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

sons, because she invested so much time, energy, and emotion in the upbringing of her deaf son.
    Mother is of a type well known, and much disliked, by educators of the deaf: one who, they say, refuses to accept the reality that her child is deaf and will not allow her child to accept his deafness. This sort of mother, they contend, is aggressive, demanding, pushy, certain of her position, contemptuous of others, and absolutely unreasonable. Not only will her child fail to live up to her absurdly high expectations; the emotional stresses that ensue are almost certain to cause personality disorders.
    That this sometimes happens I have no doubt; I have met more than one troubled deaf adult who is a product of this scenario. But it did not occur at our house. Mother wisely did all her pushing and shoving and wrangling behind the scenes, keeping her son utterly unaware of it. Rather than force me to do things that I could not do, she simply created a large space in which I could try my luck, and if my efforts did not work, go on to something else. She allowed me to be independent. She gave me room to learn how to balance success against failure and accept the results with equanimity.
    She accepted the reality that I could not hear. What she refused to accept was the concept of deafness held by most of the educators she met: that a deaf child should not be too ambitious, because the world will not allow him to achieve his goals, and that one must be realistic and guide him down paths of lesser resistance so that a simpler and easier life will allow him to be happy. In short, Mother refused to allow anyone else to set my limits. Only I, and I alone, could find and define them. For that wisdom I am deeply grateful.
    I owe Dad just as much, for he believed as strongly as Mother did in his deaf son’s potential. Moreover, he was never a distant, remote figure, as were so many fathers of the time. Almost every spring and summer evening we’d play catch out front, even when I grew older and my fastballwilder, smokier, and more painful to catch. He’d coach third base for my Y club’s softball games and volunteer as a timer at the endless swimming meets. He seemed to be everywhere.
    He was always there even for my friends. In our early teens, my best friend, Sam Williamson, bit off a little more than he could chew when he bought a kit for a full-sized, fourteen-foot plywood Sailfish sailboat. His father, competent with tools but a busy professor at work on an academic project, thought the best way to help Sam fit a certain stubborn part into the boat was to enlist the skills of my father. Dad came to the rescue and helped Sam solve the problem. As I recall, it looked as if it had been done by a professional.
    One of Dad’s most important legacies to me has been a deep appreciation for a job done right, with skill and exquisite, painstaking care. We spent many hours together in the basement building models and furniture and repairing bicycles and washing machines. Patiently he instructed me in the various uses of an awl and a spokeshave, a chisel and a hacksaw, a plunger and a pipe wrench. The things we made always looked expertly done, not the clumsy products of a do-it-yourselfer.
    He taught me, also, to make no little plans—especially when it came to home improvement. There was nothing we could not do so long as we had the proper tools, materials, and determination. Together we converted a back pantry into a powder room, brazing copper pipe and installing a heavy toilet. I was the one who scurried into the musty, cobwebby crawl space underneath the old pantry with the brazing torch; Dad, a six-footer, was just too big. I was so proud to be trusted with that important task that I momentarily lost my fear of spiders.
    When we were very young, Buck and I were siblings of hackneyed normalcy. Like brothers everywhere, we battled mightily. I still remember a particularly painful whaling Mother gave me when I was about