With nothing else but four suitcases stuffed with clothes, documents, and memorabilia, my family and I left Romania for the fabled country of America. Here, our beautiful, old home was replaced by a semi-truck, one that my father, mother, sister, and I lived in for our first two years until my father, a truck driver, had saved enough money to buy our current home in Tennessee...
The tear, the crack, the pop, and then the screaming of profanities- I thought all hope would die, but really this is just where it all began. My family is not related by blood- nor do our chromosomes align- in fact we don’t even have the same number, they have one more chromosome, allowing me to love them each a little bit more..
Sound. Beautiful, harmonic sound echoes within the bare, beige walls of my basement. The old, upright Yamaha, its keys yellowing with use, stands like a grand Carnegie Hall Steinway. The worn, acoustic guitar sits in its sacred corner, its six strings coaxing me to play. Although these two simple instruments are all that furnish the unembellished room, this underground sanctuary holds my buried treasure - music...
Imagine a life in complete silence, sentenced to ‘deaf’ – unable to hear the beautiful symphonies of Mozart, the crash of waves on a Florida beach, the incessant pounding of waterfalls, shared jokes among friends, the words “I love you” – all of the sounds that most take for granted. Now consider these: fire alarms, oven timers, last minute announcements, crucial facts in a professor’s lecture – any warning wasted on your ears. There may be some idle pleasures in silence, like studying and reading, or sleeping through a storm, but with my cochlear implants, I experience the best of both worlds...
We have all learned how to walk, to speak, and to hear: these are instinctual, naturally innate skills appearing in the early stages of life. Most forget ever having learnt them at all, and thus attribute them to instinct. Only when one has children can these learning processes finally become apparent and memorable...
As the sun rose over Duck Lake that first Tuesday morning of Week One, a sense of anticipation hung in the air around the high school boys’ cabins. At 6:45, the whistle sounded from the tennis courts and twenty-four cabin doors swung open as hundreds of teenage boys spilled out, racing to morning lineup. The announcement was made—audition results were in and could be checked on the way to breakfast...
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