world to come to his or her doorstep as it had in childhood. I surely would have missed out on many challenges. As with a hearing child, though perhaps in a more exaggerated way, successfully training a deaf child to become an independent adult involves striking the perfect (and maybe impossible) balance between encouragement and indulgence.
For my fourth birthday, my mother decided to host a big party for me. She invited children from the neighborhood to our house. Many were also about four, though some were a little older. My mother wanted me to get to know the kids and hoped they would become my friends. While we played games, however, many of the kids disappeared. I couldn’t find them. Where were they? Why did they run off? I felt frustrated because they ran away from me. I didn’t understand why they were teasing me. But my mother knew. She was so upset that she decided never to invite those children again.
The favoritism I experienced from adults was not always shared by children, who often misunderstood my deafness to mean that I was strange. I realize now that many of those kids had heard from their parents that I was deaf and that I was “handicapped.” These parents failed to educate them, so I became an oddity to be shunned. There was one girl, however, one or two years older than I was, who came to our house many times. She was nice to me and we played together often. I give a lot of credit to her parents for teaching her to regard me as a human being, not as a freak. Her parents invited my family to their farm to ride horses, so I have many fine memories of that girl and those times. Almost out of instinct, some people seem to relate easily to a deaf person, or to anyone different, while others for unknown reasons simply cannot. One lesson of that birthday party was that my deafness was a fact of my life despite the free-flowing communication that characterized our family life.
My lack of hearing sometimes had strange and startling consequences. One such consequence could easily have become a tragedy. Our house in Pea Ridge was in the country next to my father’s church. One day, again when I was four, my father asked if I wanted to go with him to a neighbor’s house to get some fresh eggs. I agreed to go but had to wait for him to get ready. I sat down to wait for my father on the rear bumper of our family car, my legs dangling in the air, and quickly became engrossed in watching other children playing in the street.
All of a sudden, I felt the car vibrate. It started backing up and I, still seated there, held onto the bumper tightly with both hands. My father was backing the car into the street before taking off for the dirt road that led to the neighbor’s chicken farm. A hearing child would almost certainly have picked up auditory clues to my father’s departure—the slamming of the house door, exchanged goodbyes, even his footsteps. In this case, my full attention was on the other children.
Here my parents had overlooked a cardinal rule for communicating with people who are deaf: never assume that information has been conveyed “somehow.” Deaf people—and especially deaf children—need to pick up information directly, not incidentally from the environment. I was trying with all my might to hold on to the bumper, praying I wouldn’t fall off. It seemed as though we traveled a long way before the car finally stopped. The vibrating ended. I jumped off the bumper and ran up to my father, who was startled to see me.
I tried to express my anger to him in simple words and gestures, many of which included pointing at the rear bumper. My father was speechless for a few seconds before he rushed up and hugged me. He thought I had changed my mind and decided not to go with him after all. Later, with the excitement of gathering eggs, I forgot all about the scare I had experienced. My father, of course, did not.
Another day, my mother and I walked from our little house to a neighboring church where my father was asked to conduct a funeral. I understood that we were going to a service for someone who had died. On the way I asked my mother, “Why the man die?”
My mother explained that the man was so old that he just died. I was not satisfied with this explanation at all, so I asked her again. When she gave me the same answer, I got impatient and asked again. “How the man die? Sick, car hit, gun, knife, fire?”
“No,” she said, “he didn’t die like that. He was very old. He was eighty-seven years old.”
“How he die? He hurt and die?” I persisted.
“No, nothing happened. He died in his sleep because he was so old.”
“Someone kill him in bed?”
“Paul, nothing happened to him,” my mother said. “He lived many, many years and he became very old. His body was worn out and fell apart. He just went to sleep and died because he was very old.”
I stopped pestering my mother for an explanation, but I was a little stunned to know that people did die in their sleep and that they dropped dead for no reason other than being old. It was an abstract concept I had trouble digesting. This new discovery was a little scary.
I was discovering much more about the world around me. Because my mother played many cognitive, linguistic, and thought-provoking games with me, I developed cognitive structures and processes at an early age. The more I learned, the more active and restless I was in response to life in general. I learned to see relationships in the environment clearly and to have them confirmed through communication with my family. Through travels and activities my family conducted outside of the home, I acquired many concepts of time and place—ideas that are too often poorly conveyed to deaf children.
Even though my family had only a modest standard of living, we managed to take memorable trips and vacations. It was part of an upbringing intentionally designed to widen vistas for all four boys, both hearing and deaf. Wherever possible, my family thought of ways to get ideas, concepts, and things through to me. Some of these techniques took imagination. To refer to days in the future, for instance, my mother used the term “sleeps”—two days from now would be two sleeps from now. She knew that the idea would have to be linked to something familiar to me in my soundless world. With a deaf child, you have to work hard to find concrete examples of abstractions, such as time or a distant place. It’s easy to gloss over something by using a few words to describe it, but my family learned to communicate in unique and memorable ways.
When we talked about a place that was far from home, my brothers acted out driving a long way and for many days. Thanks to their gestures, I understood at an early age whether a place was far or close, and so gained a more accurate view of the world. A bit of pantomime helped facilitate learning many concepts. How, for example, do you get across the notion of “happy” to a deaf child? You act out experiences—a birthday party, a surprise gift, eating ice cream. Whenever you see a situation where he or she smiles, you use the word. That is much more detailed and effective than just saying, “To be happy is like feeling good.”
With a deaf child, the spoken word and concept grow together eventually, but it takes time. A hearing child has another way of reaching the same definition. He or she simply parrots a word overheard from adults and throws it out there, using it out loud to test it in a multitude of situations until the word and its subtle shades of meaning and association are fully understood.
I am especially indebted to my family for the infinite number of word games they played with me as a natural part of daily life. At an early age, I was able to understand abstract basic relationships apart from the physical environment and to gain information simply because they talked and pantomimed to me. They knew how to use my language. If one word didn’t work, they’d try another. Then they’d slip in a new one. By the time I was five, I had developed many strategies for understanding and had progressed in my general cognitive development. Although I didn’t have perfect speech, I was able to communicate almost anything I wanted to.
My early language evolved from a well-integrated, nonverbal communication system at home. My brothers always made conversations interesting. They were never shy about going to any lengths to help me understand. If we went to the zoo and saw an elephant, for example, they’d tell me all about elephants. Then, to spice things up, David would say that some could flap their ears and fly, and Dunbar would add that many are pink, and then they’d pick me up and make me “fly.” Jonathan, meanwhile, would tell me the elephant was so strong that he could knock down everything around him. He would imitate the elephant’s walk and swing his “trunk.”
My parents and brothers were responsive to my existence and needs in everyday life. They talked with me, acted upon their talk, and expected feedback from me. They responded to me as a partner in meaningful social communication. They used eye contact to reinforce our communication. They didn’t talk to me only about what they wanted me to know. They also responded to what I had to say. Through communication, I became socialized—a part of the social order—and learned that I could affect my environment through communication.