Story of the Day 3/ 15/ 2013 #2

Today, Sarah's teacher came up to her and asked if she would be able to caption two short videos for him.
Sarah is in the second year of a film making and animation class, and she has learnt how to caption videos, however, it is a very time consuming process.
You see, in order for Sarah to caption the videos, someone is going to need to listen to them and transcribe what is on them.
That someone can't be Sarah.
That is because Sarah is Deaf.

Once someone has listened to the videos and transcribed them, Sarah will type up captions and insert the onto the video.
Then she will need to sit next to someone who can hear who will let her know if the captions come on and fade out at the right moments. This involves several steps of editing.
This also means that the person sitting next to her, listening to the videos, needs to be able to sign to tell her if the words come on too early or late, if there is a break in the spoken language, if.....

This means that either her interpreter or I would get this job.

And, although I have hearing aids, Sarah's interpreter hears worse than I do, so the entire process is , at best, frustrating and time consuming.

So, when her teacher asked her about doing it, this morning, Sarah was very noncommittal.

This turned out to be a very good thing, because during the last period of the day, Sarah's resource teacher came up to her to let her know that there will be an assembly, next Tuesday,and that there will be two videos shown that will hopefully be captioned by then.

Hopefully?
The school is not allowed to show Sarah videos that are not captioned.
After numerous mess-ups, her IEP ( educational plan) is written using rather strong language to that effect.

Sarah told me that, tomorrow, she will let her teacher know that she doesn't think that she should be captioning the videos that are supposed to be captioned for her.
I would add something to this, but what could I possibly add?

Story of the Day 3/ 15/ 2013

There is shortage of toilet paper.

But not in my house.
There is never a shortage in my house.
Unless you are talking about in the exact bathroom you happen to find yourself in, needing it at that exact moment.

For some reason, despite the fact that there are four adults living in this house, I seem to be the only one who realizes that when you use the last sheet of toilet paper, or have left just one sheet on the roll, it is your responsibility to get another roll out of the cabinet and put it in a convenient spot for the next person using the bathroom.
You would think this would not be rocket science, that it would not require multiple college degrees. But, apparently, in my house, it does.

At least, though, in my house, there is always more toilet paper, even if it has not made its way onto the empty roller .
I buy it in bulk. That is because I sometimes get coupons from Walgreens or CVS when I buy toothpaste or kleenex, and the coupons are for $3 or $4 or sometimes even $10, and if there is nothing that I want, and the coupon is ready to expire, I buy toilet paper.
You can always use toilet paper, so it is not "wasted".
As a result, we usually have between 12 and 36 double rolls sitting in our garage.

My son is not so lucky.

Today, one day after having oral surgery, he had to make an emergency run to the store to buy more toilet paper.
He lives with three other adults, but he seems to be the only one who believes it is important to buy toilet paper.
He has decided that must be the issue since he is the only one who buys it.

I am entranced at the symmetry of our situations. How can it be that only one out of every four adults is aware of the possibility that toilet paper could...well, not be there when you need it?

I suggested to Ely that the next time he buys it, he put it in his bedroom, under his pillow.
Then he should just wait, in comfort, or at least in security, and see how long it takes until one or more of his housemates realizes that toilet paper can actually be purchased at a store and that it does not just magically appear in the house.

My son's response was, "I have thought about doing that."

Yes, but he didn't.
I mean , he didn't actually do it.

However, with my prodding,and a few words of encouragement from his younger sister, we will see how this experiment works out.

Story of the Day 3/ 5/ 2013

My nephew will be in town. He plays Lacrosse and apparently, his team will be playing here in Indianapolis.
He sent me a message asking me if a hotel located near the downtown would be okay or that he should be leery.
I told hm to come stay with us, we would feed him.
He is coming in 2 weeks. that will be just before Passover.
So, maybe we would not feed him.

If you are Jewish, when it gets that close to the holiday of Passover, and you are using up the chametz- the food you cannot own once Passover starts, meals start to look like something the dog would refuse to eat, or , in our case, the squirrels.
One year, my neighbor made a casserole. it contained noodles, a bag of frozen mixed vegetables and peanut butter. Quite a lot of peanut butter.
Okay, now that I think of it, maybe the squirrels would have eaten it. But the dog wouldn't.

At any rate, he was concerned because of where the hotel was in relationship to the downtown.
I gave him my standard advice:
As long as it is not a by-the-hour or by-the-week, it is probably okay.

Then I thought, " Who am I to give advice?"
There was the hotel Larry and I stayed at when we were driving from New York to Cincinnati. We were moving because of his fellowship.
We drove and drove and drove.
There were traffic jams and delays, and at 2:30 in the morning, we still weren't there. We were somewhere in Ohio west of West Virginia and east of Columbus.
I was too tired to go any farther. I pulled out the AAA directory. It said there was a 3 star hotel just at the next exit.
The next exit was for a town I had never heard of, and I grew up in Ohio.
I drove a bit.
The town seemed dark, and then we saw it, a hotel, a few stories tall, older, brick.

We stopped, and crawled out of the car and into the lobby.
The desk clek looked at us, two very fatigued 20 somethings, and told us to go down the road about 15 more miles.

