School Bus Education Series: Part 3 by Josh

Since my 3 siblings have all written blogs about our childhood, I figured I’d guest blog, too. I be Josh, the involuntarily labeled yet self-actualized black sheep of the Boyd offspring. Second oldest but last in charge. My 4th grade teacher Mrs. Carlson once asked me, “Why can’t you be like your brother James?” This single question started my path down the wide road that leadeth to destruction according to the Good Book. Thanks for that, Mrs. Carlson. This single question also sparked my lifelong disdain for the Red Sox (Mrs. Carlson was a fan). However, I digress.

As my sisters alluded to in earlier blogs, we all endured our fair share of trials and tribulations on the bus. Twice a day, one or more of us interacted with kids of the sordid type: girls that wore fake nails, makeup and short skirts and guys who listened to Rock-n-Roll and Roll, cursed at every opportunity, gambled with their lunch money and looked at their dads’ porn. Needless to say, I knew all of these abominations were strictly forbidden inside the hallowed walls of the Boyd Compound of Fundamental Christianity. When I first set foot on the bus I felt like Pinocchio must have felt when he arrived on Pleasure Island (but before he started turning into a donkey). I had access to all of the forbidden fruit and I could eat—as long as James didn’t find out. The bus was a mobile Sodom and Gomorrah, a Pleasure Island on wheels, and I sampled almost all of the fruit the Island had to offer.

Of all the forbidden fruits I tasted on the bus, the most delicious by far was Rock-n-Roll. Not just any sort of Rock-n-Roll, mind you, Heavy Metal Rock-n-Roll. Unfortunately, I had to keep my newfound snack a secret. Notwithstanding Phil and Syl’s deafness, their fundamentalist Baptist leanings made them hyper-aware of sins of an auditory origin. These auditory sins were things that their hearing church brethren informed them were sinful. Chief among these sins was Rock-n-Roll. In Phil and Syl’s minds, all music fell into one of two categories: Rock-n-Roll and Christian. If music was deemed to be Rock-n-Roll, it was forbidden on the Compound.

Phil and Syl devised a three-prong test to determine which category the proposed music fell into: (1.) Do we sing it in church?; (2.) Is it sold it in the church bookstore?; and (3.) Does James approve? If the answer to any of these questions was “no,” it was Rock-n-Roll and tantamount to Satan worship, according to Phil and Syl. Period. Sadly, this three-prong test weeded out all of what I considered to be enjoyable music. Anything with electric instruments or drums (the core of Rock-n-Roll according to Phil) was quickly disapproved and labeled as ungodly. This was true even if the artist was a self-proclaimed Christian musician. What made matters worse was the fact that we didn’t have a lot of money so I wasn’t able to purchase my own heavy metal cassette tapes. Even if I could, I wouldn’t dare try to smuggle home a cassette. Where would I hide it? What would happen if Phil and Syl found it? Or James the narc for that matter… too risky. Eventually I enlisted the help of my friend Tim.

Tim and I were in the same grade and lived only blocks apart. We rode the same bus and sat together most of the time. Tim, though labeled by most adults as a “bad apple,” was an awesome friend because he came with a walkman. Walkmans were also forbidden in on the Compound as they provided access to… wait for it…. Rock-n-Roll radio stations (insert collective gasp here). At some point I discovered a small, easily concealed and inexpensive piece of technology called a “double jack.” The double jack enabled the walkman headphone port to support two (2) sets of headphones. Armed with this discovery and several weeks’ allowance (I received a small wage for my slave labor at the Compound), I purchased a double jack and a pair of ear buds for my listening pleasure. Being the good friend that he was, Tim agreed to allow me to plug in my double jack as long as I sat next to the window and supplied an occasional battery. I remember listening to Tim’s heavy metal mixed tape for the first time with my new ear buds. I had never heard such melodious sounds. The drums, guitars and screaming vocals were almost too much. It was like a drug and I wanted more. Tim exposed me to bands like Motley Crüe, Poison, Skid Row, Iron Maiden, Metallica and my personal favorite, Guns and Roses. In 7th grade, I bought my own walkman. Because the walkman led to auditory sin, I had to endure an intense Spanish Inquisition-esque screening process before Phil and Syl eventually approved the purchase.

From then on, whenever I wanted to add music to my growing collection of contraband, all I had to do was take one of James’s Christian cassette tapes, put a little piece of tape over one of the holes and copy over it with the Heavy Metal artist of my choice.

I guess if there’s a moral to this story, it’s that… umm… well there’s no moral. Drive your kids to school. The bus is a cradle of filth and a den of iniquity that I will never let my kids ride. The End.

