In Their Dreams

Olivia and Otis meet on the shore of a purple ocean. Behind them, the world burns in its own selfishness, and shivering travelers light their own clothes on fire to stay warm. Stars drift across the sky like drunken bees.

Olivia: Otis how are the waves?
Otis: Rough
Olivia: Is that your canoe? Is it fiberglass?
Otis: Bark.
Olivia: I see. Did you sand it at least or is it still –
Otis: Rough.
Olivia: (shrugs) Well, then. What should we do? Should we go across? How far is it? What lies on the other side?
Otis: (wags tail; gazes in her eyes with intense friendliness)
Olivia: (sits down, puts head in hands). Shoot, I’m asking a dog for advice.
Otis: (sticks his head on her knee). My darling. Watch this: (the sun emerges from the purple ocean, wearing a crown of pearls). And this: (A mermaid crests, blowing bubbles). And this: (the mountain bends down and pulls a cookie sheet out of the oven). You see? Don’t be afraid. There is nothing to fear. We will cross whatever needs crossing and end up exactly where we need to be. You will manifest the love of God, the beating heart of all creation, at every moment, whether you are aware of it or not. Everything is ok.
Olivia: Are you sure?
Otis: I have never been more sure. Okay? I’m just going to lay here and twitch a bit. Makes the dream more interesting.
(He does so. Meanwhile, the dead come back to life, and walk over a dune holding hands and singing a song from High School Musical 2. Zac Efron takes off his shirt, builds a sand castle and then is swept out to sea by a rogue wave.)
Olivia: Why, yes. I see it now. I see it now! Yes, Otis. Oh, I like this dream. I love you!
Otis: Got any biscuits?
Olivia: (checks pockets) No.
Otis: Ah man, you’re breaking my heart.

Step Back Jack!

Ah man, I was doing my bestest to ignore this bloggo right into the deep rearview but my nemesis Jacko had time on his hands and raised this very good point:

"Who cares if you have work to do and are too busy, you created that blog-o-baby and it needs constant feeding."

Aight, Jack. You'll get yours.

Where to start? Summer in the burbs and hot as tick fart. When Otis and I hit the woods for our afternoon walk, the bugs are too burned out to bite. They just lay panting on the rocks as we pass, fanning themselves with three, sometimes four of their legs. The birds here have quit flying into windows but instead smack right into the ACs.


(Yes, that's a road. Or is it now?)

Just back from a week in Maine, which is about my favorite place in creation. Woods, water, people in no rush. Evenings cool and well lubricated by fermented or distilled concoctions. On the morning of the fourth, in Brooklin, a small town near the coast, we were ambushed by an Independence Day parade that was absolutely lacking in cynicism. It was like a twenty minute long piece of milk chocolate. Before that, Milwaukee for a long weekend, for the Alexander Graham Bell convention. A beautiful event in a convention center so big I burned off a pound a day just walking back and forth to the restroom. Gave a couple talks about The Unheard which went well, and which, really, can now be summarized in just a few lines.

Namely: Darling! We are all ok. We are all loved. Aim to forgive. Every moment holds the grace you seek! God is right here. Still, put on your seatbelt.

Busy week now as I’m trying, with Mike Chorost, to finish the syllabus and reading list of the course we’ll be teaching this fall. Titled History of Change, the course will look at how minorities have adapted to evolving societies through history, and then we’ll encourage the students to relate it back to Gallaudet’s current situation, which, despite some recent gains, continues to be fraught with unknowns.

I’m also pushing to finish a draft of my novel, now tentatively titled, “The thing I really should have finished a while ago but Jeopardy was on and also this weird new game show where they hit people.” No, not really. It’s an interesting book; and has been a wonderful opportunity to work out ideas about death and issues with my folks.

Tons of other irons are in the fire, none of which, apparently, have any money attached to them. I’m skilled like that.

Now then, to tie up some loose threads. The woman I picked up at the airport: beautiful as the day is long. Don’t believe your eyes. The movie of The Unheard: eh, boarded the wrong train and is lost in Alberta. The Obama-Clinton split: people, please. Everybody’s already won.