"You don't' have any rooms?"

"This is a residential hotel. You really should just go down the road, it won't take you more than 20 minutes."
I almost cried.
I told the man, "I can't , I just can't get back in the car and drive anymore. Please let us rent a room."
So for whatever little bit of money it was...this was 1987, he gave us a key to a room that had air-conditioning provided by the window that was propped open with an empty beer can, and a bathroom down the hall that we shared with only G-d knows how many other rooms.

Then there was the hotel when we were married.

Not where we were married, which is another story , altogether, but, I will make it really brief and say it was a paper plate wedding at a synagogue on Long Island. We were married in one end of the room and had a spread of food at the other end, complete with paper plates on tables we had set up the night before ( and with flower arrangements we had stuck together the night before) with the help of my sister Kim and our good friends, the Harringtons.

No, this hotel was for our guests.
We had a small wedding.
68 people.
that includes me and my husband, the rabbi and his wife and three "crashers".
We also had , in that small number, several people coming in from out of town, and we had to find a hotel and reserve a block of rooms.
This was in 1985.
Neither Larry nor I had a car and this was before God created the internet.

Okay, there was an internet, but I didn't know about it yet, or not really. Not enough to know how to get an email address,none-the-less look up anything.
So, I got the yellow pages and started calling all of the hotels that were less than an hour's drive from the synagogue.
Most of them were $200 a night, or $190.
And this was in 1985.
And, most of our family and friends didn't have that kind of money.
Well, most of my relatives and friends.
Larry didn't have any.
I mean he did.
He had both relatives and friends.
But not coming to our wedding.

I mean his friends came, but they were locals- or had been locals and had places to stay.
And his family didn't come, except for his parents and his grandparents ( who had told us that they were not coming, but I am still not counting them as wedding-crashers), because they were so upset he was ruining his life by marrying me.
I mean, his family didn't feel that way, his parents did. And his grandparents, so they had forbidden him to invite any of the other relatives.
So, the people staying at the hotel were all from my rather lop-sided "side".

Finally, after calling every hotel in the phone book on that part of Long Island, I found one that was only $65 a night.
The hotel was an easy drive from the synagogue, and none of our guests got lost on the way to our wedding, or back to the hotel afterwards.

And it provided no end of family enjoyment for many years ,afterwards.
Because, as one of my cousins loves to tell the story, she had always wanted to be able to tell people that her husband had once taken her to one of those by-the-hour hotels.
And now he had.

So, I really should have said to my nephew, "Ask anyone but me."
But I didn't.
After all, he is young and he too deserves a couple of good stories to tell.

Story of the Day 3/ 1/ 2013

Friday evening, we celebrated my husband's birthday.
I had bought a very chocolatey cake for him, and we had his cards and presents ready.
Since it was Shabbat, the presents were wrapped leaving an end open, or just stuffed into a gift bag.
We did this because on our Sabbath, we do not tear - including tearing wrapping paper to open gifts.
The package our son sent from New York had been carefully opened in advance , as well, by my husband, before the start of our Sabbath.

I should explain that Friday was not really my husband's birthday, but it was the most convenient day for him.

I know this, because I asked.

About a week before his actual calendar birthday, I asked, "What day would you like your birthday to be, this year?"
It ,may not be the most sentimental way to celebrate the date of his birth, but it is pragmatic, and in our house pragmatic always wins.
Always.

Thats is why, a month before his birthday, I carefully wrapped the present I had gotten for him and left it with our son, Aaron.
I left the card with him, as well.

Too many years, I have bought him or made him a card and a present; and then, at the last moment, had no idea at all what I had done with them.

One year, after finding the Father's Day card I had purchased for him enough years before that I no longer remembered what it said, I mailed it off to his office, in January, because I figured that if I stuck it aside to give him , on the upcoming Father's Day, he would certainly never get it.

On very rare occasions, cards and gifts turn up within the year.
Sometimes, they turn up during some sort of excavation ( translation: housecleaning effort) several years later , and they are so old that I have no idea what their buy-by date was.
This is probably why I stopped buying him gifts of chocolate.
That and the fact that I usually ended up eating the bulk of the chocolate.

Story of the Day 2/ 13/ 2013

My husband came home from work, gave me kiss and then made an announcement, "You are not going to believe this," he said," but we have been invited to dinner."

"That can't be," I replied in confusion, "no one likes us!"

There was a very brief pause while I considered what I had said.
"Well, no one likes me." I corrected.

Without any pause, my husband remarked, "Well, they don't' know you."

I suppose that would explain the invitation.

Story of the Day 2/ 15/ 2013

It happened again.

This time, Sarah told her teacher. I am not sure why she told her teacher, what led up to it in their conversation, but she told him.
He was incredulous.

Sarah was on the bus.
This is different, an actual change in what is an unchanging narrative. Until now, it has only ever happened in the classroom.
But Sarah was on the bus, Thursday, yesterday, getting ready to ride home.
A girl came and stood beside her.
Sarah looked up.

"Will you be my friend?"
The girl signed this out word by word, using her iPhone to check the signs she was using.

