Deaf Driving

Tony’s cheerleading team did great the second day of the competition and they finished 0.07 of a point behind the team that was Grand Champion. That point spread looks very Bond-ian, and Tony certainly was surrounded by enough girls to make the connection relevant. Watching cheerleader girls fawn over him every practice and competition makes me wonder what my life might have been like if I’d been a cheerleader instead of a dugout/bench/court rat. Maybe I’d be the highest late-deafened roller in Monte Carlo right now or get to use cool weapons. Or maybe I’d be dead. Hmmm. I guess baseball, basketball, and tennis had upsides, too.

The trip to Indianapolis turned out better than I expected. I car pooled with another Cheer Fusion mom…I mean “a” Cheer Fusion mom…which in hindsight was pretty smart. Although I’m functionally deaf in conversations with multiple hearing people, I can handle most 1:1 conversations pretty well. Plus I drive a hybrid that is pretty quiet unless there are two relentlessly noisy cheer children in the back seat, which there were, but let’s not quibble. It was still a better situation than five cheer moms talking fast in a restaurant.

Indianapolis is four hours from the Chicago suburb where I live. I can’t consistently understand a passenger without some lip-reading, so for much of the drive my head was at a 90 degree angle and I wandered between the lane divider and the shoulder at over 70 mph. And, oh yes, I occasionally checked and sent messages on my Blackberry to make things a tad more challenging. (My equal rights statement to bad-driving cell phone users.) With two kids in the back seat, I should have been arrested, but hey, that’s just how deaf people drive. Even late-deafened people can get the hang of it if they’re foolish enough to work at it.

Stephanie, the cheer mom who bravely accompanied me, is a lawyer, and when we left her driveway I thought the trip would be a conversation disaster. She talks fast and tends to turn away when she finishes her remarks. I had to educate her about my needs—namely, talk s-l-o-w and look at me. I’ve been in this situation a zillion times and half a zillion times the outcome has been a bust despite my best efforts. Fast talkers tend to remain fast talkers even at gunpoint.

By the time we were ten miles into the drive I probably had told Stephanie to please slow down maybe five times, which averages to approximately 35 please-slow-downs per hour or about 140 please-slow-downs to Indianapolis. But Stephanie caught on better than many people I’ve known, and by the Indiana border we were doing fairly well. So were the kids, since she had provided melatonin pills to help them fall asleep. Tony never had one before, and he quickly conked out. Veronica, Stephanie’s daughter, had apparently developed some immunity to the pills as she only briefly went silent.

In any case, Stephanie and I had a really nice discussion for 3-plus hours. I learned more about the Cheer Fusion program than I had in the last ten months combined. I learned about the various conflicts and intrigues among the moms, which was worth the price of gas right there. For example, one mom is a real pain-in-the-ass and wants to start her own gym and bring the coaches with her. That’s good information to have if there’s an IPO. I also learned the names of a lot of the other cheer moms and their daughters. And I learned a lot about Stephanie and her family.

After we arrived in Indianapolis I went out to dinner with Stephanie and another cheer mom and her daughters. They mimicked Stephanie’s way of interacting with me, and so I got to know them, too. The rest of the weekend I periodically hung around with Stephanie and got to know other moms and even one dad who actually showed up on his own volition. All of this made me feel more a part of the dysfunctional Cheer Fusion family and I only read half of my New Yorker magazine while I sat in the stands over the two days and 12 hours of competition. They don’t have dirt about pain-in-the-ass cheer moms in the New Yorker. But the cheer mom grapevine does.

So when’s the next big meet with a long drive? I want to car pool again.