Gratefully then, I take my leave with the happy dance:

Up late Update Update

Here's a link to the Clarke School commencement address with some pictures of the ceremony. Lovely day.

Up Late Update

Hey all. Sorry I haven’t written. I hope you all are well. Lovely world keeps turning, bringing surprises and deadlines and new responsibilities, pushing the blog down on the to-do list. And even if, hypothetically, a semi-retired communications expert now living in a populated southeastern city with too much time on his hands were sending me stalker-like emails, I still can’t always find the time to write.

But I gave a talk tonight at the Yale Club in New York, a fantastical twenty-two story building across the street from Grand Central, and, feeling sleepy before hand, I drank a pot of coffee. So now I’m up. The club scared me a bit – I kept expecting someone to say, hey, who let you in here? No one did however, and after the talk, the martini they served with the complimentary meal at the rooftop restaurant was so big it came with an overflow carafe. Five bubbly young women were in the elevator on the way down and I thought of many clever things to say to them, but I had drunk two of those martinis. Also, my parents were in the elevator.

In a little more than a month, I’ll be moving to Washington, DC. I will be a visiting professor at Gallaudet. It’s been a lot of work arranging this position and I’m excited about the opportunity. I’ll be teaching a class, mentoring aspiring writers, and bringing in interesting folk for guest lectures, but aside from all that, the main thrust of my work there will be first, to help bridge the gap between the signing and speaking deaf communities; and second, to help develop a program at Walter Reed for deafened veterans.

This column in the Times points out why such a program is necessary. And I’ve talked enough in this blog about the unfortunate divide between the different deaf populations and why it’s a shame. Hopefully, we can begin to heal some of that.

I’m also hard at work at a novel whenever I have a free moment. It’s an interesting process, writing a novel – it’s really a constant discovery of how little I actually know about writing. I’ve thrown away hundreds of carefully thought-out pages while finding, on the flipside, that the most absurd shoelace-tying daydream opens up whole universes.

Next week, I’m off to Milwaukee for the national AGBell convention, then Maine for some scotch and R&R. This week Otis hopefully will start his hearing dog training. Last week was a commencement in Massachusetts, which had to be the most cynicism-free day I’ve experienced in some time (and I love the article headline -- it just nails it). I hope you all get to enjoy many days like that this summer. Wear sunscreen.

Light of Evening

On Tuesday, I’m going to JFK to pick up a young woman from Israel and bring her to Port Authority. A few years ago she was sitting on a bus in Jerusalem when a young Arabic man sat down next to her. She turned to him.
“Hello,” she said, and turned to look back out the window.
He blew himself up. The woman was rushed to the hospital. Major veins were ripped open and the doctors didn’t think she would make it. But as fate would have it, the only doctor in the country who could perform the surgery that could save her life was in the hospital that very moment, getting chemotherapy treatment for his cancer. He unhooked the chemo IV from his arm and went to the operating room and did the surgery, putting her veins back together with odd parts and guile, constructing a new face from the pieces of the old one.
“How will I recognize her?” I asked the man who wants me to pick her up.
“You will,” he said.

I was in the woods all last week, and in the mornings, the birds were out in full force -- thrushes, swallows, woodpeckers, robins, whooperwills, even a Peacock – singing their songs, courting their mates, pounding their heads into the trees in search of food. The music of their doings was a symphony as beautiful as anything any orchestra has ever played; it ebbed and flowed with an unpredictable but sublimely organized rhythm; you could feel that these birds were pouring their hearts into every sound, as if this one note, this one right here, was the last one they’d ever sing, was the culmination of everything they’d lived for.

The woman from Israel was in a coma for weeks. They didn’t know what kind of function she would recover. But she woke up and improved and left the hospital. And now she is coming to the states to, more or less, sit in the woods and listen to the birds.
“She has no anger, no regrets about what happened,” says the man who arranged her journey.
“None?” I ask, because how is that possible?
“None,” he says.
“Never?”
“She should be dead. But she’s alive. What is there to complain about?”

