American Sign Language (ASL) is not a language of mine, and I have no background or proficiency in Deaf communities or cultures. This account is sure to contain mistakes in terminology and perceptions. I apologize and will correct this account if anyone adds a comment telling me that an error is disrespectful. It is certainly not meant to be.

As a little kiddo I had a children’s book about Helen Keller. The book had a fingerspelling alphabet, so I walked around the house and school and neighborhood spelling things to myself until the grownups were scared that I was losing my hearing or common sense or both. As it happens, New York was a loud place with loud speech. Noise and voices (and the words in those voices) sometimes startled me so much that it was restful to think of people just signaling instead, in Morse code light flashes or Boy Scout flag wigwagging or smoke signals. That manual alphabet just seemed a really appealing way to share ideas.

Back then the WNET educational television Channel 13 had a show called “What’s New?” One regular feature was “The Quiet Man,” where Mr. Bernard Bragg acted out pantomime scenes with piano music, like a silent movie. The pantomime costumes and facial expressions seemed a little scary at the time. But years later at the library there were health books on the shelf by Paul Bragg, and I took a few to the checkout desk. At home it turned out that one book was by Bernard Bragg. The Quiet Man! It was his memoir, Lessons in Laughter. The Quiet Man had a lot to say, and I started reading and couldn’t put the book down. Mr. Bragg’s had a whole lifetime of achievements, as a famous actor of Deaf theater. What? Deaf theater? It was amazing to learn about ASL — not at all just English spelled one letter at a time, but a historic language of communities and cultures. [Wee editorial break, 11/21/22: just yesterday I noticed a note about Koko the Gorilla, mentioning that dear Koko was “fluent in ASL.” What? Koko and her human associates accomplished something unprecedented and wonderful, but… ASL as language and culture? Another realm. End of editorial. -mg]

In 1978 I started teaching Russian as a graduate teaching assistant. The course required every student to come to the front of the room, and recite a memorized Russian dialogue. One quiet student was too shy to speak in front of a group. Finally I had to advise her that if she didn’t drop my course, she’d get an F in her grade point average. At that news she sat with her head down in silent tears, with her fingers in her lap making shape after shape. Through some higher grace of inspiration I asked her “Your hands — is that Sign?” She explained that she was a hearing student attending Gallaudet, living in the Deaf community and using ASL everywhere except in my class. “How about this?” I asked her. “What if the whole class recites the dialogue together to YOU — and you Sign it back to them? This week you can look up the vocabulary, and teach it to them.” That was the best teaching idea I ever had. She was a natural star! Signing away, teaching at the head of the class! Soon the students were signing right back (Lenin! Komsomol! Borscht!) and waving jazz hands in the air in applause. After that class she felt comfortable Signing while also reciting in Russian, impressing the daylights out of her peers. (Yes, it would have been more appropriate to ask her to use Russian Sign, but at least ASL was just the bridge we needed.) Years later I saw the student again, a radiant young woman leading a whole group of Deaf friends. She pointed me out to them, then told them some story about me. The group watched her story, beamed at me, and applauded. As they ran away she looked back at me, crossing her fists over her heart.

In work at a publishing company, it was a thrill to hear a phone operator introduce my very first teletypewriter phone call. I hollered into the receiver like a telegraph operator in an old war movie. “OPENING QUOTATION MARK HELLO COMMA CAPITAL MISTER CAPITAL ENGELS E-N-G-E-L-S PERIOD CAPITAL THIS IS CAPITAL MARY M-A-R-Y PERIOD CAPITAL WHAT BOOK WOULD YOU LIKE TODAY QUESTION MARK CLOSING QUOTATION MARK OVER!! OPERATOR GO AHEAD PLEASE.” The operator sweetly clued me in that that I could calm down and just speak like a human.

In the 1980s at a hospital interpreter job, there was always a hopeless shortage of in-person ASL interpreters. Deaf patients would show up for even urgent and complex appointments and procedures — and were routinely turned away entirely, or were given a shrug and a prescription pad and pen to write on. (One of our hospital bureaucrats decided to cut costs by hiring a friend of his to fill in for ASL interpreters. She interpreted many appointments, saving the department the fee of $35 an hour. Then one day, a Deaf patient stormed out of the hospital and stormed right in to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. They determined that the volunteer was using homemade hand signs devised by her family 50 years earlier to communicate with a relative institutionalized as a child — back in Greece.) Given the drastic shortage of ASL interpreters, it dawned on me: Could I ever study and advance well enough to be at all helpful to our patients?

I did get to serve exactly one patient. Our interpreting dispatcher got a desperate call for an interpreter as stenographer. All our interpreters spoke English as a second language, and were self-conscious about their QWERTY typing. The only native English speaker on site was me. The patient was hard of hearing, and doctors had grave news; for over two hours the providers and a social worker walked him through choices of interventional, palliative, and end of life care. The patient sat close to me, asking many questions and intently reading the computer monitor while I speed-typed every word of the doctors’ instructions in 20 point font. One doctor entered and raised his voice: “Mr. X: LOOK at me when I speak to you!” The patient did not turn around. I pointed to the monitor and said “Doctor? Mr. X__ is paying full attention to every word you say, right here.” The doctor came over to watch, fascinated by our transcription workaround — especially when I printed up the entire session for Mr. X. to take home, with the answers to all his questions. (After my contracting job with that hospital ended, that same doctor called the dispatcher to insist that they send The English-English Girl.)

