International Week of the Deaf

Today starts International Week of the Deaf.  Apparently Deaf History Month started in the middle of March.  Ah, well, better late than never.  Deaf History Month was started by the National Association of the Deaf in 1997 to celebrate the accomplishments of Deaf individuals.

Most of us probably know that Ludwig von Beethoven, the magnificent composer, was deaf.  I am sure we all are aware of Helen Keller!  Did you know about these individuals are or were deaf?

Nanette Fabray, an actress from when I was a child and teen in the 1960s-70s.  She was the one who made me realize how easily misunderstood lipreading can be.  She appeared on an afternoon talk show and, to demonstrate, she said a short sentence without using her voice.  I thought she said “I love you” and so did the audience.  Wrong!  She was saying “I’ll have a few.”

Is it widely known that Thomas Edison was deaf?  So was Juliette Low, founder of the Girl Scouts.  Kitty O’Neill, speed racer from the 1970s: deaf.  

When I was a secretary at Gallaudet University in 1978, one of our lawyers was Bob Mather, a Deaf man.  There are Deaf doctors, Deaf CEOs, Deaf Almost Any Occupation You Can Think Of.  Deaf people can do anything, especially with the technology that allows them to communicate with others without needing a phone.  In movies or on TV?  Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur, Linda Bove (Sesame Street), Lou Ferrigno (The Incredible Hulk).  There are hundreds of Deaf people who have made contributions in all fields of endeavor.

Sports fans, do you know where baseball signals and football huddles originated?  With Deaf athletes!  The backstory about the huddle is that when Deaf teams played each other, opposing teams could see what play was being planned from across the field.  And so, one player grouped his teammates into the huddle so he could freely sign the play without the other team seeing what it was.  Similarly, that’s how baseball signals were developed.

One of the silly questions people have asked me about my parents:  how can they dance if they don’t hear music?  Well, the answer is that there is such a thing as “residual hearing” which means that even a profoundly deaf person can hear something.  Even if not for that, Deaf people can feel the vibrations from music.  My parents were beautiful dancers, lovely to watch them float across the floor.  In 2016, Nyle DiMarco won in the TV competition, Dancing With The Stars.  Yes, he is deaf.

When I was a KODA (kid of Deaf adults) I was asked a lot of questions about my parents.  Other kids would ask me out of curiosity and I could understand when the question was dumb.  They just needed to be educated.  I was totally taken aback when adults asked many of the same questions.

Q.  How can your parents drive a car if they can’t hear horns and ambulances?

A.  They had three mirrors on the car: both sides and in the middle.  Deaf drivers tend to be much more alert because they are continually scanning all the mirrors for something unexpected.

Q.  So why is it against the law for me to wear headphones while I drive?

A.  Because you aren’t as attentive to your surroundings, sorry, and do you have 3 mirrors?

 

Q.  How can your parents get up in the morning if they can’t hear the clock?

Q.  How could your parents hear you crying when you were a baby?

Q.  How can they hear the doorbell?  Or the phone?

A.  Flashing lights that go off when the alarm goes off/baby cries/doorbell or phone rings

 

Q.  Do your parents know how to read?

A.  Come on.  Really?

 

Q.  How can they buy a car/a house?

A.  Same way hearing people can.  By reading and signing contracts.

 

Q.  Do your parents speak English?

A.  Not well.  They were fluent in American Sign Language, which is NOT English.  It has its own grammatical rules, syntax, and idioms.

Q.  Oh, I thought sign language was just abbreviated English.

A.  Nope.  It’s taught as a foreign language in a lot of high schools and colleges now.  Many states recognize American Sign Language as a foreign language.   

Q.  How could your parents have kids?

A.  (trying not to laugh) Same way any person can have kids.

Yes, someone really did ask me that.

 

 

 

Restoring Hearing Loss?

There was some positive news from my Good News Network newsletter. 

<a href=”https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/mit-reverses-hearing-loss-stimulating-hair-growth-in-the-inner-ear/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_medium=weekly_mailout&utm_source=05-04-2022>MIT Researchers Reverse Hearing Loss By Regenerating Inner Ear Hair Growth</a>  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has a spin-off called Frequency Therapeutics.  They had been researching how to restore hearing loss and have come up with a promising injection to stimulate hair growth in the inner ear.

Our ears have three parts: outer, where the canal leads to the middle, which has the tiny bones that conduct sound.  The inner ear has the cochlea, where we all have little hairs that vibrate and send sound through its nerve to the brain.  And then we hear.