One night, I’m up reading essays about the universe. In one chapter, the author describes how every single molecule on this planet was born in the furnace of stars and then scattered throughout the universe by their supernovae explosions. That is, when the stars ran out of fuel, they collapsed in on themselves, creating tremendous pressure that blew them apart, and so their atoms were launched throughout the heavens. We are, there is no other way to put it, made of stars.

Beautiful Film

Just returned from a screening of Hear and Now, Ilene Taylor Brodsky's deeply personal and touching documentary about the decision of her sixty five year-old parents to get cochlear implants. It's not a political film but it is an engrossing and emotional one that makes a concerned effort to convey a certain deaf experience. The film will premiere on HBO this Thursday, May 8th at 8pm. I had the opportunity to meet Ilene and her folks at the screening; they have an infectious warmth. Hope you get a chance to see it yourself.

L.A. Story

Back in gray New York after a whirlwind week in LA. What is there to say about that city? The sun is always shining, the traffic is polite, beautiful people racewalk along the sidewalks with their handweights and hands-free phones and have blonde children and drive hybrids and do so many beautiful things. I’m starting to like it actually. My nieces live there and each afternoon they make announcements about the myriad things (family, strawberry yogurt, swim goggles, Zac Efron, Uncle Albert) that they love.

Had meetings about making The Unheard into a movie (which, following form, would probably be called The Unseen). The meetings were enjoyable so hopefully something will happen.

Friday at a party for the LA Book Festival, I ran into Scott Simon of NPR, with whom I had my first and best interview. He was quite affectionate.

Sunday was a spot on a panel at the Festival, with, among others, a woman who started a Beauty School in Kabul and another who drove a cab in Beijing and two other women, with two other stories as heartfelt and magical as any -- crossing mountains, reconciling histories, returning flags of war.


All across the sprawling UCLA campus books and their lovers lay about. Old, young, in strollers and wheelchairs, beneath a sauna room sky, they reached out for each other. I’d never seen so many readers before. They rushed happily from panel to booth to lecture. One even gave me a toy dinosaur.

“I’d like to go out with you, but I’m shy,” she said. “Here’s a dinosaur.”

Earlier, I waited in the green room with a hundred other writers:
“This is not a pretty sight,” I texted Zev.
“Are they all drunk?” he asked.
“No.” It wasn’t yet noon. “But you should see them hit the free buffet.”

So: well-fed writers and generous festivalgoers -- maybe, there’s hope yet for the literary arts. Yes, I know, Grand Theft Auto IV came out this week and the odds that a young-un is reading a novel instead of racedriving over pimps and hos and capping fo-fos are not good. And, on the idiot box: commercials for a movie in which the wrongly-accused hero creates a suit of armor and blows shit up and then walks away. That’s it: he blows the shit up and then he. just. walks. away. It’s going to be a big hit, I’m sure.

Monday I spoke at the Echo Horizon School, where’d I met the students back in March, this time to an audience of concerned and curious parents.

Beforehand, I had a drink with Zev at a nearby bar.
“I have to give a speech soon,” I told the bartender. “Should I have a few beers or get a coffee?”
“We don’t have coffee,” she said.

The sixty parents, almost all with deaf children, waited in the school auditorium. What could I tell them? I knew their fears. We all have such fears! You want your child to have a smooth road, you want him to have every potential opportunity, you want his life to be one easy playground slide to happiness – but bang, right off the bat, the doctor is telling you of a broken part. And there’s no way to exchange. Their heartache! My child – I could never love anything so much as you and it’s my fault, mine!

The technological options are many now, as are the competing philosophies for using them. But, I told the parents, there is no move more important than embracing the situation, inviting it inside, seating it at the dining room table and pouring it tea. The Buddha taught that you should invite the things that scare you to stay a while. Through that gentleness, their miasma of lies and threats breaks down.

Your children will survive. Their wounds will be their teachers. They’ll drive you crazy. They’ll blow off important events to chase cute girls. They’ll drive your cars off the side of country roads and come home giggling. They’ll fall in love with people who hurt them and rage against your kindnesses. All of that is ok.

“How was that?” I asked Zev, after the talk.
“Next time,” he said. “Drink coffee.”