BEWARE OF FLYING HOCKEY PUCKS.

As I've written before on my blog, supervisors and teachers at Jericho Hill School for the Deaf and Blind frequently took us to events which we couldn't enjoy due to our disability. Their "good deeds" were only for show. Escorting us to the Ice Capades, the circus, and sports events certainly must have looked good on their reports and created a favourable impression in the minds of their superiors. I'm sure that some of those civil servants meant well. For us though, outings meant sitting on hard benches for hours while the fully-sighted audience enjoyed the spectacle.

Though I hated sports when I was young, I was allowed to keep a souvenir from one game that I was forced to attend. Here's an excerpt from Deliverance from Jericho (Six Years in a Blind School) that tells how a hockey puck became mine one November afternoon.

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During one game, my boredom was abruptly interrupted. As I sat and yearned for the end of the third period, an object hit my chest and landed in the row in front of me. "Hey, it's a hockey puck," Brian exclaimed as he picked it up.

"So that's what hit my chest," I said as I rubbed the spot.

Brian pondered the puck in his hand and then said, "Well, I guess it should be yours since you're the one who got hit by it."

Though I thought the sport was a complete waste of time and effort, I felt excited to actually hold a real puck which was used in a game. That was one item I felt proud to take home from Vancouver to show my family.

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Deliverance from Jericho is filled with many more vignettes of what life was like in that government-run institution. These range from poignant experiences of homesickness to hilarious incidents of mischief. Read more about Deliverance from Jericho here. Please feel free to contact me directly as well.