Share

Left Behind: By Jemina.

As adults, we all have certain fears we’d like to conquer--fear of heights, fear of failure, fear of clowns, and whatnot. One of my fears is the fear of being left behind. This fear has been rooted deep within my soul due to several instances as a child that at left me paralyzed with fear. You see, being the baby of the family had its pros and cons. I was more spoiled, it’s true, but that’s more because the novelty of child rearing had worn off by the time I arrived, and Syl just didn’t have it in her to tell me “no” most of the time. Syl’s child-rearing fatigue syndrome also led her to delegate. A lot. In fact, Syl delegated my supervision to my sister Joy much of the time. Unfortunately, this usually resulted in my being wholly unsupervised whenever an imaginary game of “Pioneers” was started (see Davy Crockett entry below). Joy would tear up the stairs to her bedroom like a bat out of hell, grab her rifle and jam that coonskin hat on her greasy mullet so fast, I was alone before I knew what had happened. Over time, I grew used to Joy leaving me alone at home, but the problems started when her absenteeism in public created some unfavorable situations for me.

Although church services on Sunday began at 8:30 in the morning and lasted until noon, we were often forced to remain on hallowed ground as the deaf congregation all clamored for Phil and Syl’s attention. It was not uncommon for a disgruntled parishioner to, in a flurry of hand movements, demand to know something relatively trivial, such as why so and so brought deviled eggs for the potluck and not jello salad like requested? Or why so and so kept their stinky baby in the service instead of leaving and changing their kid’s turd-filled diaper? While Phil and Syl were putting out fires indoors, we kids were usually outside playing tag or running amuck in some form or fashion. We’d play until we heard Syl screaming our names in rapid succession (she refused to actually go and look outside for us) and we’d all load up in our 1985 Ford Club Wagon van and drive home. However, since I was the youngest and most persecuted, I would often go and play by my lonesome to avoid the ridicule that was most assuredly waiting for me wherever Joy and Josh were. Consequently, there were times when I wouldn’t hear Syl’s roll call and everyone would clamber into the van, Joy would fail to mention I wasn’t in the vehicle, and off everyone went back to the house without me.

Sometimes Syl did not realize I was missing until we approached the house. Sometimes, though, it wasn’t until everyone sat down to eat lunch that she discovered I had yet to make an appearance. However, no matter the time of said discovery, there was no effort made to go and retrieve me. Phil and Syl, ever the pragmatists, figured that the bus that took the inner-city kids to and from church would also take me home. This happened so often that it almost became a routine for me to seek out the cluster of poorly-dressed children (a category in which I fit myself), tell the bus driver my plight, and ride along, a beacon of paleness amongst the Caucasian, Hispanic, and African- American masses.

My agony doesn’t end there, my friends. Due to the fact that I was raised in a strict Independent Baptist household (re: compound), we were constantly reminded that “THE END WAS NIGH.” This meant that the Rapture was sure to happen any day or hour. If you were sinful, of course, you wouldn’t be Rapturetized and would be left on earth to suffer the pestilence, flames, and famine of the Tribulation. One of Joy’s greatest pleasures in life was to tell me that I wouldn’t be Rapturetized because I was a snotty-nosed kid who often disobeyed my parents, even though my disobedience was, more often than not, at her suggestion (an evil ploy to keep me out of heaven? I sincerely wonder). As I was far too simple-minded to figure out Joy was a pathological liar, I tended to believe that I’d better shape up or else I wouldn’t be shipped up to heaven. Now, readers, place yourself in my already overgrown feet as a 6 year old--you’re minding your own business outside of church on a Sunday afternoon, trying to avoid the bullies who happen to be your own brother and sister, and all of a sudden BAM! Everyone around you is gone. Panic sets in as you conclude everyone’s been Rapturetized, and who, exactly, is going to take care of you? Scary, isn’t it? Welcome to my childhood.

I eventually realized that being left everywhere was not attributable to The Rapture, nor to the fact that my parents hated me, but merely to the combination of a large family and an older sister who wished she were the youngest. But don’t think that just because I’m old enough to drive myself places, I don’t have my oldest brother (still the most devout person I know) on speed dial just in case I have a Rapture-related panic attack. I may be older, but I still am terrified of being left behind.

Share

Can I Get a Woo-Woo? By Guest Blogger, James (The Eldest).

