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franksolich
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« on: August 03, 2009, 04:49:50 pm » |
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The summer I was a sophomore, about to become a junior, in college, one day I was sitting by myself in the "gun room" of a wholesale hardware dealership, looking out the window at the moving-van company across the street.
I was nineteen years old, and thinking about the future.
I liked the wholesale hardware business, and I liked what I was doing, but I quite reasonably assumed that by the time I would be in my mid-20s, tracking firearms was not going to interest me as much as it presently did.
Until then, I had been pretty laid-back and nonchalant about the future, taking whatever came my way, but the recent graduations and departures of the two oldest roommates, forced me to give the future more thought than I had.
I was "on track," academically, but what else did I have to do, to get ahead in the world?
Being deaf, there were bound to be certain, uh, obstacles, but I couldn't do anything about that. Excresence happens. One accepts, adapts, and moves on. And so I was more interested in things I could change, than in things I couldn't.
I recalled that the wife of a physician in the Nebraska Sandhills town where I had spent my adolescence, at the funeral of my mother, had commented it was "too bad" the parents had never gotten speech therapy for me, it being generally unavailable in the area, and they being too preoccupied with other problems, including problems of mine. She hinted that she would be happy to pay the bill--she had more money than her husband--if I could find a program suitable for myself in Lincoln. But I was thinking about a whole lot of other things, and said, thank you, but no.
That hot summer day in Lincoln, as I watched Mayflower vans move up and down the street, something occurred to me. My deafness was invisible, and so couldn't possibly give anyone a negative first impression of me, but my speech seemed a turn-off, especially to people who engrave first impressions into granite.
So maybe I should look into that.
I did, and much to my surprise found out that the University of Nebraska had an excellent speech therapy program, one of the finest in the nation, and it was right across the street from where I then lived; I had never paid attention to it before.
Students, those with low incomes, and those with particularly difficult speech habits, were given speech therapy services at $25 per session, each session usually about two hours long. Speech therapy was given by graduate students working towards a Master's or Ph.D. degree in the program.
I was evaluated, the consensus being that yeah, I needed it, like really bad.
Bad enough that five-day-a-week sessions would barely suffice, especially given my age, at nineteen speech habits pretty pretty much engraved in granite. It would be like an elephant begatting a mouse, but a mouse was better than nothing at all.
Everyone I knew was enthusiatic about the idea, ranging from wildly enthusiastic to moderately enthusiastic, never less than moderately. The cost was of great concern--at the time, working part-time, I made little more than that ($125) per week, and of course I was paying my own way through college. But then out of thin air, unasked, an older couple who had taken me in after my parents died, suggested they would pay $100 a week of it, myself the other $25, and if I went all the way through it, at the end, they would "refund" me all of my $25 payments.
So I was all set, ready to go.
In two years, I had five speech therapists, women in their mid- and late-20s, all of them good-looking, all of them soft and gentle and nice-smelling. Not a bad one in the lot, and to this day I remember all of them fondly, and with gratitude.
The primary problems were with stuttering and stammering (however, I never lisped, although I oftentimes came close), and eliminating those were the main objective. If that could be done, well, anything more than that was gravy.
There were some things insoluable. Being deaf, I pronounced words the ways they were spelled, or how I imagined they were pronounced. Those in the second category, I determined if the pronunciations were correct by the reaction of the other person.
Nothing could be done about that, so that was left alone.
This was first tackled by using the 1547 Book of Common Prayer and the 1610 version of the King James Bible. Later, things such as the lyrics from the 19th-century Gilbert & Sullivan operas, and other late-Victorian writings. Apparently someone long ago had discovered that these are ideal when teaching speech, although more suitable for those recovering from strokes, than deaf college students who had never gotten them right to begin with.
The Lord's Prayer in the 1610 version of the Bible is considered ideal by many speech therapists, because of the way the words flow.
It took about eight months, and two speech therapists, but voila! one day the stuttering and stammering spontaneously evaporated into thin air, never to return.