Who knows what Sarah really thought, when the girls asked this, but Sarah has been well trained and nodded her head, "Yes".

Sarah's teacher., Mr. H was incredulous. "But you're in high school."
"I know, but this happens . It has happened more than once."
And , Sarah added that the girl responded as the other girls who have asked her this question in the past have responded.
The girl became very excited.

The first time it happened, Sarah came home and told me, and Sarah thought that perhaps the girl who asked her was developmentally delayed or had some other special need, because, as she told me, at the Deaf school, kids don't' ask that once they are out of 3rd grade.
She asked me if Hearing people were "different".
Did they ask this of other kids even when they were in high school? A question that was seen as immature and uncool by her deaf peers.

"No," I told her, " Hearing people also stop asking that at some point in elementary school."

Despite this, every semester or two, a girl will come up ands ask Sarah exactly that same question.

And Sarah always nods her head ,"Yes."
This is because , if , in fact, the girl is developmentally delayed, it would be mean to answer otherwise.

But her teacher, Mr. H, still didn't believe it.
It was....really odd.
He did , however, advise Sarah that the next time it happened she should look very interested and maybe excitedly ask, "Do you like to kill cats?"

According to him, this will help to weed out a lot of .........

I am sure he is right. In fact, it is a brilliant suggestion.

Except think of the friends she will be left with.

Story of the Day 2/ 12/ 2013

The phone rang.
It was 4:43 PM.

It didn't used to be 4:43 PM. It used to be a quarter to 5, or 4:45, but then someone went and invented digital clocks and now telling the time in an excessively OCD manner has become normal. It has been at least 3 years since someone has told me it was a quarter to anything, when asked. At least.

I answered the phone.
There were three of us at home. but when it comes to answering the phone, usually, I am the only one who counts. This is not because they are lazy. In fact, there are numerous occasions when Aaron will run off eagerly to answer the phone, intoning, in his most mature voice, "Hello, this is the Margolis-Greenbaum household. How may I help you?"

This usually impresses people no end, until they realize he cannot hear what they say in response. This is because he is daef and struggles with most unfamiliar and even some familiar voices on the phone.
The reason that I am usually the only one to answer the phone is that he often doesn't wear his hearing aids in the house, and since Sarah is too deaf to use hearing aids, I am the only one who can hear the phone ringing, and therefore the only one who counts in terms of answering it.
So, off I ran and , at 4:43 Pm, picked it up, and answered, substantially less charmingly than my son, something along the line of "Hello?"

A woman, who sounded young- a generalization I make based on the fact that her voice was relatively high pitched and therefore hard for me to understand, asked, "May I please speak with Ah ah."
Okay, she did not really say that, but when you are hard of hearing, as I am , that is what you hear.

I was fairly sure that the breathing pattern was her saying "Sarah" and not "Aaron, but you cannot be sure based on breathing patterns alone, so I asked, " Do you want to speak with Aaron."
"I am calling to speak with Ayh ah/"
And I am pretty sure, now, from her response that she wants my daughter.
This tells me two things, the first one of which is that she has never met Sarah.
The second is that she is selling something. The question is what.

"May I ask who is calling?" I ask, innocently. Hey, I can do a good imitation on occasion.
" This is the United States Army."

I wasn't expecting that.

They must have gotten a list of students graduating and are calling around trying to get recruits for our all volunteer army.
I supposed I should be polite, in this situation. It isn't the same as if the credit card something or another is trying to talk her into transferring her balance to their card for the introductory low interest rate of 1% for the first $100 and at $23.7% for everything above that.

I politely explain, " I realize that you must not know Sarah, because you called here to speak with her on the telephone. Sarah is profoundly deaf and can neither hear the phone nor speak on it."

There was a very long moment of silence.
Make that something like 2 and half minutes. I was starting to wonder if she had become disconnected. I mean, the phone, the phone had become disconnected.

" I will take her off our list."

One more career option eliminated.

Story of the Day 2/ 10/ 2012

Another story which required an unusually long time to get permission to post:


Sarah is working on a group project in her Film and Animation class.
That means that she is working as part of a group.
As is usual, in these situations, group work involves things like "discussions".

The discussion, today, included talking about one of the characters in a video that they are developing. The character is a young man with Autism.
As part of the story, he needs to have car keys, or, at least, appear to have been driving a car.

One of the other students in the group didn't like this.
"Autistic people can't drive!"

"What do you mean Autistic people can't drive? " Sarah replied, "They can, just like people who have Learning Disabilities or are Deaf can drive!"

"Deaf people can't drive!"

"Deaf people can drive!", replied Sarah with great self-assurance.

The other girl was stunned. "They let Deaf people drive? But they can't hear horns!"
Sarah tried not to roll her eyes.
" There is nothing important involved with hearing horns. Most of the time, people who honk are just being obnoxious. And you can see flashing lights , in the case of an ambulance or firetruck."
The other girl sat there.
Stunned.

And for the first time in months, Sarah is feeling eager to hurry up and get her driver's license.
So the next time someone makes a dumb comment like this , she can pull her license out and stick it under their nose.