Sign Language: Another Kind of Eloquence

At first, I thought the 35-year-old woman standing 15 feet from me was a Secret Service agent. I was in a crowd of about 100 people waiting to hear former Vice President Joe Biden give a campaign speech. The woman, dressed in a blue jacket and black pants, looked out over the small crowd with confidence, just as I expected a Secret Service agent would.

Besides wanting to hear his message, I was there to observe the swarm of press and security agents that accompany a former vice president on the campaign trail. This wasn't the first time for me. In 2007, when I took my mother to see Hillary Clinton speak, a wall of men in blue suits, each with a single bud in his ear, stood between Hillary and us. My mom was sure she would be elected president, so she pushed her 86-year-old hand between a couple of Secret Service agents to shake Hillary's hand.

There were Secret Service agents in the Biden audience, but the woman in question was not one of them; she was a sign-language interpreter. As Biden spoke, I listened to his words as I watched this woman make them come alive. When he spoke forcefully, her face showed passion, and her arms stretched out and reached up. At times her whole body was in motion. She was not just reciting his words; she was animating them with emotion.

I asked a woman next to me if all sign-language interpreters were so energetic. It turned out that the woman standing next to me, named Sue Desrosiers, had raised a deaf daughter. Sue shared how proud the Deaf are of their language, so I was determined to learn more.

Days after the speech, I watched a YouTube video of Christine Sun Kim signing the national anthem and "America the Beautiful" at the Super Bowl.

 She depicted the phrase "purple mountains' majesty" by creating peaks with her arms and used her body to imitate the ocean waves for "From sea to shining sea," in a way that I could visualize the mountains and the oceans. My favorite, though, was "bombs bursting in air." As her fists swung up, she opened her hands to reproduce the image of exploding bombs while her face shouted a silent "BOOM!" I don't read sign language, but that I could understand. Her spirited depiction was exhilarating; more powerful than words alone.

Here on the farm, husband Bruce and I use our private sign-language to communicate over the sound of farm equipment. For instance, when I hold up two fingers, that means he needs to deliver two round bales of hay. One finger means one bale. Pointing to a field means the cows in that field need to be fed, and a thumbs-up means we are done. How much more efficient if we could sign sentences like, "Where are you going?" or "What's next?"

If we did use American Sign Language to communicate, I would sign "bombs bursting in air," when he forgets to shut a gate. I could sign an image of horses tearing up the barn when he forgets to let them out. Of course, I never make mistakes, so, of course, Bruce would only use loving gestures to speak with me, right?