Jimmy are you out there? My dear friend. I know what side you are on without having seen you for almost twenty years Please email me when you read this. The situation at Gallaudet is intolerable as it stands and must be changed to facilitate ASL for all.
I finally took an ASL course at Drury University taught by an interpreter. A deaf teacher did a couple of classes and she was marvelous, so these courses need to be taught to the hearing by deaf teachers. The deaf know what it is like to be unable to communicate, so they are more sensitive, more aware of how to reach you.
Make the jump.
My friend Jimmy and I spent a few years eating breakfast together at the Deli on South Street in Philadelphia. It began because I get up late and by the time I would get there on weekends the tables would be full. Jimmy would be eating alone and at first he invited me to eat with him. Then it became a ritual. I resisted learning signing even when he tried to teach me. I wrote notes to him and he wrote them back. We had similar tastes in literature and politics and spent a couple of hours Saturday and Sunday mornings
talking writing about these things.
I had first seen him at TLA, the avant garde movie theatre on the old South Street strip. He picked up the trash after the films and whether he got free admission for doing so I never found out. But I thought he was just another of the aging hippies around the place and never talked with him. Then at some point I found out he was deaf, but I don't remember exactly when.
Well we established a friendship, he got sad one weekend and told me he had to move out of the coop house he was living in as the house had been sold. I had an empty apartment in one of my buildings, The Banca d'Italia on 7th Street and he moved in there where I had my own apartment. He took care of my cat when I went to Paris for one winter. He got a TTTY phone and began to talk with a lot of people in the deaf community. Then he told me one day he was going to go to Gallaudet and I was thrilled for him. About that time I lost all my real estate and I moved and didn't see him after that. But I know he is involved in this and I pray for his safety at whatever level he is acting on.
This week I found a four month old baby living in a house where I had gone to rescue some puppies for them. The mother is a local in my neon red town and she told me her baby is deaf. They picked it up at birth when he failed a hearing test. This baby is unusually friendly, bright, open, responsive to your face, not a typical baby here in my neon red town. They are usually sullen as the parenting skills are mostly punitive. When they are not misbehaving they are mostly ignored. So I told this mother I thought it was a wonderful opportunity for her and her husband to learn signing, for her baby to begin to talk before he is six months old, for her toddler to learn and get an intelligence jump on other kids her own age. These parents were not sure what to make of me. I was taking a darling Pappion mix six months old dog and two eight week hound puppies, all of whcih were flea infested which all the people in the house considered normal. So I am being diplomatic with my horror of fleas. I told her (I have a used book store) that I would order some baby sign language books for her in return for the puppies I was rescuing and getting adopted.
I am so excited that I might get a chance to work with this baby. I was teaching him signs the other night and he was smiling and happy and watching, watching, watching so attentively.
Since reading Oliver Sachs and his account of all the signing babies living on Martha's Vineyard (the locals have a deaf gene so they all sign) and the babies all talk at six months. It is becoming a big thing with liberal, educated hearing families to teach their babies signing to give them a head start. Remember Robert de Niro in Meet the Fockers the second film and that darling baby signing in it. Promoting it so to speak.
Signing and then reading someone's signs require mirror imaging. To read someone signing the signs are reversed from how you learn them watching your own hands and matching the signs in a book. A teacher will show you both ways so you can get accustomed to seeing and doing. And you need to practice in front of a mirror.
But the really great part of it is that it is the cure for DYLEXIA! Since you must consciously reverse and become proficient in signing and reading signs, both hemispheres are involved. Stop fighting dyslexia. It is an opportunity (even tho Dumya has it) for you, so start signing now with your babies and children. Bring ASL into the mainstream. It is a beautiful fluid, imaginative, discovery oriented language. Don't miss out on it. When I was in China the only foreigners able to communicate with Chinese strangers were the deaf. It is the universal language the world has been waiting for. The Native Americans used it among themselves as they spoke different languages but all (many?) signed.
This is the very time to put this out there.