No Photo (yet) No Audio
Janis is extremely shy. She's also about as close to stone deaf as you can get, and has been since early childhood. I first "met" her about 1980. She lives less than a block away. She wears a huge hearing aid but mostly reads lips. Even the hearing aid doesn't help much. For the past few years I'd see her on Wednesday nights at Starbucks where an informal Deaf Club meets. One of the guys, Don Meredith, is my age. He makes little tops and he can do amazing tricks with them, like getting it spinning on the back of his hand and making it run up his arm, or suddenly jerking his hand out from under it, flipping his hand over and catching it, still spinning, in the palm of his hand. For a few bucks he'll sell one to you and try to teach you how to do the tricks. Few succeed. I need to get some photos of him with his tops. With that 15mm lens I could get a big hand close to the camera with the spinning top, Don and some other folks in the background.
A few months ago Janis unexpectedly became a widow at 55. One day she knocked on my door asking if I was going to the market. Since then she calls a few times every afternoon and evening. It's after 11 PM now and I just got off the phone with her. We went shopping at Publix earlier, then stopped at McDonalds because they have fifty-nine cent hamburgers on Wednesdays. She loves them! At Publix all she bought was some peanut butter that was on sale. That's normal with her. She never seems to do much shopping at a time. We took the McDonalds burgers to Starbucks and ate them with our coffee. She seems to use food shopping as an excuse the get out of the house, but Don says that it's really an excuse to spend time with me, that she has a thing for me. As we sat around with Don, Don's wife Mary, and a few other deaf people signing one another, I finally managed to shoot a few photographs with the 21mm lens that included Janis, without her noticing. I should be adding a photo to this blog posting in the near future.
I also found out that a lot of tonight's sign language conversation consisted mostly of Don and Mary trying to convince Janis that I would make a good catch. She didn't tell me that, Don did. Things might be getting interesting around here.
* * * DON'T FORGET TO VOTE! I'M GOING TO THE POLLS TOMORROW MORNING FOR EARLY VOTING.* * *
A few months ago Janis unexpectedly became a widow at 55. One day she knocked on my door asking if I was going to the market. Since then she calls a few times every afternoon and evening. It's after 11 PM now and I just got off the phone with her. We went shopping at Publix earlier, then stopped at McDonalds because they have fifty-nine cent hamburgers on Wednesdays. She loves them! At Publix all she bought was some peanut butter that was on sale. That's normal with her. She never seems to do much shopping at a time. We took the McDonalds burgers to Starbucks and ate them with our coffee. She seems to use food shopping as an excuse the get out of the house, but Don says that it's really an excuse to spend time with me, that she has a thing for me. As we sat around with Don, Don's wife Mary, and a few other deaf people signing one another, I finally managed to shoot a few photographs with the 21mm lens that included Janis, without her noticing. I should be adding a photo to this blog posting in the near future.
I also found out that a lot of tonight's sign language conversation consisted mostly of Don and Mary trying to convince Janis that I would make a good catch. She didn't tell me that, Don did. Things might be getting interesting around here.
* * * DON'T FORGET TO VOTE! I'M GOING TO THE POLLS TOMORROW MORNING FOR EARLY VOTING.* * *
Labels: deaf, McDonalds, peanut butter, polls, sign language, Starbucks, top, vote, widow
posted by Al Kaplan at 9:33 PM
1 Comments:
Pardon my ignorance, but how does one talk on the phone to a deaf person?
Love your blog!!!
Post a Comment
<< Home