My Sense of Silence by Lennard J. Davis

Author:Lennard J. Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

6

Schooling

“The record of a boy's education interests few save his parents.”

—Rudyard Kipling, Kim

School was where I was most at home. Paradoxically, my home was like a waiting room, where I sat bored and slightly anxious over what was to come. My parents taught me survival skills. My father taught me to defy expectations by persevering. Race-walking was, for him, a way of excelling in a world that, at that time, did not allow deaf people to excel. My mother, on the other hand, taught me to lie low. She was an expert at simple existence: if she had to make a pot roast, she would make a pot roast. She existed purely in her moment.

But my parents could not teach me about the world, about nature, about ideas. By the time I was born, they were old and tired, possessing just enough energy to perform the necessary functions of life. When my father was not racing or working, he spent most of his time slumped over the Daily News, asleep on the couch, or watching baseball. When I was older, I took a photo of him on the couch, newspaper on his lap, head thrown back, mouth open in a snore. I looked up an apt phrase in Roget's Thesaurus and inscribed the picture: “‘Thou knowest him well, the god of Sleep’…Chaucer.”

My mother was a dervish of cooking, cleaning, or sewing. She taught me to thread a sewing machine, and I could darn my socks and sew on buttons. My father was not particularly handy; I think he taught me how to change a light bulb and repair a broken lamp. (Or maybe I taught him.) Luckily, we lived in an apartment building, so the superintendent would come up and repair the dripping faucets, accepting the shot of whiskey my parents offered as a tip.

My brother had learned many things at school, and if he was home and interested, he would teach me. But most of the time he was either out on dates or hunched over a card table in the living room doing his homework, and I had to be quiet so as not to disturb him. If I talked to him at dinner when the radio was on, he would say, “I'm not paying to hear you.”

By contrast, school was a magical place of knowledge and discovery. It was a place where adults were interested in me and where my talents were recognized. There was the pleasure of discovery at school. I was initially amazed by the many occasions for celebration because, in my family, changes and occasions were met with a matter-of-fact acceptance. At school we celebrated Arbor Day just to say hello to the trees in spring. We made cut-out turkeys for Thanksgiving. These ordinary acknowledgments of the seasons seemed to me extraordinary festivals.

Schooling began ominously, though. When I was four years old, my mother took me to a nursery school. On the street in front of the school, two dogs were joined, looking quite blasé after mating, and an angry man was yelling at them and pouring hot water on their backs.

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