What's That Pig Outdoors?: A Memoir of Deafness

Epilogue

Epilogue During the two decades since this book was published in 1990, my life has caromed down avenues I never anticipated. Of course, time has taken its normal toll. As I approach my seventies, my eyesight isn’t what it once was. My lipreading skills have eroded slightly. Conversations are a little more difficult, especially with strangers. Part of the problem is that American society has become much more diverse than it was when I was growing up. No longer is a white Midwestern accent the norm in my territory, for there has been a huge influx of people who speak English as a second language or with a distinctive national accent. This makes lipreading far trickier. Partly because of hereditary osteoarthritis that pinched my spinal cord, my sense of imbalance grew more acute; sometimes, when turning a corner or getting up from a chair, I will lurch like a drunken sailor, leading those around me to conclude that I had two or three too many. Recent spinal surgery banished most of the pain, but I must still rely on my eyes to keep a level horizon. No longer do I zip through airport security checks, and that’s not entirely the fault of 9/11. My stainless steel artificial knee, also the result of arthritis, triggers paroxysms in magnetic detectors, every time bringing on a full pat-down search, legs spread and arms wide. A heart attack and triple bypass surgery have further complicated matters. All these things, however, are part of the normal course of life. Both my beloved parents are gone, having lived into their nineties still fiercely proud of the son they had set on a road not often taken. They had watched eagerly as What’s That Pig Outdoors? opened unexpected doors for me, one of them being a whole new career. So, happily, did my sons, who are now grown and fathers themselves. Pig was praised beyond my most extravagant dreams, primarily because it was on a subject ordinary readers found fresh and new. NewsKisor_Pig text.indd 185 5/4/10 1:43:19 PM papers and magazines small and large liked it. A few grouches in the culturally Deaf world took exception, contending that the book was irrelevant because I refused to accept my deafness and learn American Sign Language—but in my experience most Deaf and hearing-impaired people (more about this seemingly redundant terminology later) simply were delighted that one of us had written a popular book that attempted to explain one person’s life of deafness. Since then there have been other similar memoirs—from both the oral and the signing camps—but mine was first to stake out the territory. The reviews inflated my sometimes shaky ego, especially during the publicity tour when the media, including radio and television, and groups and institutions of all kinds asked me to speak to them about the issues Pig had raised. This was electrifying. Suddenly people everywhere didn’t care how I spoke. They wanted to hear what I had to say. This was a happy new development for me, and I embraced it wholeheartedly. No longer was I the terrified wallflower capable of faking fatal illness in order to avoid having to stand and deliver. Before long I had turned into a cool and confident speaker before a crowd. The quality of my speech, however, has remained the same: lucid and understandable in calm and quiet situations, distorted and sometimes unintelligible in others. (It has been more than a decade since I had speech therapy at Northwestern. The student therapists helped me as much as they could, but after a few years the returns stopped increasing.) And I was not entirely unassisted. Debby and occasionally Colin or Conan went along on many of my talks, serving as interpreters (often both ways) when interviewers and audiences had difficulty understanding my speech. Most of all, I reveled in “communication access real-time translation,” or CART for short, in which a professional court reporter, usually with a printed copy of my talk, would keyboard it into a laptop that projected the words on a large screen before the audience at the very instant I spoke them. Of course I was not entirely successful. A few commercial radio and television producers discarded the results of taped interviews because they feared my imperfect speech would annoy their listeners and anger their advertisers. Many more interviewers, however, used the simple and familiar device of repeating key sentences...