Miss-Delectable

Yankee Notebook: Rest in peace (and quiet): Times Argus Online

My father, who was deaf from the age of 10, spent his long career as an Episcopal priest and missionary to the deaf. But it's been decades since I've been to a gathering conducted in sign language.

Here at my father's funeral in a packed church in DeWitt, N.Y., on the last day of June, about half the congregation is deaf. The celebrant, my father's immediate successor, is deaf. Her successor, the current missionary, is not, and though he speaks sign language well, he does it with a slight "foreign" accent.

The bishop of Albany is here at St. David's Church, looking a little dazed; I suspect he's never before been to what's called a deaf service. But he's game – he'll do the committal at the end of the rites – and he's clearly soaking it all in. My wife says she can hear the whining of several hearing aids turned up full blast. I didn't bring mine, so I can't.

There are interpreters on each side of the church signing for the speakers who don't. Watching them, I'm moved as of long ago by the beauty of the language. While the signs we use at the dinner table are small signs – two fingers rubbed like a knife across a palm for "butter"; two fingers tapped on the back of the opposite hand for "potato" – the signs we use in church are large, slow and sweeping. When, for example, the priest raises both arms from his sides and brings them together high over his head for "heaven," his surplice makes him look like an angel raising its wings.

Facial expression and posture are important, and at a funeral can be especially poignant. I grew up speaking sign language with my parents, which probably is the reason I can't play poker: You can read my cards in my face.

The dialect of sign language used here today is not the style native to most of the older deaf folks, or to me, for that matter. We learned to sign in "English," which involves a lot more spelling, as in tenses of verbs and specific nouns. Today's version is American Sign Language, or Ameslan, which is much quicker and perhaps more beautiful, as it flows better without all that bothersome spelling.

But it grinds me to sign "I go store," rather than what I really mean, which might be "I went to the store" or even "I've been to the store." It reminds me a lot of a carpenter who used to work with me. His grandparents were from Quebec, so he spoke their language. One of my remodeling customers was a French Canadian lady, and they had a great old time speaking French while he worked on her kitchen. After he left, she said, "He speaks the old-fashioned French, just like my grandparents. I haven't heard that for 50 years."

Almost all the deaf people here were my dad's parishioners – more a flock, really, because they were scattered all over New York state throughout four dioceses, and he drove more than 30,000 miles a year – in the days before interstates – to visit them; hold services; help them find jobs; marry, baptize and bury them.

I think he was also considered an automotive authority. I'll never forget the young deaf fellow, unlearned in the ways of the world (he's here today, now an old man, and came over earlier to give me a hug), who got a job and bought a new Chevy convertible. He proudly brought it to show Dad and during the conversation asked, "How often do I need to add gas?" I suspect the answer involved a long explanation of the mechanics of internal combustion.

Both my parents lived in, and were acculturated to what they called the deaf world, meaning almost all their friends were deaf. They attended Gallaudet College (now University) in Washington, D.C., met there and afterward enjoyed quite a large fellowship that kept in touch mainly through fraternal organizations, church attendance and newsletters.

During the last few decades Dad campaigned for improved electronic communications for the deaf. He was delighted when the phone company began its translation service and made reconditioned TTYs available to the deaf, charging regular phone rates for their use. It was great to see the energy that infused him when the phone rang (actually a bright light went on and a buzzer vibrated under the couch cushions; his invention). He and his friends had their own abbreviations that would be familiar to texters today.

Later he lobbied for closed-caption television. He declined a cochlear implant when they became possible, but made a brief stab at e-mail when somebody presented him with an old computer. Predictably, it gave him fits, and there was no one nearby to show him how to use it. I was unwilling to go backward to a TTY; so instead we maintained contact by snail-mail.

What was happening without his realizing it was that, because of all those electronic advances, the deaf world as he knew it was shrinking – even disintegrating. He grumped that people were falling away from the church and forgetting God. But it wasn't that. It was basically that they no longer needed the frequent fraternity of their fellows to participate in society.

This funeral service has been a bit of a humbling revelation to me. I've always known how many times in 43 years Dad covered the distance to the moon and back in his car, and how busy he was. But it's always bothered me that the church had, in effect, robbed me of my father, who, when he had a regular job at the meat packing plant, was there every evening and weekend.

He was ordained and started his missionary travels when I was 7. After that, he was gone a lot. I knew where he was, but it was more important to me, at an inarticulate level, where he wasn't.

Today, however, watching the dozens of his old friends pausing at his casket to remember, to pray, to regret their loss, and listening to the frequent references to "beloved Father Bill" and, even more moving, "our brother Bill, who was always there for us, no matter what," it occurs to me that it's time to get over all that. Time instead to listen to what he meant to all these people: his advocacy for answers to their needs; his sheer physical energy; his extrovert's desire to bring people together.

In the words of his current successor, "Our brother Bill was a giant of a man."

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