We can begin to lose our hearing for different reasons.  If there’s a dysfunction in the middle ear, it causes a conductive loss.  The little bones aren’t communicating with the cochlea.  In addition, although we’re born with thousands of cochlear hair, they begin to die off and aren’t replaced.  When too many of the hairs die, a person becomes deaf.  The hairs can die simply as we age or they die from noise exposure, antibiotics or chemotherapies.

Before we’re born, we have progenitor cells that will eventually become specific hairs, like for the cochlea.  What the researchers discovered was that using a regenerative therapy to stimulate the progenitor cells helped improved a hearing-impaired individual’s ability to understand and participate in his or her surroundings.  They use molecules in an injection into the inner ear to do this and the hope is that restoring hearing will be like lasik surgery that restores vision.

My husband, Ted, was a sheet metal worker for most of his working career.  His work environment was very noisy and, over the years, he lost a lot of his hearing.  The last time he had an audiogram, the numbers showed profound deafness.  He is fortunate in that he can use his residual hearing and lipreading to help him socialize.

I know how isolating hearing loss can be.  My parents were Deaf.  They didn’t mingle with hearing people; until there was captioning, they couldn’t understand everything they saw on TV.  They were complete lost in family gatherings where many members would be speaking almost simultaneously.  However, they were very active in the Deaf community and that was where they would socialize. 

It's not so for hearing people who lose their hearing later in life.  Some do blend into the Deaf community, learning to sign and reconnect with people.  Others, who are older, have a tough time learning sign language.  My husband is one of those people.  People with hearing loss who aren’t able to lipread well or use residual hearing find themselves lonely and isolated.

I am hopeful for this therapy.  I think Ted would benefit from it.  I also think he might benefit from a cochlear implant because he’s already familiar with speech and would adapt well.  Understandably, though, he has no interest in having a hole drilled in his skull, destroying whatever residual hearing he has to implant a device that would act like the cochlea.

From what I read, I don’t know that the therapy would benefit people like my parents, who were born deaf and grew into adulthood.  Maybe it could work for deaf babies?  I wonder.

Proofing this after the fact, I realize I need to practice my html LOL

Plattdeutsche Park

 

The news is an awful bummer but I began subscribing to another positive news newsletter.  I also focus more on the “fairer” of the newsletters, like the 1440 and the Skimm.  I read Press Run, in which the author takes on the negativity of the mainstream press toward President Biden.  I also read Reuters a lot for their impartiality.

As for why the news is generally a bummer:

1.      Ukraine.  The coverage of the carnage left behind by the retreating Russian army is truly horrifying.  President Zelensky calls it genocide and it sure seems to be, but the Western countries seem hesitant to go that far.  They do call Putin a war criminal, however.  The Russians, of course, is claiming the footage of the bodies tied with their hands behind them and left strewn on the streets are a “hoax.”  Yeah.  My lyin eyes are deceiving me.  Oh, it is so sickening.

2.     The abuse and mistreatment of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson by the GQP.  The Rethuglicans on the Judiciary Committee practically pranced about, shouting “We are racists!”  There’s no shame anymore.  Every single one of those GQP corrupted Senators voted against the most qualified person ever to be nominated to the Supreme Court.  She far outshines trump nominees and yet she was mocked and interrupted by the thugs during the hearings.  And every single one toe stepped to the “no female blacks on the Supreme Court.”  And while the hearings were going on, the Chair, Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat, didn’t object once to Jackson’s mistreatment.  The only one to defend her was Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey.

3.     The GQP continues to flagrantly break the law and get away with it.  Those of us who believe in law and order are thoroughly depressed by the lack of consequences for the higher up law breakers.

 

In more positive news today, I saw on the Long Island paper, Nassau Daily Voice, that the Plattedeutsche Park restaurant was voted the best German restaurant on Long Island.  I so remember the Plattedeutsche well and very fondly. 

 

I went there when I was first dating Rich.  His parents, grandparents and all his relatives were of German heritage so the Plattedeutsche was like a second home to them.  Every year, the Park had Volks’ Fests and Oompah Fests.  They were so much fun!  There were games for the children to play; delicious bratwursts, knockwursts, hot dogs and potato pancakes to stuff a hungry self on; a loud, lively Oompah band and lots of dancing, drinking and singing.  Every once in a while, folks would form a parade and march around the park.  The fests were always packed and always filled with “gemütlichkeit”.