It was gone even before one was aware it was going.
I do not mean to give the impression speech therapy was a piece of cake; in fact, it was rough, arduous, grueling going. Because speech is so much a part of one's self, changing it creates all sorts of emotional discombobulations and convulsions, and those have to be dealt with by a speech therapist not trained in psychology, as they pop up.
And this was going on five days a week, not the customary two, maybe three, days a week usually done.
I sweated a lot. There were many long periods of utter cold silence during those two-hour sessions, when I adamantly refused to say anything at all. There were probably six or seven times when I decided to Hell with it, and quit, but I never got around to it.
Something that made one feel awkward was that usually "clients" for speech therapy tended to be male children who looked to be 3-5 years old, and here I was, a tall junior in college trying to sit in the waiting room on some sort of miniature kindergarten-type chair. I got stared at a lot by the lilliputians.
And private rooms for speech therapy being limited, sometimes the therapist and I had to sit on the same little tiny chairs in front of a table with legs seeming too short to accommodate even a tall ant.
One issue was the obvious inability to pronounce the short "e," perhaps the most common vowel-sound in the English language. It was at first thought I had just never learned it, being too busy learning other things in life, but apparently it was, or is, an anatomical inability, not a speech inability.
Without the short "e," I cannot utter my own first name correctly, and any layman can reasonably assume what this means psychologically. But excresence happens; one accepts, adapts, and moves on. I've aways answered more to "Tad" or Matt" or "Thad" or "Brad," and got used to it a long time ago.
At mid-point, the third speech therapist was "assigned" to deal with me in open, social, casual situations. She was the only blonde of the five speech therapists, but as already mentioned, they were all really good-looking.
This flopped--not her fault; she didn't pick the therapy--because someone omitted to remember that a deaf person even with perfect speech is likely to run into a wagonload of problems in such situations. Five days a week, we dined at Valentino's Pizza. One does what one can, and one never gets tired of Valentino's pizza, even if had five days a week for fourteen weeks.
The purpose of such is because people in need of speech therapy tend to maintain poor, or even no, eye-contact when speaking. But because when I was smaller, the parents demanded that I maintain physical contact when talking to, and "listening" to, another person, maintaining eye-contact was never, really, a problem.
The last two therapists went back to the standard, formal, method, practice and repetition. There was, and still remains, a constant problem with words of two syllables, both syllables starting with the same letter (such as, say, "railroad"). I always said such words as if wielding a hammer to drive two spikes into the tie.
I gave up on that, and as I do today, just used the alternative word (such as, say, "railway"), which simplies matters greatly.
I was so enamoured of them all that I gave them my football tickets so that their boyfriends could attend; wouldn't even take a dime for the tickets.
After two years, and as I myself was nearing graduation, the whole thing was evaluated by professionals, who gave the not unanticipated analysis that a mountain had labored to bring forth a mouse.
But really, it was not that bad. The goal had been to eliminate the stuttering and stammering, and that had been accomplished the first year. Anything and everything beyond that, of which there was much, was just so much extra.
One of the singularities of speech therapy was that my patterns changed wholly, from a deep and tripping-over-one's-toes voice, to a shallow and slow voice; a manner of speaking as slow and broad and shallow as the Platte River.
But if that was the "price" one had to pay--and it very well may have been--it was cheap at that price, just to get rid of the stuttering and stammering.
Bleeding-heart socially-conscious tolerant-of-diversity Democrats, liberals, and primitives may shudder when I open my mouth, even go apeshit over the voice, but there are many others who like the voice as it is, usually those for whom English is not their first language, or those with a poor command of English.
I suspect that's why so many of my income-tax clients are of Texan, Vietnamese, Armenian, and Azerbajani derivation. They can understand me, while they can't understand the English as spoken by most other Americans.
Each and every word has a distinct beginning and a distinct end, with space enough between each word that one can comprehend. It's not like the slobbery gibberish as spoken in blue cities and blue states.
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