Excerpts from the NYTimes:-
EACH night, Carolyn Ginsburg and Mark Stern share pillow talk without the talk. They fall into their own silent language, revealing the day’s news and anxieties through lips, gestures and glances.
Their ability to converse visually has been honed through decades of practice. Ms. Ginsburg, now 39, was a young girl when she started her journey toward a hearing loss that is greater than 80 percent. Mr. Stern, 42, became deaf when he contracted meningitis as a 1-year-old.
By day, they interact easily with their co-workers: she as a director overseeing a group of credit cards at American Express and he as an executive of GoAmerica Communications in Hackensack, N.J.
...their get-together ended without so much as a hug. Nevertheless, Ms. Ginsburg said that she scribbled in her diary that night: “Met an interesting person from California. He really wowed me. I don’t think I’ll ever see him again.”
In February 2005, more than seven years later, Ms. Ginsburg was on her way to see an Israeli film when she stopped off in an Upper West Side coffee shop...As she was talking on her cellphone at the coffee shop, she looked up and saw a man wearing the distinctive-looking cochlear hearing aid implant — a device that transmits electronic impulses into his auditory nerve. Something clicked. She mouthed to him, “Are you, by chance, Mark Stern?” Yes, he replied.
...As they drew closer, Mr. Stern arranged to install videophones in their homes so they could “talk” at night. “I had to put on a dress when I was on the phone,” Ms. Ginsburg said, laughing about the anxiety it caused. She added, “My grandmother would say that you know you love someone when you can’t find words to explain it. You just do. That’s how I feel about Mark.”
...While vacationing in the Outer Banks in North Carolina last July, Mr. Stern, an avid pilot, pointed out a plane in the sky. Accustomed to his constant fascination with passing planes, Ms. Ginsburg initially didn’t react. He insisted she look. She did. The plane was towing a banner that read, “Carolyn, Will You Marry Me? Mark.” She immediately said yes.
Mr. Stern said, “When I asked her mother for Carolyn’s hand in marriage, she asked me, ‘Why do you love my daughter?’ I replied, ‘I just can’t explain it, but I can tell you that I just know that I do.’ She said, ‘That’s the right answer.’ And we smiled.”
Their wedding took place on a drizzly afternoon Nov. 12 at the Glen Head Country Club in Glen Head, N.Y. During the ceremony, which was performed by Rabbi Robert S. Widom, two interpreters who understand and can sign in both English and Hebrew, stood at the ready. One was for the dozen or so guests who were deaf or hard of hearing. The other was for the bride and bridegroom, who were especially keen to take in the cantor’s singing, which can be hard for them to make out because it often includes drawn-out syllables. “We wanted to make sure we didn’t miss anything,” Mr. Ginsburg said.
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