I CAN VISUALLY HEAR YOU!

I CAN VISUALLY HEAR YOU!

While in college, sitting in a lab, writing notes from a lecture was most difficult. Not being able to hear, I had to finds ways to improvise to make up for the lack of hearing. I was extending myself beyond the realm of possibility and using visual clues, some lip reading and textbooks that when combined, along with the professor’s body language when he/she had any was my only hope.

My social life was a complete bust. There was no time for any, I didn’t have the money and I couldn’t afford the time since I was so busy trying to catch up with the work I might have missed in class and lectures. Coming from a modest home, there was no money unless I earned it, and earned it I did. I usually work one or two jobs, depending on the day of the week, when the class schedule dictated my time off from classes. It seemed every night I worked well into the night, because I got home from a job at a supermarket, maybe slept for an hour and jumped on a train to sleeping to school the next morning. The train was at 5:30 A.M., because I needed to go into the city, switch trains and turn around and come back out again to another part of the island and make an 8:00 A.M. class or lab, jump off the train and hitch-hike a couple of miles to the campus, in the snow, rain and cold or oppressive heat of the early fall. While I hitched a ride, I would be carrying as camera with a tripod, books, art supplies and portfolio case, about 30” x 40”.

Somehow I managed to do the impossible, and I doubt that anyone believes me in this, but it is all the truth. Coming home at night, it was as difficult as it was in the morning. But things got better for me on a Friday night, my brother-in-law John, God bless him, would come around 6:30 or & o’clock and give me a ride home to his house, where my Dad would pick me up and take me home.