Signs of Success

(December 1998 RW)

This story doesn't have to do directly with distance running. But it has everything to do with the values that runners hold dear -- the enduring and eventual winning.

My son Eric dabbled in track during high school, and he'd gotten pretty good at sprinting (nearly qualifying for the state meet twice at the least and fastest of distances, 100 meters) before leaving the sport. He found bigger races to run as he picked up speed academically and socially.

Eric was born with limited hearing. When this was discovered at age three, he was put in hearing aids (which so annoyed him that he tried to flush one down the toilet and fed the other to the family dog) and immediately sent to a special school.

The advice given us at the time was, "Put him in an oral program. This will give him a better chance of learn to speak than if he relied on sign as his first language."

He hadn't yet voiced his first word at that time, and without signing he had no access to language. He wouldn't speak in sentences until his sixth year, and because of this his now-mainstream classes made little sense to him. He had to repeat an early school year.

Eric hit a bigger wall when he started middle school. He joined a new group of strangers at the worst of all ages. He was the only boy like himself at a time when the greatest sin is to be different. Each school day became a lonely, threatening ordeal.

He needed a change, and his younger sister Leslie pointed the way. She too is hearing impaired, and that year she'd started attending the Oregon School for the Deaf.

Eric visited there, saw kids like himself working in their classrooms and said, "I want to go here next year." We arranged for him to do that.

The move seemed like a mistake at first. He traveled to a foreign land where he didn't speak the language.

"It was like I'd been sent away to prison," Eric said later. "I thought my life was over." He now felt lost between two worlds -- at home with neither the deaf nor the hearing.

Staying at the deaf school depressed him, but going back to his old school terrified him. So that summer he decided to "stay at OSD, try to get along with everybody and improve my life."

He later came to realize that "in regular school I would have always been 'that deaf kid.' Here at OSD I'm just another kid."

He did there what he would never have tried at a regular school: ran track and played football, co-edited the school's video yearbook and literature magazine. He traveled to an academic competition against other western schools for the deaf. He appeared before the state legislature on behalf of a bill to allow out-of-state students to attend his school -- and shook hands with the governor at the law's signing.

At graduation he walked to the stage and began with, "I am Eric Joseph Henderson, salutatorian of the class of 1997." He simultaneously signed and spoke his welcoming remarks.

He now attends a regular university, not one for the deaf. He has held jobs among the hearing, and has some friends who hear and some who don't.

The boy who was caught between the worlds of speakers and signers is now a 21-year-old man equally at home in both. Eric, the non-distance runner, has taught his dad new meanings of enduring and winning.

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