This is a story about a thirty-one-year-old father, a brown-eyed little girl named Hazel, and what one small town can become when one person refuses to let a child grow up in silence. Read it slowly. The last paragraph is the one I want you to read twice.
The Diagnosis
Marcus Ellery was twenty-nine when his daughter Hazel was born. He was a maintenance technician at a small ski lodge in the central Green Mountains of Vermont. His wife had left the marriage when Hazel was nine weeks old.
The reasons were her own. They are not part of this story.
What is part of this story is that Marcus, by the time Hazel was six months old, was raising her alone in a small rented house on a back road, working overnight shifts at the lodge when he could find a neighbor to sit with her, and spending almost every waking minute he was not at work in the small upstairs bedroom Hazel slept in, talking to her about whatever he could think of to talk about.
He talked to her about the weather. He talked to her about the maple trees in the yard. He talked to her about the make and model of every truck that drove past the kitchen window. He talked to her, his mother later remembered, in the soft constant way that single parents talk to babies when there is nobody else in the house to break the silence.
At fourteen months old, Hazel was diagnosed as profoundly deaf.
The Brochure
The pediatric audiologist in Burlington handed Marcus two things at the end of that appointment. The first was a glossy brochure about cochlear implant surgery. The second was a small index card on which she had written the phone number of a Deaf community advocacy group in northern New England.
Marcus, who had not finished college and who knew almost nothing about deafness, sat in his truck in the hospital parking lot for forty minutes before he drove home. He read the brochure three times. He turned the card over and looked at the phone number.
What he did next is the part of the story that the audiologist, who has retold it perhaps fifty times to medical residents in the years since, says she has never quite gotten over.
He threw the brochure in the trash bin outside the hospital.
And then he drove home and called the phone number on the index card.
Why He Made the Choice He Made
Marcus has explained this, in the eight years since, only to a small number of people. He has explained it carefully because he knows that the question of cochlear implants is a deeply personal one and that many families make the opposite choice for reasons that are entirely their own.
What he said, the one time he was asked about it in front of a camera by a small local news station, was this:
"I did not want my daughter to grow up thinking she had been born wrong. I wanted her to grow up knowing that the world would learn her language, because she deserved to be spoken to."
He paused for a long time after he said it. Then he said:
"I figured I would start with myself."
The First Year
Marcus did not know any sign language. He did not know anyone in his town who knew any sign language. He worked nights. He had a one-year-old. He had no money for classes.
So he ordered, through the public library in the next town over, a set of three instructional DVDs and a beginner's textbook on American Sign Language. He set up a small mirror on the kitchen table. He started, in the early hours of the morning after his shifts at the lodge, signing in the mirror for twenty minutes a day.
By the time Hazel was two, Marcus could carry a basic conversation in ASL.
By the time she was three, he was driving forty-five minutes each way every Saturday morning to attend a weekend signing meetup for Deaf adults in Montpelier. He was the only hearing person there, and the only one with a small brown-haired girl in his lap, and he learned more in those Saturday mornings than he had learned in the previous two years of DVDs.
By the time Hazel was four, the Deaf adults at the meetup had started, gently and without quite saying it out loud, treating Marcus like one of their own.
The Daycare
The problem came when Hazel turned four and Marcus needed to put her into preschool.
The nearest preschool that had any kind of accommodation for Deaf children was an hour and ten minutes from their house. Marcus could not drive her there and back twice a day and still keep his job. The local preschool — the one all of Hazel's neighborhood friends attended, a small church-run program in the basement of the Methodist church two streets over — had never had a Deaf child enrolled. The director was warm, willing, and honest. She said she had no idea how to communicate with Hazel. She said she did not want to take the spot if she could not give Hazel what she needed.
Marcus thanked her. He drove home. He sat at his kitchen table that night and he did the math on a piece of grocery-store receipt paper.
The math was this: if he taught two preschool teachers basic ASL — a week of evenings, maybe a month at most — Hazel could attend the local preschool. The math was also this: if he taught the other twelve children in Hazel's preschool class basic ASL, she would have friends she could actually speak to.
The next morning he called the church preschool director back.
He asked her if she would let him teach a class.
How It Spread
The first class met on a Tuesday evening in the church basement. Two preschool teachers and four parents showed up. Marcus had prepared a single sheet of paper with the signs for fifteen common preschool words on it. He taught them all of them, including the sign for friend, which is two hooked index fingers meeting in the middle, and the sign for please, which is a flat hand moving in a small circle on the chest.
By the third week, twenty parents were showing up.
By the third month, the class had been moved out of the church basement and into the cafeteria of the town's elementary school, because the basement could no longer hold everyone. Two of the original parents — both retired schoolteachers — had started teaching their own beginner classes on the other side of town to handle the overflow.
By the time Hazel turned five and started kindergarten, every single teacher and aide at her elementary school had completed at least the beginner class.
By the time she turned six, every child in her grade had learned enough basic ASL to play with her at recess.
By the time she turned seven, the small grocery store on Main Street had started running a hand-drawn sign in the window during the holiday season that read, in both English and ASL diagrams: We speak Hazel's language here.
Where Things Stand
Marcus Ellery is now thirty-seven. He still works at the ski lodge, though he is now the head of maintenance and his shifts are during the day. He still attends the Saturday signing meetup in Montpelier, though he is now one of the people teaching the newer hearing parents who come in for the first time and sit nervously in the back.
Hazel is now eight years old. She is in third grade. She is described by her teacher as "the most confident child I have ever taught" and by her grandfather as "the only person in this family who can win an argument with her father."
According to a small study conducted last year by a graduate student at the University of Vermont — who had read about Marcus in a regional newspaper and reached out to him — the small Vermont town where Marcus and Hazel live now has, by a meaningful margin, the highest per-capita rate of conversational ASL fluency of any zip code in the United States.
The graduate student wanted to interview Marcus for her thesis. He agreed, on the condition that the thesis not use his last name.
The thesis was published anyway, with his name redacted. It is twenty-three pages long. The dedication page reads, simply, For H.
What I Want You to Read Twice
The last time a reporter asked Marcus about all of this — last December, for a small follow-up piece in a state magazine — he was asked whether he had ever, in the eight years since the diagnosis, regretted the choice he made in the parking lot of that hospital.
He thought about it for a long time.
Then he said:
"My daughter does not know what it feels like to be the only person in a room who cannot understand what everyone else is saying. She has never known that, in her entire life. I do not think she will ever know it. That is the thing I made with my hands."
He looked down at his hands when he said it.
Then he looked back up and he smiled, and he said the last sentence of the interview, which the reporter said was the only sentence she had not been able to write down without her own hands shaking:
"And the town learned to speak to her. The whole town. So that she would never be alone in a conversation. Not once. Not for the rest of her life."
