[After Wisdom.]
We are driving in the car. Or, more specifically, I am driving. My wife has just had all four of her wisdom teeth removed, and she is fairly groggy.
The wisdom teeth are huge. I am amazed that things this large can reside in a human jaw. We have them with us in a plastic baggy. They are a gift from the dentist, and my wife plans to take them to show to her students at school.
My wife's jaw is still numbed, so she cannot talk. Also, she has gauze pads in her mouth to help stop the bleeding. I am supposed to change these when we get home. My wife is worried that I will faint. I tell her, "You are not a frog, and I am not trying to pith you." That is what caused me to faint last time. I do not work in biology labs anymore.
We try to have a conversation. My wife knows how to fingerspell. I am vaguely familiar with the concept. We stop at a light.
My wife fingerspells something. I try to guess the letters. She curls all of her fingers to her palm except for her index finger, which she holds out straight and horizontal.
"P," I guess. She shakes her head. "Q."
It is neither. "Geeegh," she says.
"Oh," I say. "G."
She changes the shape of her hand.
"E," I say. "A."
She moves her hand so that I can see that she has made an O.
She does this again. "O, O," I say. "B."
It is not a B. It is a D. Then she makes a J, which I remember, an O, which I just saw, and what I suppose is a B, and it makes sense, so I say "Good Job!"
My wife points back at the dentist's office. "They did a good job!" I say. I am very proud of myself.
She nods. Then she spells F-R-E-E-Z-I-N-G. I know the R, the I, the N, and the G. The F, I mistake for a B, and the E and Z are just wild guesses. Actually, I guess B for all of the open hand shapes, and E for all of the closed fists. We turn onto the highway.
"You're freezing?" I ask. She shakes her head. "There is freezing stuff?" My wife points back at the dentist's office, now four miles away, and then points at her arm, where the IV was. "They gave you freezing stuff in your arm?" I ask. She seems to nod, so I assume that we have advanced our conversation by another sentence. "They'll do that," I say. It is like wading through quicksand.
"Deaf people must not converse in the car much," I say. We merge with another highway and drive south out of town.
"R-O-B-O-T," say my wife's hands.
"Robot?" I ask. She nods.
"You see a robot?" I am confused, and I did not have any drugs. I wonder if my wife is completely sane at the moment.
She spells sommething else with her hands, but I am trying to read the letters out of the corner of my eye while we go through the big curve in the highway just south of the university. I think that she has spelled "D-E-A-D".
"You feel dead?" I ask. "Like a dead robot?"
She shakes her head.
"There's a dead robot out the window?" I ask. "You saw a dead robot?"
My wife speaks around the anaesthesia and cotton. "A deav perfon coulb uve a robog to reave the simes ad say thigs oug loud."
"Oh," I say, "A robot that could translate signs would be helpful."
Very helpful. We exit off of the highway into our town. My wife starts to spell something else, but there are many cars on this road, and they are going every which way. "Hold on," I say. "I have to pay attention to a lot of stuff right now."
We ride in relative silence (the radio is on) until we get to our street.
"P-I-L-L-O-W G-U-E-S-T R-O-O-M," my wife spells, and then she moves her hands to indicate that she wants that back support pillow from the guest room upstairs. I mostly get this right the first time, except that I think that P is Q and S is A, and L is B. I tell my wife that I will get her the pillow.
"It's a good thing that they invented ASL," I say. "Otherwise talking to a deaf person would consist of playing 20 questions."
My wife spells a lot of things as I turn into the driveway. "Y-O-U S-T-I-L-L E-U-S."
I assume that I have become confused at some point, because the last bit of that makes no sense. "Still guezzig," says my wife. "You."
"I know," I say.
Monday, March 17th, 2003
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© 2003 Karl Bailey.