DiaBLOGue

I thought again today of how I used to sit at forums and devotionals so that I could watch the signer for the deaf club. I knew the manual alphabet and recognized a sign or two, but mostly I watched without understanding, the signer’s hands, eloquent and expressive, echoing the words of the speaker. I’d see “thank you,” a hand to the lips and then out; I’d identify the rapid-fire finger spelling of a name—much too fast for me to read. And at the end of the prayers, that beautiful sign “the Lord, Jesus Christ,” the letter “L” moving diagonally from the left shoulder to the right hip, and then a finger in the palm of each hand. I was always crying long before the prayer. 

Last summer I was asked to respond to a paper on the LDS garment, given by Colleen McDannell at the Salt Lake City Sunstone Symposium. Her paper, to appear as a chapter in her forthcoming…

The first three weeks of my mission in Koshigaya, a small city outside of Tokyo, Japan, breezed by. Despite two months at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, I still couldn’t understand the gibberish that…

“I saw Cory yesterday,” Mom tells me when I meet her downtown for lunch. She used to play her harmonica outside Crossroads Mall, before she moved to the ZCMI Center. She doesn’t play her harmonica…