That’s me up there BEFORE my, “Alberta Cowboy” days. I was in grade one in California, just a few months before we moved to Canada. We were supposed to make hats with a letter from the alphabet on them and I thought it would be funny to do a question mark. Greg, always the rebel! 🙂
I am including some answers to some questions that people have asked me over the years. I don’t mind good, honest questions at all. Feel free to post a question in the comments section below and I will do my best do give you a good answer.
Go and make heaven proud. Do the best that you can do with the gifts that God has given YOU!
Contents
What is all of this “Deaf-Blind” stuff about?. 1
How do we know you are not a fake?. 1
What happened to your vision and hearing?. 1
What do you see and hear now?. 1
How do you play your guitar then?. 1
Why is your website so ugly?. 1
How smart are you being involved in music when your hearing is so poor?. 1
What is the secret to a good lead solo?. 1
What is all of this “Deaf-Blind” stuff about?
Ok, full disclosure on this one.
I am not at all excited about that terminology. I would like to just ignore it and I wish it would go away. I do not like labels. I think that “Deaf-Blind” sounds really rude to be honest. I wish there was a better way to say it, but those are the facts. I am registered as “Deafblind” with the CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind).
I grew up in the southern Alberta cowboy culture and to me at least, that meant minimizing any signs of weakness. Ironically, I realize now that for a long time, I wasn’t very compassionate and understanding with others who had handicaps. I would just push on and try to ignore what I was having to deal with as much as possible. So, to me, that meant I didn’t really want to try to help someone else to deal with issues they faced as well.
So, the last thing I am trying to do here is to make people feel sorry for me and then buy my album. I do feel that my story is interesting and even encouraging, and I think some will enjoy my music too. So, I decided to just do it, swallow my pride, tell my story and let you know how you can listen to the songs.
It isn’t all easy, but hey, we all have things to deal with?
As time has gone on, I have become much more empathic towards others as God has kind of allowed some of my rough edges to be sandblasted a bit. Adversity can do that to you!!!
I can relate to those lyrics in Jesus Loves Me.
“Little ones to Him belong. They are weak, but He is strong.”
If you want to find out more about “Deaf-Blindness”:
How do we know you are not a fake?
I hear ya! There have been some pretty disheartening scams in some musical circles in the past, so it is a wise thing to check things out. So, here is some documentation for you.
Here is a letter from my Optometrist, Dr. Tannis Rode.
This is an audiogram from Alberta Health Services in Calgary, dated November 2022.
What happened to your vision and hearing?
I recall seeing a quote a few years ago about Stickler’s Syndrome that went something like this. “Stickler’s will not take your life away, but it sure can take your hearing and vision away.”
We only found out that my daughter Tasha and I have Stickler’s just a few years ago. It affects us both differently. So far, Tasha has good vision and hearing, which made me very happy. On the other hand, she has had a lot of trouble with her tendons, and this has made life challenging for her in a lot of other ways.
When I was born, my eyes were “cloudy”, and the doctors thought I would be totally blind. The good news is that they cleared up in a couple of weeks. I had about 20/200 vision until 2019.
I started having hearing trouble in my early 20’s. I woke up to virtual silence from an ear operation in about 1985. That operation was supposed to make everything better.
I will be telling you more about this at some point in some of my stories.
What do you see and hear now?
Good question!!
It is a moving target, and sometimes I don’t even know. It is day-to-day. I don’t know what I am going to wake up to.
This whole thing has felt like grief in slow motion for decades now to be honest. I try to be strong and will learn new ways of doing things and then it all gets worse, and I have to start from scratch all over again. I know this is so hard for my family and friends to watch. I can say this, my wife Dawn is one incredible lady. She has stood by me the whole way, taking me to countless appointments in Calgary and sitting through more operations than either of us care to remember.
Ok, what do I see?
Put on frosted glasses, mute the colours and now give them a good shot of black spray paint, and you are close in some lighting conditions. Other times it is like I am a scuba diver in super murky water. If you stand in front of me, I likely can’t see any detail of you at all and I might not even know you are there. You are taking your life into you own hands at this point, so just best that you get out of the way! 🙂
Hearing? Pretty much turn both ears right off. If you were to talk loudly into my right ear at close range, I would be able to tell that you are saying something, but I would likely not be able to understand you. It would sound like muffled mumble in a box in the other room.