One night at the Boston Public Library I passed a conference room filled with patrons happily Signing with their snack plates and cups on the floor. (One beautiful young woman walked in with a little red foxlike dog. The dog looked around, lit up with joy at the sight of a floor covered with treats, and glanced up at his owner for cues. She snapped three fingers together, letter N for “No!” The dog lowered his head and sighed, and carefully skirted around the plates at heel.) One young man was both speaking and Signing with what appeared to be effortless bilingual fluency. I slipped in to the room and introduced myself, confiding to him my concern: that by learning ASL with no background in Deaf culture, I would only be offending members of those communities. This friendly welcoming man raised a hand for attention, and interpreted my misgivings to the group so that they could answer for themselves. The whole group laughed. After a rapid spirited discussion, they gave him their consensus to pass on to me: “It would help if more people would learn ASL. At the grocery store I could ask where the eggs are!” They also agreed that of course the Deaf communities encompass a full spectrum of opinions and sensibilities about the use of ASL, and that much depends on an outsider’s attitude, motive, and manners.

There was so much to learn! A wonderful book was Deaf Like Me by Thomas Spradley, about his little daughter Lynn and her maddening struggle with the “Oral Method” exercises required by her well-meaning teachers; finally the parents discovered the power of ASL to set free an extraordinarily bright little girl who was raring to connect with others. There was Joanne Greenberg’s novel Of Such Small Differences, and the narrator’s acute awareness and resilience as he coped with oblivious Seeing / Hearing characters and their reactions from infantilizing to predatory. There was In Silence: Growing Up Hearing in a Deaf World, a heartbreakingly beautiful memoir by the late Ruth Sidransky about her warm-hearted Deaf parents and the rich East European Jewish Deaf community of New York in the early 20th century. (At her father Benny’s deathbed, the family walked in during his last moments and found his arms placed in full restraints as a fall prevention — keeping this passionately loving man from expressing his farewell to his beloved wife and daughter. At the burial, Benny’s widow watched his coffin lowered into the ground, and signed “Benny? Can you hear now?”)

In 1997 the Adult Ed school downtown announced a class in ASL. Who wouldn’t jump at a chance like that? I bucked into that room like a rodeo steer out of a starting gate, and all through class stared hard at our teacher’s every gesture. Within a few lessons he began Signing “Hey LADY! Back off. You make me nervous.” Our Deaf instructor was hilarious, gifted at Signing humor, irony, mimicry, innuendo, allusion, sarcasm, regional dialect, social register, and his interpreted scenes of classic Hollywood movies where he would play all the characters himself. One night, still afire after an all-absorbing session, I stepped out to the street still gesturing to myself — and was startled by the passersby trying to communicate by pushing their mouth parts at one another, using inefficient clicking and buzzing noises like insects.

One year later on Christmas morning, friends invited me to play them some holiday carols on the Irish whistle. To my bewilderment I hit several sloppy wrong notes. We chalked it up to the cold weather. That was the first symptom of rheumatoid arthritis, a condition that took away Irish whistle, calligraphy, and of course ASL. For example, to finger-spell the letter “R” (= cross your index finger and middle finger and hold them up, as if to wish someone good luck) I have to reach over with the other hand and nudge the middle finger in a suggestion of a front crossover, a 10% approximation.

With vicarious wistfulness I keep up with the ever-flourishing talents and achievements of people like Marlee Matlin and Mandy Harvey. Tonight I was in tears all over again watching a favorite Steve Hartman clip on YouTube, CBS Evening News “On the Road.” (You can search for title “Community learns sign language to engage with 2-year-old girl.”)

Letter by letter, this language and yet another life dream have slipped through my hands. What’s lost is more than cartilage and bone; it’s a world of insights and relationships and wonder.

In 2000 or so, late one bitter cold night on the Boston Red Line T, a young teenager sat hunched over and alone, staring at the floor. As each person boarded the train, the young man glanced up, searching in vain for eye contact, and each time flipped a furtive signal with his hand. I watched him several times to make sure, and sure enough: as each passenger passed he fingerspelled “H + I.” My stop was coming up next. I’d have to sprint out of the car, change trains, change trains again, then walk two miles at midnight through harbor wetlands by the airport to get home. There was no time to even grab a piece of paper and start a note to him. But I leaned across the aisle and with a hand sweep Signed “Hello!” He sat bolt upright with an electrified stare of attention, and signed “You Deaf?” From that night class I remembered just enough for my swollen joints to Sign back in hurting painful fashion “Deaf, No. Hearing. Took school class. Long ago. Don’t know ASL.” He launched into my seat right up against me and signed “You Deaf?” I signed one phrase I’d gone and studied, for just this occasion: “Hands arthritis hurt ouch! My Sign no good finished very sad.” He tapped my chest, then my ear and jaw: “YOU! DEAF??” We were pulling in to my stop. He Signed me some urgent message, Signed it again, shook me by the shoulders, and finally with his fingers tapped on my teeth. And all I could say to him was “Sorry late house go bye Sorry” before sprinting for the next train.

He was only a kid. He didn’t know what to do on a late night subway except launch himself at a strange woman and tap on her teeth. He had something to say. It was important. It mattered, and so did he. What was it?

I will never know.