In the beginning there was the speaker, an invention of Alexander Graham Bell really that was intended to talk (thus reproducing the phenomenon of his speech) to a listener in place of that actual other human speaker.
Initially it was made out of one side of a magnetically excited diaphragm surface used in a sealed chamber housed at the end of a cone that made it louder. It was a masterwork of inventive imagination that literally changed the course of human life, productivity and communicative capabilities when coupled with its complimentary sound to electricity translating microphone. to form the telephone.
Ironically it seems the inventors true passion that motivated his discoveries was indeed a valiant struggle to assist those who could not hear, and of course he devoted his thus-still remaining efforts to find other more effective sign language technologies that at least liberated them from the isolations of silenced existences.
In my case I was always motivated by a desire to assist those without or who had lost their sight, Unlike Bell's case I was not motivated by the frustrations of a living partnership, but by the incomprehensible hardships the unsighted who I knew must face and then eventually more so for the sake of my own mother who lost most of hers due to macular degeneration. Indeed my parents worked ceaselessly and devotedly towards building themselves a happy and secure future, beautifying their home and raising three children, the second two of which, I was the first, they adopted.
After their 35 productive and hard working years building a stable home and then raising children of whom I was the middle I was able to have an interesting view of their own intellectually maturing outlooks. Most particularly the fact it was a Catholic household figured strongly into my growing awareness of the dogmatic dangers of fascist moralistic-ism. My older sister had been rather viciously disciplined by comparison to myself, and softening over the years, my younger sister handed an open carte blanche by comparison.
In later years the results were strikingly opposites! The older a jovial, agnostic fun hunting liberal, the younger a tortured repressed frowning neo-Baptist conservative with a totally sealed mind. As for myself I simply stayed confused yet became oddly, more concerned about them than what they represented. As to my faith, it mutated. The Vatican Council had torn and shredded for me as a rather reluctant alter boy who had always both consciously and subconsciously objected to the very foundational basis that the rest of the dogmatic tyranny of it's boring celebrations had been. If rights can be made wrong, and visa-versa bey the mere tyrannical democratic socialisms of political tomfoolery neither must ever be more than somewhat half correct relative to a detached point of view.
Indeed all the hard work, conformist, God, church, morality, home and marriage devotion of my parents which my anti-war, drug abusing, anti-Kennedy-assassinating CIA-Pentagon dictatorship, rebellious, anti-war, free love, culture so disdained was another set of extremes I secretly suspected they would both profit from and yet somewhat outgrow. As much as I wanted to accepted and free to have and benefit within the framework of my lifestyle I dearly hoped their rewards with each other would be lovely.
It was then within a month of my Dad's final retirement from the Chrysler engine plant he had learned to first keep running as a very well qualified, talented and dedicated machine repairman who had started sweeping it's floors and rose to be 1st its General Foreman of all skilled trades to, finally it's manager. Suddenly my mother one day, certainly the most talented arts and craftswomen, award winning gardener with a vast knowledge and understanding of the horticulture, and the best cook I knew of on earth, an avid and knowledgeable intellectual reader, and former dental assistant back in Ohio before they married and she came to Windsor to start her new life was suddenly, irrevocably, quickly and inexorably destined to live out the sunset of her life in the creeping blurred shadowy darkness of macular degeneration.
If I ever doubted whatever was truly just, about the rewards of a consistent upstanding faith in and unblinking slavery and dedication to all that is right in orthodoxy before, now I was secretly most heartbroken for them both at this most bitter harvest for all their live's labors
