Chapter 2

Chapter 2

My Particular Type of Stuttering

I have never encountered a more sever stutterer than I was. One of the worst experiences of my life was when I was required to stand up in front of the congregation of my church, about five hundred people strong, and recite a prayer into a microphone at about age twelve. It was absolutely nightmarish, my voice booming down the auditorium through the PA system, strange to my ears, listening to this stranger's voice struggling its way through the text like a paraplegic dragging itself through a boulder strewn wilderness. I couldn't change the text to mitigate my dilemma. You can't very well take poetic license with a biblical prayer. Everybody looking at me, everybody thinking "what a shame." The ordeal seemed like it took an eternity but it probably only took me five minutes to fight my way through what should have been a three minute one-page prayer.

I'm a consonant stutterer. I expect most of us are, and with a name like Drew Crowder you can imagine how much fun it was growing up. The term "children can be so cruel" barely describes it. If I never hear the term "stutterbrain" or am subjugated to that abhorrent Porky Pig character again it will be too soon.

Only recently have I heard about vowel stutterers but what I have to show you may be adapted to that condition. For me sharp consonants; p's, d's, k's, sharp c's, even ch's were, and occasionally still are, a trial. I remember a "shining moment" as a child when I lay on my parent's bed and watched a James Bond movie on the black-and-white TV in their bedroom and burst into deep and intense tears because I knew that I could never be a secret agent. I could never be James Bond because I couldn't talk. I could never deceive an enemy because I would stutter out of nervousness and fail the mission. This was an avenue of life, a dream, that I could never live because I was handicapped. As trivial as it may seem it sticks out, as often the most unusual things will upon retrospect, to make up the person that I was and define the trial I was to overcome.