And on certain summer days, when the wind was blowing just right and our kitchen window was open, I could smell the salty air of the Atlantic Ocean, sometimes even catching a hint of mustard and grilled hot dogs from Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand (although this part may have been my imagination).

My parents’ world was a four-room apartment on the third floor of a redbrick building, not far from Coney Island. The world that I would one day call my own. And while I stepped with one foot into my parents’ silent world, my other tiny foot was born into another world. But unlike my parents, I could also hear the murmuring voices and the thunder outside the hospital window. And in the same way that many children start learning to speak from the moment their mother whispers I love you into their little ears, I began to learn my first language by watching my father’s hands through half-closed eyes.

His hands flashed in the air, quivering with excitement: Welcome! Welcome! Open your eyes! You are home now. Instead, he introduced me into the world with joyous signs of welcome. As a deaf man, my father had no words to speak. When I finally arrived, the first words my father spoke to me, as I lay in my mother’s arms, were with his hands. You see, both of my parents were deaf, and no one, not even the doctors, could say if I would be born deaf too. But there was another reason I was the center of attention that night. I think it might be because of the dramatic circumstances of my birth. In the middle of all this chaos, my father ran out of Coney Island Hospital, where my mother was about to give birth, and howled at the sky like a banshee. Then the clouds cracked open, releasing a flood of water on our neighborhood and turning Brooklyn’s wide avenues into raging rivers. According to my father, on the night of my birth, giant fingers of lightning reached down from the sky and ignited oil tanks, which exploded, sending flames hundreds of feet into the sky and turning night into day. For one, I came into this world during one of the biggest electrical thunderstorms in the history of Brooklyn, New York, where my parents lived. But in my family, I always have been, ever since I was born just after midnight on July 1, 1933.Įverything about that day was peculiar. I’ve never liked being the center of attention.

Hands of My Father by Myron Uhlberg