Unit 3: Selection Vocabulary 1

My sister was always less easily intimidated than I was, and while she kept a stubborn silence, I said, “Thank you,” in a very tiny voice.

At that age, if one’s name is changed, one develops a curious form of dual personality. I remember having a certain detached and disbelieving concern in the actions of “Cynthia,” but certainly no responsibility.

Premila followed more sedately, and she told me on the way home never to do that again in front of the other children.

I walked more and more slowly, and shouted to Premila, from time to time, “Wait for me!” with increasing peevishness.

When Mary tried to run her fingers through her hair as she saw others do, her fingers became hopelessly captured by the curls: Hair, she deduced, must grow in loops, out of our head at one point, back into it at another.

I believe we belong to the circle and, for our survival, we will return in one way or another to renew those rhythms of life out of which our sense of self has emerged.

Together in a moment out of ordinary time, we paused in the little opening at the wooden grave houses, oblivious to the wood ticks, which must later be picked carefully from our clothes and our flesh, oblivious to the buzzing of mosquitoes or sand flies, oblivious as well to the more trivial tensions of contemporary politics.

...I recognize not only the alphabet and the parts of the English sentence, but the silhouetted form of the shipoke and the intricate language of a beaver’s teeth and tail.

But for my other education, practical and spiritual, I have no grades or degrees, no certificates to commemorate the annual rituals. I have some tangibles of those processes—a jingle dress, fans of feathers, sometimes photos—but mostly I have stories, dreams, and memories.

Absorbed by my computer screen, I do not notice when my manager enters the room, much less when he starts talking.

Lipreading, on which I rely for most social interaction, is an inherently tenuous mode of communication.

Since I entered a mainstreamed public school in first grade, there have been no other deaf people occupying center stage in my life.

Encountering people who are nervous about lipreading gives me a strange complex.

When the connection clicks, when I can read the curve and flow of a person's face, my ebullience soars.