Author: Karen Putz

Time as I’ve known it
Doesn’t take much time to pass by me
Minutes into days
Turn into months
Turn into years
They hurry by me

I was cleaning out a drawer full of pictures and I came across an envelope with several pictures inside. The pictures were of Tod Morris and my husband, just a few weeks before Tod’s life ended.

As I gazed at the pictures, I started getting some flashbacks of memories. Tod was my husband’s buddy, a big guy with a huge smile and a distinctive laugh. As deaf as we were, we could pick out Tod’s laugh in a room full of people. He had a gutteral laugh, a series of “heh, heh, heh, heh” that would make you chuckle in response. Whenever someone would describe Tod to another person, they never failed to imitate his laugh using signs and facial expressions.

I met Tod when I was just learning to sign. I had just become profoundly deaf the summer before and was easily intimidated by my husband’s friends that first year. My husband’s friend Mike, also a buddy of Tod’s, was a speed demon with his mouth as well as his signing. Occasionally, Joe and Tod would interpret what Mike was saying/signing so that I could keep up.

Every Christmas break, Tod would hang out at Joe’s house and we would watch movies together. An athlete who was always in motion, Tod would poke at my stomach and berate me to do sit-ups. “Don’t you want to have a flat stomach like my girlfriend?” he would tease. I would just roll my eyes at him and suck in my stomach.

One year, we had gotten a video camera for Christmas. Kent, another friend of my husband’s was in town and the three of them started clowning around for the camera. We ended up with an impromptu “Don’t Do Drugs” commercial, with Tod providing the hilarious laughs.

As the years sailed by, we shared weddings and new additions to our families. Tod lived in St. Louis and we occasionally spent time together whenever they would travel to Michigan and Illinois to see his family.

Dreams full of promises
Hopes for the future
I’ve had many

Dreams I can’t remember now
Hopes that I’ve forgotten
Faded memories

Then one day, we received a message from Cathy, his wife. “Tod has cancer. He only has a couple of months to live.”

Tod had felt a lump in his neck early that summer. He was diagnosed with cancer in December of 2001. So early in 2002, we started making plans to head down to St. Louis to spend some time with Tod. His sister flew in from California and a bunch of us drove down. It was a magical weekend of memories and enjoying the time together. We played poker and reminisced about good times. Around midnight, we stood around looking outside. The snow had fallen and the moon was out. The trees glistened and everything had a surreal glow.

(From left to right: Tod’s sister, Kristy, Mark, Joe, Mike, Ron and Tod)

Still I love to see the sun go down
And the world go around
I love to see the morning as it steals across the sky
I love to remember
And I love to wonder why

The next morning, we all went for breakfast at the local Denny’s with a couple of St. Louis locals. We laughed, we chatted and connected. Little did we know that time was truly running out.

The next day, Tod went into the hospital. He received some terrible news.

He had just a month left.

We had talked about going to Disney World together, but we dashed those plans. Tod was too sick. Joe and I drove down for a final day with Tod at the end of February. It was a heartbreaking visit. On March 4, 2002 Tod passed away, just a few days shy of his birthday. His daughter Emily was three and his son Jason was just a few months old.

Today, Cathy, Emily and Jason are doing well and still living in St. Louis.

Tod Morris Memorial

(The quoted song is “Around and Around” by John Denver. The above picture was taken by one of Tod’s friends. Tod loved to be on the water and he loved to fish.)

I’m sure Bob Nardelli is laughing all the way to the bank. The Home Depot CEO was given the boot after six years of keeping Home Depot stores in their messy state. As a nice going-away present, the board gave Nardelli some parting money to the tune of 210 million bucks.

Why should I care?

Last year, Home Depot took up a large chunk of my time. A simple refund in the form of a store credit turned into weeks of store visits, which lead to this Epinion: No More Home Depot for Us! The final straw was a rude encounter with a manager who refused to give us the sale price on a product that was deceptively advertised as being on sale.

