This began with a story I had heard all my life, but never fully understood.
My father was six years old when he left home in West Tennessee and traveled across the state by train to the Tennessee School for the Deaf. He remembered it in fragments—names of towns, the rhythm of the train, the feeling of being carried farther from everything he knew.
For years, those fragments were all I had.
This space is an attempt to follow that journey—to gather what can be found, to sit with what cannot, and to understand what it meant.
But it is also something else.
In trying to document his story, I began to better understand my own—growing up between a Deaf father and a hearing world, in a life shaped by both silence and spoken language.
These pages hold both of those paths.
Not as a complete record, but as something closer to memory—partial, searching, and still unfolding.
— Gathering the fragments, one memory at a time…
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The First Train Ride 