Now, insert a super, high powered hearing aid into my right ear and I can talk to you if you sit right by me, but you will sound quite distorted. It is really hard work for me to listen to speech, but I love listening to Dawn read books to me! It does require my full attention and can be exhausting. I am good for about an hour and then I need a break.
Now, here is something amazing and I do not have full documentation of this event. It was maybe 10 years ago and I was at a top audiology lab in Calgary. They did a hearing test and then a speech recognition test. I recall that I scored around 75-80% on the speech recognition test the technician or Dr. told us that it made no sense. “With your hearing loss, you should not be able to understand speech at all and yet, you are doing very well. The only plausible answer that we have to this mystery is that it must be because you are a musician and your brain is somehow stitching all of this together. It is quite a miracle really.”
(Update, I just had another speech recognition test the other day and this time it was 50%)
I have no useful hearing at all out of my left ear. It is just dead. Maybe about once a year that I hear something that is REALLY loud out of that ear, like a thunderclap 20 feet away. That actually happened once, and I heard it quite well thank you very much!!
How do you play your guitar then?
Well, it is a lot more of a challenge than it used to be!
Because of the hearing loss, my perception of pitch is all messed up, and I can’t hear most notes higher than those the 12th fret. It is weird. There are some note much lower that I can’t hear either like the open B/3rd string.
I rely on a huge tuner on my computer screen to tune my guitars.
I also discovered that the way I used to had sometimes been based on quite a bit of eye-hand coordination. Even though I was always legally blind and I never could see the individual strings, in the past I COULD see the inlays (markings) on the neck of a guitar. So, I could see where my hand was on the neck. Now, I can’t see where my hand is at all, so I have had to relearn some things that only really come with practice. Because of the problems with pitch, I don’t know if I would ever be able to play live again. Doing something like a lead solo that is all over the neck may prove to be fatal! 😊
Why is your website so ugly?
Because I did it! 😊
I used to pride myself in making things look nice, but that seems to all be in the past now. I decided to go with something pretty much canned and easy for someone else to maintain if need be, so I went with wordpress.com. It has some great blog features, but the template are a bit underwhelming.
I did the best that I could do with what I have and that is the whole idea! 🙂
How smart are you being involved in music when your hearing is so poor?
This is a good question and one that I know many have, but few are brave enough to ask.
If I was to take my hearing aid out and not stimulate the nerve that goes from my ears to my brain, that would die and I would lose hearing in that ear. That happened early on. I didn’t want to wear hearing aids because they are just for old people, right? So, I finally just got one for my right ear and the left ear died. I truly regret that silly mistake!!
If I just sit in my office all day every day and don’t have any stimulation in my right ear, it starts to get worse. So, I need to do something and music always seems to make my hearing better. I am talking small quantities at as low of a volume as possible.
When I recoded the album, there were times I am sure that in my excitement, I did overdo it a bit, but for the most part I did just a little bit every day.
Ironically, I was ready to post this, but we were JUST in Calgary to see Dr. Park, a top ENT there.
As you may have seen in the audiogram above, the hearing test wasn’t very encouraging. I thought, “Man, I am not telling this guy I have been recording. He might be pretty upset with me for doing that!”
Well, it was a hard appointment for me. I just couldn’t hear him, so Dawn was my “translator”.
When I had my hearing aid out as he looked into my ears, he asked Dawn, “What does he do all day?”
That is a good question. I mean, he has Helen Keller’s brother sitting here in this chair and he is wondering what on earth this guy does with his time!
This is the part I love, and really, it is why I am doing what I do here on Expressong. Things like this make me laugh because I am sure I would be voted most unlikely to say, record an album. God has a sense of humor and for me, it only points to Him and how He can work through even a weak guy like me.
Dawn’s reply to him was, “Well, he trades stocks, writes stories and articles, he wants to write a book, he plays his guitar and just finished recording an entire album!”
I guess Dr. Park wasn’t really expecting that answer and of course I had no idea that this conversation had happened at the time.
When I put my hearing aid back in, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Keep playing your guitar.”
That was it, but I knew what he meant.
Sometimes things like this come down to quality of life, and I will keep playing my guitar.
What is the secret to a good lead solo?
Oh, this is my favorite question, but you are going to have to wait!!!
I started writing and realized I have more than enough for a separate post someday.
Expressong 
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