In the area where I live, Home Depot was the nearest home improvement store for several years. It was the default store that we ran to when we needed supplies to finish our basement. We learned to navigate the messy aisles in the same way we navigated around our home: by stepping over piles and squeezing around aisle displays to reach products.

As a result of our weeks of returning to the store to haggle for our refund, we were able to chat with employees and learned that the morale among employees was low. They pointed fingers at the CEO, who apparently came in cracking a whip and expecting performance with low reward. Someone forgot to tell Nardelli that the real problem is customer service and the inability to find a product in the store. Make your customers happy and they’ll keep returning.

Nardelli’s dismissal has come too late for our family.

We now shop at Lowes and Menards.

Good gosh, today is January 2nd. Already.

This year is flying by too fast.

On Sunday night, we had a couple of friends over to ring in the new year. It was one of those last minute affairs, with an email sent out a few days before. With the lack of babysitters, the logical solution was to just get together and bring all the kids. Everyone brought something to share and there was plenty of food to go around.

Food and friends, you can’t beat that combination.

As I was running around tossing buffalo wings into the oven and the other gals were filling up bowls and platters, I briefly thought back through the years to another New Year’s Eve party that I attended in high school. Everyone at this 1981 party had normal hearing. Most of the people there were from my swim team, including a guy that I absolutely adored. I was relatively comfortable with them, but the noisy environment and fast-flowing conversations meant that I couldn’t follow conversations. So I found myself social bluffing my way through conversations. Of course, with all the under-aged drinking going on, it was easy for everyone to simply assume that I had too much to drink and was just spacing out instead of talking. I felt like the “real” me was hidden because I wasn’t able to speak my mind or contribute to the group conversations.

I left that party wishing I had normal hearing.

Fast forward to Sunday’s party. Despite the shrieking of a dozen kids, the blaring of the tv and some loud voices, I’m able to have a conversation with everyone there. Everyone’s deaf, hard of hearing or a child of deaf/hard of hearing adults. We’re a mish-mash of communication modes, but everyone signs. There’s a comfort I can’t explain, but it must be the same ease that people with normal hearing have when they gather in groups as well; they’re not straining to “hear” or follow conversation. They’re not limiting their involvement in group conversation because of a physical inability to converse.

So on Sunday, I was able to argue the merits of investing in retail stock, discuss new recipes and debate the future without missing a word or straining to understand a conversation. Quite a long way from the high school party where I left feeling like a large chunk of my life was missing.

So here’s to 2007. If anyone reading this is feeling the same way that I did back in 1981– here’s to some new friendships and hoping that you will find a group of friends to connect with that will have you saying, “Ah, life is good.”

Happy Holidays to everyone!

We just returned from Michigan and Oak Forest, spending time with both sides of the family. I’m looking forward to having the kids at home for the next two weeks. The house is filled with the usual after-Christmas chaos, half of the stuff here and the other half there and one happy chew-anything dog who is getting into everything. The kids are already clamoring for batteries, screwdrivers and scissors and it’s only eight a.m.

I’m crawling back into bed instead.

When people ask me, “What do you do,” I usually reply that I work in early intervention. I work as a Deaf Mentor. The definition, from the Hearing and Vision Connections website is: Deaf Mentors are enrolled under Family Support, but are not credentialed. They are available to go into the home, ideally working in close coordination with a DT(Developmental Therapist)/Hearing provider, to share personal experiences, teach sign language or the family’s chosen method of communication, and introduce information about having a hearing loss, the Deaf community and Deaf culture.

I have been doing this for three years, serving about 25 families from birth to age three. I am seeing a major trend: the majority of families with babies with profound hearing loss are choosing implants. In Chicago recently, a seven-month old baby received two cochlear implants . Some of the kids with implants take right off with listening and spoken language. For others, it’s a slower process and the results are not as immediate. For some families, the implant does not work for their child.

