The Luck of a Coda
Jesse has his scabbed knuckles stuffed into his pockets, his blonde head bowed, watching his feet sway up and down across the sidewalk drawings. I am ten years old and he is nine, the two of us stepping unhurried through the apartment complex like giants in a giant land, quietly oblivious to the size of the rest of the world. When the clouds of Indiana in May tumbled over and spilled with fresh, new summer, we would fight the humidity with long, pathless walks, never truly searching but in a direction so inexplicable it was as if we were tramping after direction itself, to have that and all the unseen mapped out like unveiled frontiers just beyond each weed strewn yard or patch of gravel.
I didn’t know you knew sign language, he says, referring to an occasion when he’d seen my parents and I talking. My first language, I tell him. Oh… he says, and I can feel his next question peering over my shoulders as I walk farther ahead of him, my shadow enveloping his diminutive shape. He finally asks, But… how…? And I tell him, Because my family’s deaf.
I do not realize how bluntly it hits him until I see his contracted face staring at me as if at an open wound. Really? He says, and you’re the only one who’s … ? Yep, I say, and now his face has worsened, bearing the distended, itching confusion of a woman who’d just found out her baby was switched with someone else’s. I know his next sentence was as inevitable as echoes, so I wait.
I guess you’re just lucky, huh? I suppose I could have shouted: Both my parents, my brother and sister, my entire family, every last one of them, right up to the rims of their eardrums, down to every bone in their hands: DEAF! and there’s nothing at all wrong with that! I suppose I could have told him that to say I was lucky would mean that my family is unlucky, and that they are nothing of the kind, and I did. There is no specific way one can clearly explain why he/she could possibly be proud of having deaf parents, except to say that it is that culture that forms the very fiber of their being; to know their struggle through lifetimes of disadvantages and to endure with them even now; to find limitless strength and pride in such a journey; to love a language, a movement, a unique way of life so far apart from the rest. This is not a learned quality, but an enormous chapter of who I am and who I will inevitably be. So I say that I AM lucky–to have been so enriched by two cultures in one lifetime, to have the mastery of two vastly different forms of communication, and to have such a perspective on humanity. And though I know that I have made myself somewhat far-fetched in other eyes, I know that their family life is just as far-fetched to me. And it is this difference alone that allows me to understand the purpose and importance of individuality, and what enlightenment an individual can bring to an unknowing world.
I am majoring in English at the University of Oregon, and plan to become a professor, incorporating my love to teach, to learn, my love for language and literature, and the many messages I have to give. Coming from a family immersed in the field of education, I have discovered that teaching is truly the greatest occupation there is, and there is no greater form of teaching than writing, for it provides the greatest amount of people with the largest amount of information. There is no one mark I could possibly leave behind as essential as the knowledge I wish to provide to those that are willing to learn, for this begins a great chain of empowerment that can never be broken. Through my years of practice, I have learned that mastery lies only in the realization that there is no such thing as mastery, only the vast appreciation one can get from every experience, including that of a CODA; therefore, all paths from here are boundless, mapped out like unveiled frontiers beyond today and tomorrow.
