Free What's That Pig Outdoors? by Henry Kisor Page A

Immediately he smiled, sighed with relief, and gently took the trumpet from my hands. For weeks he must have been waiting for me to say those words.
    At the time I didn’t think my lack of success all that unusual. Some of my friends had also tried, and failed, with musical instruments. Big deal. So we weren’t cut out for that sort of thing. Musical illiteracy was simply another characteristic we shared. They were
tone
deaf, and I was
deaf
deaf. If there was a difference, the consequences were the same.
    In other ways we shared success. Most of the boys in my fifth-grade class joined the Evanston YMCA, which had an excellent afternoon program for boys as well as a summer camp in Michigan. The Y staff was as open-minded as anyone could be about deaf children in their programs, and they were also willing, at Mother and Dad’s behest, to allow me to seek my own level. Two or three times a week, we fifth-graders would take a bus downtown after school for swimming lessons.
    In the summers some of us took the bus to Camp Echo, which the Yoperated in the woods near Fremont, Michigan. Though some of the boys were filled with the usual ten-year-old’s horror at being separated from his parents for the first time, I wasn’t. Those summer visits with my grandparents had accustomed me to being away from home. Like a grizzled old veteran lecturing a bunch of recruits, I airily told my cabin mates that their homesickness wouldn’t last, that camp was terrific and c’mon, let’s have some fun.
    At camp and at the Y my friend Sam and I became quite proficient in the pool and were asked to join the Y’s age-group team, he as a backstroker and I as a freestyler. In the beginning, because I couldn’t hear the starting gun, I swam only on relays. But since I was a stronger swimmer than most—partly because I had entered puberty a bit earlier than my friends and was putting on muscle—Dad and the coach thought I might also excel in individual events if only I could get a good start. They tried placing me in the lane closest to the starter so that I could feel the vibrations of his pistol. The results were inconsistent. In a small, closed-in pool, I could sometimes feel on my skin the crack of the .22 pistol if it was a particularly loud one. Most starter’s guns, however, didn’t produce vibrations strong enough to register on me.
    So I learned to keep one eye on the left hand of the swimmer to my right. As soon as it moved, off I’d go. Of course, there was a noticeable delay in my start, but with time and practice Dad and the coach helped me get the lapse down to two-tenths of a second or so. Today, when winning margins are often measured in hundredths of a second, that might not seem like much help. But in the schoolboy competition of the 1950s, it was plenty. Soon I stood out from the crowd as a swimmer and began to win my share of medals in regional age-group competitions.
    It wasn’t long before my rivals learned that they could make me falsestart by twitching their hands as we go into the “set” position. On a false start, the starter would fire his pistol a second and a third time to halt the swimmers before they’d got more than a few yards down the pool. Whenever that happened, one of my teammates had to jump into the pool to grab me before I worked up a head of steam. Three false starts and a swimmer was disqualified. The officials, however, quickly sized up the situation and announced that anyone who tried to make me false-start would himself be banished from the event.

    In the typical American family unit of the 1940s and 1950s, the mother was the dominant figure at home while the father went off to work, and the Kisor household was no different. Mother took on the major responsibility for my speech and lipreading, and for persuading dubious educators to take a chance with a deaf child. We were close and still are, perhaps more so than other mothers and