All this talk of closed captions. How silly.
I’m not hard of hearing. Why would I use closed captions anyway?
In a word, Mom.
In the few years after the storm,
when I lost all that (oh so ultimately inconsequential) stuff
and there was nowhere else to lodge in a city of drastically reduced rental space,
I stayed with my parents.
I did not know that we were embarking on what I will always think of now
as my mother’s dwindle time.
After the storm, my mother begin her inexorable incremental descent,
little by little, each day just slightly worse than the last, no day better.
It was a terrible time in both our lives, but I now think, in some ways,
I was blessed to be trapped in that house,
in the slow motion ebb of my mother’s life.
I have memories of my mother, incredible intimacies and inside jokes,
that none of my siblings have.
It was horrible and it was not.
I am, mostly, glad I was there.
Mom had developed what she and I defined as slow of hearing.
She would hear the words, she said, but on the odd occasion not quite catch the meaning. Give her a second or two and she said her brain caught up.
I was cool with that. She’d had patience with my learning words.
I could have patience with her misplacing a few temporarily.
Closed captioning seemed to help.
With the visual reinforcement of the oral words,
she never had a problem keeping up.
Well, good enough.
Plaster those subtitles under the pictures any day, any time, if it helped her out.
Bless you modern technology and the Americans With Disabilities Act.
So we watched everything with words underneath.
We loved episodes of “West Wing.”
Yes, the dialogue was rapidfire, but reading along as the characters argued their endless ethical dilemmas, Mom kept up just fine, her incisive remarks proving her mind was still as sharp as ever.
Then there were, I have to laugh remembering, the TeleTubbies.
Ridiculous. A woman in her seventies and her forty-some-odd year old daughter glued to the tube watching a show invented for and targeted at one to four year olds.
We loved it though. I cannot explain the attraction but we were daily indulgers.
Of course, the series was at the other end of the intellectual spectrum from “West Wing,” especially when it came to dialogue. The tubbies spoke very few words. Closed captioning was hardly necessary and somewhat ironic given the normal (pre-reading) audience. Nonetheless there were the words at the bottom or the screen.
As Twinky-Winky strolled across the screen, chanting -
the captions reading his words, “TwinkyWinkyTwinkyWinkyTinkyWinky.”
As LaLa pirouetted and pranced in her coquettish fashion, singing,
the captions read, “LaLaLaLaLaLaLa.”
And then there was little red Po bouncing along the path,
burbling sounds that didn’t quite resolve themselves into words.
The first time, I remember thinking,
“Oh my. This must be how slow of hearing starts.”
A second later the words appeared at the bottom of the screen,
“Po - Speaking Cantonese.”
My mother and I dissolved into puddles of laughter.
I never turn the captions off.
Never.
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