Henry Kisor’s Pain in the Ass
“I honestly don’t think I’ve missed out on banter any more than I’ve missed out on any other form of oral communication,” Kisor wrote back. “My children and I exchange japes, pointed or otherwise, every day. Jack Schnedler and Marvin Weinstein and I indulge frequently in the sort of amiable abuse you hear in a newspaper office every day . . . .
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“As for idiomatic English,” Kisor went on, “I probably miss more owing to age than I do deafness. Any old fart on the verge of 50 is not going to encounter the hip vernacular of MTV very often. I do pick up a lot of the current idiom from reading–the papers . . . and the weeklies . . . . Maybe I’m a step or two behind the freshest of the fresh. But in recent years a good deal of the new idiom that comes out of the movies has become more accessible to me through the medium of closed-caption video–I’m something of a video-movie junkie these days.”
“I was a precocious child. My parents tell me I was a good singer,” he said at lunch. “But music is not a part of my life. People ask me if I miss it. No, I don’t. I don’t miss what I never had. But when I write, I write by ear. I sound out the words. But it’s an inner ear.”
Perhaps, we said–thinking of what he’d discover and then give up–you wouldn’t really want one day of hearing.
Kisor isn’t having any of that. Even so, when students at Gallaudet College for the deaf–where sign language is required–hit the bricks a couple of years ago demanding a new president who was deaf, “I began marching with the Gallaudet students in spirit if not in person. After all, right was on their–our–side.”
As soon as Pete Rose copped a plea, the debate started. Does he belong in the Hall of Fame? Does he belong in prison?