I’m James, the eldest of the Boyd brood. Throughout our childhoods and even today the Boyd kids are routinely asked what it was like growing up with deaf parents. We used to say we didn’t know because we didn’t know any different. On closer examination, however, we all have realized that our upbringing was startlingly different from our friends’ upbringings. During our youth, the four of us adapted to our environment and utilized our senses to pick up on any social cues necessary to survive in the “hearing” world to make up for the lack thereof at home. Sometimes these social cues came too late and some form of public humiliation usually ensued. This is the story of one such occasion.
There are a number of words in the English language that describe sounds or serve as identifiers for sound. Most of you know where I’m going with this. Having deaf parents (“Phil and Syl” to all you frozen sandwiches fans out there) meant that the Boyd children often were not privy to the proper words for certain sounds. Thus, we were forced to: (a) make up our own; or (b) rely on the butchered pronunciation of our aforementioned deaf parents. Phil and Syl will admit that their subpar (I’m mostly picking on Syl here) pronunciation skills are the result of years of wasted sessions with ineffectual speech therapists who were convinced that they could save the world one deaf child at a time. Don’t believe me? Here’s an example. For years we referred to the “foyer” in our home as the “folly” simply because that’s what my parents called it. Who were we as children to question those who had given us life and took care of our most basic needs?!?
Enter the siren, that colorful, rotating device that sits atop most emergency vehicles. Growing up in the ‘hood, we came to regard the frequent blaring of sirens as a nighttime lullaby. As the eldest (I was 5 or 6 at the time), I decided that the proper name for this curious light-emitting device was “woo-woo.” I instinctively knew that because this was an object that emitted sound, my parents could offer no valuable insight on this issue and it was up to me to educate my younger siblings, specifically my not so bright (in my opinion) 3 year old brother, Josh. This new vocabulary word served us well as we interacted in our home; however, that would all change one fateful day.
My world was rocked one sweltering summer day when Josh and I left our non-air-conditioned home with Syl and headed with her to work. That summer, Syl had procured part-time employment at the neighborhood, emphasis on the hood, YMCA. This dilapidated building had a room where members could drop off their impish offspring to be “cared for” by someone else while they exercised. Syl would smile at the unsuspecting parents as they dropped off their screaming little ones, taking the ear-splitting cries with remarkable ease and then placing the upset child amidst a pile of toys and returning, unfazed, to her book du jour. My brother and I passed the time playing with toys and amusing ourselves in various ways (I once got a battery-powered car wrapped in some little girl’s hair and Syl had to cut it out). One toy that we were particularly fond of was an ambulance complete with, you guessed it, woo-woo’s. One day, Josh and I had befriended another boy about our age and we were playing with the aforementioned ambulance when the following exchange occurred:
Josh, with great excitement: I love woo-woo’s!!!
Friend, puzzled: Woo-woo’s?
Josh (looking expectantly at his older brother and replying confidently): Yeah, woo- woo’s!!!.
Fancying myself a bright child, I immediately picked up on my newfound friend’s perplexed response to my brother’s reference to woo-woo’s and quickly concluded that this kid probably had hearing parents and, given our neighborhood, had an accurate name for these flashing things. At that moment I had a decision to make. Do I: (a) defend my brother’s honor and announce flatly that these were in fact woo-woo’s and that any suggestion otherwise would be preposterous . . . or (b) throw my brother under the bus and claim the true English word for woo-woo thereby sparing myself any future embarrassment?!? Here’s how the rest of that exchange went down:
James, to Josh: woo-woo’s?
Friend, to James: Those are sirens.
James, to Josh, with a sarcastic and knowing look to my newfound friend: Yeah dummy, those are sirens!!!
Josh and I never spoke of the incident but we both learned some valuable lessons that day. First, if you want to know the word for something that makes a sound, don’t ask your deaf parents—ask a trusted friend with hearing parents. Second, if you’re going to make a word up, don’t use it in public. Lastly, you must assume your brother will not think twice about throwing you under the bus if he has an opportunity to avoid humiliation at your expense.

Share

Cans For Cash! By Joy.

The Boyd Family’s socio-economic status can best be explained in the form of a simple math equation: Phil (preacher) + Syl (housewife) + 4 kids = negative money. Some parents tell their kids they’re not made of money, but they don’t mean it and their kids know it. When Phil and Syl told us they weren’t made of money, we believed them (see equation, above). For those of you who read about my quest to become Mrs. Davy Crockett, you must have wondered how a family that tap danced on the poverty line swung a trip to the happiest place on earth. Sit back, dear reader, and prepare to be amazed.

