When my father came home there was laughter, rollicking rolling laughter, He was strong and handsome, his thick black, wavy hair fell into his black, laughing eyes. When he kissed me, I pushed his bristled moustache from my tender skin. His hands, thick and squared off at the tips, smelt of the sweet horsehair at the upholstery factory, His finger nails carried the cotton lints he used to stuff satin sofas.
He signed his name, Benjamin, but no one called him that, I called him Daddy Ben, People who could hear called him Benny.
My father, like my mother, was deaf, So I grew up living in two world, our private world and the hearing' world outside. I was on intimate terms with silence and the language of silence.
My mother was born deaf, and so I thought, was my father. Then one day he mentioned that he had not always been deaf. "You weren't? How did you become deal? My hands asked, "I was sick, a long time, Ask Grandma" he replied.
When Grandma Lizzie came to our apartment, I rushed to her demanding an answer. She said, "Spinal meningitis" and told how my father had been stricken with the disease when he was two, As he approach school age, his hearing diminished until there was none, not even the memory of sound.
He was a bright child, but his intelligence was locked away. Without normal speech at the age when children begin to play with syllables and sounds, my father was separated from his own wit. His other senses did become more acute with time. But he never recovered from early verbal neglect, he could not read a book page by page. The flowing language, line after line, chapter after chapter, was too difficult to sustain. Even so Daddy Ben was undefeated. He transformed pain into humour. "It is better to laugh at life," he'd say. "It makes easier a hard time". summary writing
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