I really do enjoy working with the variety of families on a weekly or monthly basis but I’m sometimes the resource of last resort. Sometimes I will receive referrals to families when the children are almost three. Some of the families are quite a distance from my home, so I’m often on the road for long periods of time. I’m self-employed, which means that I handle my own billing and take a tax write off on the number of miles I commute.

The most rewarding aspect of the job is seeing the communication and language development that happens with each child and family. I love it when a mom or dad tells me, “My child said/signed ‘I love you!’”

Steven, my youngest kiddo, had a basketball game on Saturday and we headed over to the gym a few minutes before game time. The night before, he came up to me and said, “I don’t want to go to the game, Mom.”

So we sat down to talk about it.

Turns out, he becomes extremely nervous before the games. He’s an excellent athlete, but the jumbling of nerves gets in the way of his playing skill. “I don’t want to play basketball anymore,” he declared.

My heart sank. I knew that he really loved to play because he was a totally different kid at the local YMCA, when playing for fun with his family. What was really going on? Could it be, I suspected, the difficulty with understanding what was being said during the game?

Steven has a moderate-to-severe hearing loss. He is able to use his voice well, which leads others to think that he can understand conversation at every level in every situation.

Not so.

Let me share my experience. I teach a class in Conversational Sign Language at the local community college. A few weeks ago, we combined classes with another instructor and showed a video by Peter Cook. During the discussion afterwards, a question about varying types of hearing loss came up. I explained that I was completely deaf without my hearing aids but that my hearing aids gave me access to environmental sounds. I rely almost 100% on lipreading in conversations.

“But how can that be,” asked one student. “You speak so well.”

So I asked the student to say something to me while I turned around. “Eye Are a oyee ahin ee ah.”

Turns out she said, “Hi Karen, thank you for teaching class.”

The student had a speechless look on her face. Suddenly, she understood what things sounded like to me and how much information had to be delivered visually for communication.

I hear mostly vowels. Lipreading/speechreading gives me visual clues which I piece together with the sounds coming in and fill in the blanks by understanding the context of what is being said. You can read more about it here: Yo, I’m Deaf!

While Steven hears much better than I ever did while growing up, I suspected that he was losing his ability to discriminate words. I was right; a recent hearing test showed that his ability to understand words by hearing alone dropped to about 38 percent.

It was too late to grab an interpreter for Saturday’s game so I talked with the coach. I explained about the drop in Steven’s ability to comprehend speech. The coach shared that he was totally deaf in one ear, something that he didn’t tell us before. So he took Steven aside and told him and Steven’s face lit up. He suddenly had a connection with the coach that he didn’t have before and it seemed to put him at ease a bit.

Yet, the jumble of nerves was still there as Steven started the game. I had to sit back and remind myself that he was kid, that perhaps this would be the same thing we’d face even if he had normal hearing. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out the difference.

But anyway, let me brag. Steven’s team won the game and he made one beautiful, swish shot from near the three-point line.

That’s my boy.

On Saturday night, ten of us from the BookHands book club gathered at my house for our annual holiday party.

The book for the night was Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog a beautifully-written story about a loveable yellow lab named Marley. Everyone gave it a thumbs up, including the gals who never had a dog as a pet.

During the discussion, we shared stories of our own pets. One of the gals, Patti, brought in pictures of her dogs. Years ago, she owned a lab named Penny, who was so like Marley that she felt she could have written the same book. She was newly married and her husband wasn’t particularly fond of Penny. One day, Penny tugged at some newspaper on the floor and tipped over a can of white paint that was loosely covered. Paint seeped into the wooden floor. Patti cleaned up the paint the best she could, but they ended up refinishing the floor. Her husband wasn’t too pleased, but over the years, he learned to accept Penny as part of the family.

If there’s one book that you buy for the holidays– pick up Marley and Me. I enjoyed this book so much that I had to share an Epinion: Marley and Me, Your Heart Will Be Captured.

On another note, this weekend was a weekend of splurging on chocolate and cookies in a major way. Lauren attended a birthday party where the girls made cookies for several hours. Here’s what she brought home:

Needless to say, there isn’t much left on Monday morning.