Janice and Me

I have sprung my daughter Janice from Texas to live with me. Tonto was our guide just ahead of the posse. It was high noon when we hopped on the last train to Yuma. Janice will be sixty in four months. We had to persuade the border guards neither one of us were seeking an abortion.

Of course, none of her getaway happened this way except in my fevered mind. Janice and her dear friend Paula drove out of the regressive state with no hail of bullets. Texas is where everyone carries a gun to protect themselves from everyone else who carries a gun. Texas is ruled by boys in the back room, card sharps and cattle rustlers, by puerile men who didn’t listen to their school marms yet who think they know what’s best for women, their possessions.

Janice is looking after me with all her pluck and spunk. I lost my zest and zeal somewhere along the way except for an occasional shout on the page. She is here to steady me when I jump to conclusions. It happens that way at a certain age.

She has much to teach me.  My impulse to rescue her from life’s labyrinth no longer holds since I’m as lost as she is. Seldom is heard a discouraging word. My daughter hears with her eyes reading my lips and speaks with her hands to her friends. When she makes her calls it is to a screen with her orchestrating fingers flying like butterflies. Over the years Janice has become familiar with the walls of this world and how to climb them. She has reminded me that she is not hearing impaired. She is simply Deaf.  The skies are not cloudy all day.

After nearly forty years on her own journey, she returns carrying a strange mix of elemental wonder and wounds from indifference of the marketplace. Isn’t that the same marriage of irreconcilable forces we all grapple with? How to keep our humanity alive in the midst of an uncaring society?

We are here for each other with our respective lanterns in the shadows. To see the deer and the antelope play. There are, to be sure, moments of exasperation. Never having learned how to sign, I live with that shame. There are now apps available which print my voice. We manage. I think of all the voices in my years I have been deaf to. I bear witness with amazement to Janice's dance through life.