Chapter 22: September

Chapter 22

September

The school year started for me in late August with endless meetings. It started for the students in early September. I got a new nickname, “Pirate,” because of my prosthetic foot. The Deaf community is loving and wonderful in a thousand different ways, but it can be absolutely brutal when it comes to nicknames. For most people, Deaf people will fingerspell their names. This can be tedious, as anyone who's seen someone trying to spell out “Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger” can attest. You have to be well established in the Deaf community to even get a nickname, and it did warm my heart to get one, even a nickname as annoying as “Pirate.” I don't know why I didn't get a nickname before, but I suppose that part of me getting the nickname had to do with my injury and disability. After all, I was now different, like they were.

At the same time, I felt more distant from the Deaf community. I did take Trout to a few Deaf events, but he was losing his sign language. He liked the Signing Time videos and learned a lot from them, but without someone to practice with every day, he felt less of a need to sign. At daycare, he spent less and less time with the Deaf kids and more time with the hearing and Hard of Hearing kids.

I donated $20,000 to the school toward building a piano lab capable of teaching 12 students. Brunette Holly organized a fundraiser that brought in a further $15,000. There was a lot going on in music education for the Deaf in 2008, and I wanted to be a part of it. Each station had an 88-key digital piano and a computer which ran visual software that guided them how to play, much like Dance, Dance Revolution taught them to dance. The studio opened in 2009. Now, in 2017, that program is still fully funded by outside contributions raised through recitals, grants, and fundraisers. We have a second, full-time music instructor to meet the needs of all the students who want to play the piano.