The Art of Being Deaf: A Memoir

7. Music Lessons

75 7 Music Lessons Damian e-mailed me regularly between our excursions to the movies, dinners, and coffee outings. He would also telephone me from his work for a quick chat or send me text messages on my mobile phone. I looked forward to logging into my in-box and seeing his name in bold type, right there in the midst of all my work e-mails. Damian. I always clicked onto his name first, ahead of the other e-mails, to read his latest bit of news. When my mobile phone buzzed with the chirrup of an incoming text message, I would rummage urgently through my bag or around the top of my desk to find it, hoping that the chirrup signaled yet another message from him.In this way,even though we did not see each other all that often, I felt a bond of intimacy building between us. I liked to think about him; and I liked to think that each telephone call,e-mail,and text message from him meant that he was thinking of me too. Late one evening, he sent me an e-mail about the French film festival.Would I like to go? Yes! I was free most nights! I waited to hear back from him. Growing up deaf in a hearing family draws on the same skills needed for walking across one of those wobbling rope-and-plank bridges cast up high across rain forest creeks: both demand agility in moving back and forth across borders, balance in mind as well as body, and confidence 76 Part Two tempered by caution.The difference between the two tasks is that the first one continues lifelong, and the second is a one-off journey completed in a matter of minutes, tension-filled though they might be. As a child, I sat through mealtimes at the dinner table—that place and time in the early evening when we gathered as a family—in a daze of incomprehension. I had the choice of eating what was on the dinner plate before me while forgoing watching what was being said around the table,or I could watch the words being mouthed by my parents, sister, and brother, and let the sausages and vegetables on my plate cool. I understood what was being said only if I made the concentrated effort to do so—forking in a mouthful of mashed potato in between glances at the words sailing across the table—or if I insisted on their repeating what they had just said in the moments that I had my eyes down to the plate.I would pull at my mother’s arm and assert myself: “What are you saying?”When a friend asked me to give an example of the sorts of conversations I might have missed out on during those childhood mealtimes, I scoffed at him. “If I knew the answer to that question, I wouldn’t have missed out, would I?” But in hindsight, I understand now why I do not share my family’s casual knowledge about this relative and that neighbor: the incidents,tragedies , and joys that peppered their lives must have been the grist for those dinnertime conversations. I never did catch up; I still have many gaps in my stocktaking of who did what with whom and when. This makes me feel foolish. Every cry of “You must remember that/her/him!” feels like an accusation, as if I have been remiss in some way. I made my way through a world, at home and outside, in which people’s mouths opened and closed in a rhythm that did not always make sense to me.When they did not face me and speak directly to me, I was tense with wondering: what had they said? could I ask? or was I asking too much, too often? I was never fully in the know and lived with the chronic discomfort of cluelessness: what’s going on? It was as if the actions around me were taking place on a film that had torn away from its spool on the projector, and was now flapping around and around, casting confusing shadows and images against the wall. At home, I dealt with this by submerging myself in my own imaginative world and letting the voices of my family slurry above me and around Music Lessons 77 me. It was simply a sludge...