^It's quite uncommon, so is common courtesy.
I don't remember much about it, but when the family lived alongside the Platte River, years before we moved up into the Sandhills, about three or four times a year, these strange men would come to our house, and stay with us for a few days. If I'd been any older and more knowledgeable, I would've considered them sinister Italianate-looking thugs; but I was aware they were good friends of the parents, and that they'd come to hunt and fish.
They always had presents for me, things one doesn't usually give a small child. They also brought along a few "token" things for the younger brother, more appropriate for our ages.
Unbeknownst to me, they were M.D.s and psychologists from Lincoln and Omaha--and a couple from the Omaha School for the Deaf--and while of course they were out there to hunt and fish, they had another important reason to visit.
My parents were raising me in defiance of all the then-conventional wisdom about the upbringing of deaf children, and they were intensely curious about how it was all coming out. They did seem to pay more attention to me than I thought was necessary, but had the good graces to go on to something else whenever I got irritated about it.
These are only vague memories, but I do recall raising a ruckus three or four times when they expressed the wish to take me to the soda fountain at the drug store three blocks downtown, alone with them. No way. To get me to go, they had to invite my younger brother too. I wasn't going anywhere with strangers unless it was with someone who knew what was going on. (I was about four at the time, my younger brother, two.)
At about the same time, I'd made the acquaintance of a very old man who seemed to shave only once a week; he was a widower and lived way out in the country. Originally from a wealthy family, he'd drunk away most of the farm. He was touched in the head; he raised a few pigs, and imagined that they enjoyed rides through the verdant countryside in the bed of his pick-up truck.
He'd load them up--I dunno if they protested or not--and drive his battered, rusted, old truck to our place, asking me if I'd like to come along. It was always okay with the parents, and if the parents weren't around, well, the older siblings were glad to be relieved of half their baby-sitting chores.....
There was probably a story in him, and he probably told it to me as we rode through the country, sometimes up into the lower reaches of the Sandhills to the north, but of course I never heard it; I only sensed that he talked a lot while he was driving. (Undoubtedly, my parents, because they were who they were, knew his story, but as with the secrets of everyone else entrusted to them, they never passed it on.)
One night, when I was six years old, he went home, sauced, and decided to make some dinner. The pilot light in his natural-gas stove had gone out, and in his drunkeness, he tried to get it going.
The biggest piece of him that was ever found was his left leg, dangling from a faraway tree as if a stocking on the fireplace mantel at Christmas. It was very sad, this first funeral (a closed casket) I ever attended.