 

I’d taken German in junior high and high school but had forgotten most of it by the time I began dating Rich.  I didn’t know what “gemütlichkeit” was and asked his grandmother.  She answered that it wasn’t a real word but a combination of ideas conveying that everyone was experiencing good feelings together.  Happy camaraderie.  That certainly defined the spirit at the fests.

 

On special occasions, we’d always eat at the Plattedeutsche.  This is where I learned to truly appreciate German food.  I’d grown up with American/Irish meals and so I really enjoyed dishes like rouladen, sauerbraten, schnitzel, apfelkuchen, and many others.   Family birthday parties and gatherings were always held in a private dining room at the Plattedeutsche.  We stuffed ourselves.

Throughout our marriage, Rich and I went to the Plattdeutsche every year we lived in New York.  When we moved to Maryland, we’d travel to Franklin Square to meet up with family to celebrate Oma’s birthday.  Oma is German for grandma and that is what Rich’s grandmother was called.  After Rich passed away in 2001, I went with our children to the Folks’ Fest.  We couldn’t stay as long as we used to; it was too painful. 

 

Now, twenty years later, all I remember is the good times and the great food!  

 

Hatred

Lots of sad stuff about today.  First, what’s going on in the Ukraine:  with the Russian pullback to regroup, people re-entering one of the occupied cities have found hundreds of murdered citizens, many with their hands tied behind their backs.  I saw some pictures and they were horrifying.  The news broke yesterday and I’m really glad I wasn’t paying attention.  People can be so evil to each other.  It’s a wonder God isn’t sick of us all.  Today, President Biden called the slaughter a “war crime” and wants Putin to stand trial.

It's also the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination.  He was shot and killed around 6 in the evening, and it was on the TV news when I came down the following morning for breakfast.  I was 13 and in 7^th grade, that horrible year from hell when I was bullied and tormented.  My Deaf parents were in the dining room, chatting over breakfast.  I broke the news to them and their response was “Oh no, now there’s going to be trouble.” 

I didn’t understand.  I was beginning to be aware of what was happening because we had Current Events once a week.  I was assigned world news and so I was more informed about what was happening in Viet Nam and other places.  I’d heard of Martin Luther King, but I thought he was doing a good thing.  Why would anyone shoot him?

My parents were right about trouble.  There were some fights breaking out at my junior high but, more than that, there were angry people rioting in the streets.  We had to have a curfew and only “essential” personnel could be out after curfew.  That meant my dad, who worked the night shift, could go to the Baltimore Sun where he was a printer. 

Watching the news became a terrifying experience.  There were images of cities on fire everywhere in the country, with people raging in the streets and vandalizing stores and cars.  I was especially frightened by the scenes in our city, Baltimore, as familiar places were set on fire or destroyed by rioters.  There was a report that snipers were firing at people driving in cars after curfew.  I couldn’t sleep until my dad got home.  I was afraid he would be killed by an unheard sniper’s bullet.

I was also learning much about systemic racism.  Our history hadn’t impacted me much up to this point; slavery wasn’t taught in school.  Neither was Jim Crow laws or segregation.  Now I was becoming aware of hatred I didn’t understand.  For some reason, white people seemed to hate black people for the color of their skin.  Black people only wanted to be treated as well as white people and that was fair, I believed. 

Even as things began to get back to “normal”, I was beginning to read stories about James Earl Ray, George Wallace, Bull Connor and the Ku Klux Klan.  It was sickening to think that some of the awful things I’d read in Gone With The Wind were still going on.  I shared my feelings with my parents but found to my dismay that they were prejudiced against black people too.  My mom did take me aside and advise me to “make friends” with black classmates so that if there was more “trouble”, I would be safe.  I didn’t bother to tell her I was already friends with black classmates but after Dr. King was assassinated, they seemed wary around me.

At about that time, I read To Kill A Mockingbird for the first time.  There was no way I could make myself think as my parents did and that was the beginning of continuing arguments with them.  I wanted to know why they, who suffered discrimination and prejudice because of their deafness, could hate another group of people suffering because of their skin color.  They always had prejudicial, ignorant reasons.  At 13, I was positive that adults were flawed.

I can’t hate people because skin color, religion, or sexual orientation are different from mine.  I’m not religious; I don’t go to church.  However, I do believe in Jesus and his teachings.  The one lesson that sticks is love God and love your neighbor as you love yourself.  There’s no language that says “only if they are white and Protestant”. 

We sure do need to have the true history of our country taught in schools even if it makes white people squirm.  We should squirm.  People the world over do such evil to other people.  It’s heart-breaking.