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You’re nothing but a block of wood.”
    My father was not a block of wood. He was no dummy.
    My father’s face flushed with anger.
    “ Tell the man to shove the roast up his ass! ” he signed with exaggerated emphasis.
    “My father says we’ll be back, thank you.”
    Outside on the street my father knelt down to me.
    “I know you didn’t tell the butcher man what I told you,” he signed. “I could tell by looking at his face. That’s okay. I understand. You were embarrassed.
    “It’s not fair, I know.
    “I’m in the deaf world.
    “You’re in the hearing world.
    “I need you to help me in your world. He a ring people have no time for a deaf man. No time to read my notes. They have no patience for the deaf. Hearing people think I’m stupid. I am not stupid. ”
    My father’s hands fell silent.
    “No matter what they think,” he finally signed to me, “I must still deal with them. So I must ask you for help. You can hear. You can speak.”
    My father was always so sure of himself. But now he seemed different. And I thought he might cry. I had never seen my father cry. I couldn’t even imagine it. And it scared me.
    Looking directly into my eyes, he slowly signed, “It hurts me to have this need for you. You’re just a boy. I hope you will understand and not hate me.”
    Hate my father? I was shocked. How could he think that?
    “No.” I shook my head.
    “Never!” my hand said.
    My father took me in his arms and kissed me, then held my head to his chest, and I heard his beating heart.
     
     
    N ot long after the butcher shop incident, my grandmother Celia told me, “You must always take care of your parents!” That’s all she said. She didn’t explain herself, or give me any instructions about how to follow her advice. However, I vividly remember what she told me that day because it was so baffling to me. How could I, a child, take care of them, adults? And not just any adults—they were my mother and father. But I would learn.
      Memorabilia  
     
    The Language of Touch
     
    F rom the time I was a small child, I was struck by how often my father would hold me, for no reason that I could ever understand. On my block it was quite noticeable, even to a young kid like me. In that time men had the socially accepted role of breadwinner. They were not the nurturers of our young lives. That role was reserved for our mothers.
    Every weekday morning while it was still dark, the apartment houses on our block would empty of all our fathers. The men would march with heavy-lidded eyes, virtually in lockstep, to the subway station on Kings Highway, from which the subway trains would whisk them off to points all over Brooklyn, as well as to “the city.” (No Brooklynite ever called the city “Manhattan.”) There our fathers toiled in largely meaningless tasks, uncomplainingly, since the Depression was not far from memory. Latter-day concepts of having a “career” or work that was “fulfilling” would have been Greek to their ears. A “job” plain and simple, the ability to earn that which was sufficient to “put bread on the table” and pay the rent—that’s what our fathers’ daily tasks in those days were all about.
     

    My father and I
     
    At precisely one hour before supper, the fathers of our block would return, shoulders turned downward, heads bent, the New York Daily News held tightly under their arms.
    The women would proceed to greet their husbands, often launching into a well-documented list of their child’s misbehavior that very day. This litany of misdeeds might result in a swat on the head to the errant child with the folded Daily News —or worse.
    On my block, in those long-ago days, this was often the only physical connection a father would make with his son.
    But that was not the case with my father. At the end of his workday he would drop to his knees when he saw me, and hold me close, as if I had been lost, then found. After that first embrace he would hold me at