As a nerdy kid growing up in a steadily declining neighborhood in downtown Rochester, New York, I learned quickly about the value of a pop can* (*To all my Southern friends: “pop” = yankee-speak for Coke). In New York, each pop can was worth 5¢--a paltry sum, unless it was combined with hundreds, nay thousands, of other pop cans. This simple principle was the impetus for Syl’s plan to get the Boyd Family to Disney World. Ever the dreamer, Syl was convinced that we could collect enough pop cans to pay for our family to go to Disney World. Many scoffed at her idea (ahem, Phil), but I, in my childlike naïveté, thought it was a brilliant idea! I had no idea how many pop cans it would take to get our family to Disney World, but I was certain we would make it. And thus the journey began.

While a family of six is certainly a good start in terms of a labor force, Syl knew that Operation Disney World would require many more hands. We were, after all, on a time crunch. The Deaf Baptist Bible Conference in Orlando was only four (4) months away! Plus, our family of six wasn’t exactly the ideal worker pool. Jemina was three at the time and, let’s face it, essentially useless. James, Josh and I were 11, 9, and 7 respectively, and, though we were energetic and motivated, we were constrained by school, homework, and early bed times. Enter the Deaf Ministry. At this point in my childhood, Phil was a deaf pastor who had his own deaf ministry. I still don’t know how Syl managed it, but she somehow convinced the congregation to join her cause. Maybe the parishioners viewed the Boyd children (and perhaps me in particular) as a homely lot and they took pity on us. Or maybe Syl took some liberties with the Word and insinuated that their place in heaven might be jeopardized if they didn’t do “God’s Work.”

According to the gospel of Syl, God’s work meant following her to local schools, community colleges and universities in search of the holy trinity of pop cans: Coke, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper products. Twice a week, I would go to bed as Phil and Syl gathered a group of volunteers in our living room and mapped out the locations to be hit that night. Week after week I begged to be allowed to join them. My motive was twofold: one, to collect tons of pop cans and thereby get to Disney World that much sooner; and two, to escape my ridiculously early bedtime of 7:30 p.m. After weeks of nagging Phil and Syl, they finally let me accompany them on a late night excursion. On a school night. A double victory! On this particular night, the target was Rochester Institute of Technology, a huge university with hundreds of trash cans and receptacles with untold numbers of shiny cans inside.

When we arrived on campus, we split up into groups of three to five people and fanned out. I was in Syl’s group. Up and down the dimly lit halls we marched in search of our treasure. When a garbage can full of loot was spotted, furious hands movements, flickering light switches, and unmistakable shrieks of delight ensued. Unfortunately, most of the cans were not situated at the top of the garbage can, awaiting our arrival. Rather, the cans were usually buried under a pile of crumpled paper, discarded food, empty water bottles, and the like. For reasons unclear to me now, I always volunteered to burrow deep into the garbage can and go after the cans located in the receptacle’s deepest recesses. Although I was of above-average height even then, I required a little assistance in this regard. Said assistance came in the form of two volunteers hoisting me up and lowering me into the can, by the ankles while I rummaged around, grabbing three or four cans, then wiggling my legs to request an extraction (I couldn’t ask to be lifted out; these are deaf people, remember?). And so this process continued in the empty classrooms and break rooms, the lavatories and the common areas, me being lowered into each garbage can, rummaging, releasing, and repeating, until I was fully satisfied that I had fully excavated the last aluminum nickel and emerged, glasses smudged, she-mullet matted, satisfied, syrupy and sticky up to the elbows.

Slowly but surely, each passing week, we grew steadily closer to our goal. Each week Syl would announce our monetary take for the week, along with the total amount collected thus far. After four long months, Syl announced that we had finally reached our magic number: $3,000.00. To save you some needless mental exercise, $3,000.00 equals 60,000 pop cans. Impressive, eh? Luckily, my brothers and I were too young to realize that we and our parents looked like homeless vagabonds every time we passed a trash can and one of us rooted through its contents. Unfortunately, Syl’s crusade forever imprinted the idea that cans = cash in my brain. At this very second, I have a trash bag pregnant with cans in a kitchen cabinet. I tell myself that I am being responsible, that I am going to recycle them. Soon. I know that I can’t get 5¢ apiece for them because Alabama doesn’t care enough about the environment to bribe her citizens to recycle. Still, I think I subconsciously resent that fact and I continue to hoard my cans for no apparent reason. Thanks for nothing, Syl! The End.

Share

An Insincere Apology. By Jemina, On Behalf of Joy.

Dear Readers,

This week's blog was to be provided by Joy, but as her 1980's wooden computer crashed while an impending trial sucks the life out of her, there will be no blog this week. You may voice your complaints in the comments section below to encourage her to get a new computer that doesn't include a trial version of AOL.

I look forward to your comments!