I fell asleep easily enough, but I woke up around three and had trouble falling back to sleep. Strange for me. I woke up around 7:30 and walked Elsa. I cleaned one of the bathroom drawers that I hadn't gotten to yet. I think I'm pulling a Marie Kondo: I'm getting rid of everything that I haven't used in a while or brings me joy.
Judy texted to tell me that she had an upset stomach, and Paulette would be picking me up for church around 9:35. Jean R, Mike's first wife and the mother of their son, Damon, called just before I left. I have been calling her daily since she had her open-heart surgery. For the last two days, she has been sleeping when I called and hasn't called back. She told me that she had been under the weather because of a combination of medications she was taking but feeling better now.
Jean and I continued to talk while Paulette drove us to church; I stayed in the car until the bell rang, announcing the start of mass talking. We talked about our childhoods. We both lived in the Bronx, me in Parkchester, and her somewhere else. We named all the childhood games we played: handball against the sides of buildings, depending on the goodwill of people lived in those places, hopscotch, jump rope, and a game where you had to bounce a pink Sterling ball while we recited, "A my name is Alice, my husband's name is Al, we live in Alabama, and we sell apples,' going all the way through the alphabet. You also had to lift your right leg and bounce the ball under it on Alice, Al, apples, and Alabama. Jean said she once completed the pattern ninety-nine times; her leg was killing her at the end. We rode bikes and roller skates, but not the modern ones. Our roller skates had steel wheels and fit over our shoes like sandals. It was easy for those skates to get stuck on a piece of uneven pavement, and down we would go.
I had to end the call when the bell for mass sounded. Paulette must have locked the car when she got out. I pushed the unlock button on the passenger side door, and the alarm went off. I went racing toward the church, assuming I was drowning out the priest, yelling for Paulette. She came to the door, car key in hand, and pushed the alarm button, but she was too far away for it to work. She handed me the key, and I ran back toward the car and got the thing to shut up. While the celebrants of the mass had already gathered at the back of the church, nothing had been interrupted.
When I got home, I lay down for a while. I was expecting two kids in my home for tutoring around noon. I worked with K first, who was in second grade. His report card says he's on grade level. But he only started speaking understandably recently. I had his older brother play the Quiet Queen audio file with phonemic transcription at night while he slept. That's when the improvement started. He knows most of the alphabet, except that at one point, he called the letter J, G. I noticed he had been absorbing the phonics he is learning in school, but he demonstrated that he had problems with automatic recall. I checked out his visual and auditory processing Both seemed to be okay. I showed him how to retrieve words from long-term memory instead of decoding words each time. I taught him to identify the vowel letters in words. The vowel sound is always the keystone of every syllable. He picked up the crossbody blending technique quickly.
Then I worked with his sister, who is in 5th grade. She was reading a James Patterson book written for children. Geez, Louise, that syntax is complex. It was written as if the narrator was talking to the reader directly. Whoever thinks written English is complicated, you should see what it is like to follow conversational English when it is written. Holy cow! I picked out some less complex sentences and showed her how to parse it using questions, drawing the answers directly from the text. Conventional reading lessons are designed to have children understand only certain aspects of the text: the why and when information that is not explicit. These lessons skip the essential part of helping students understand how to decode a sentence. As one of my third graders put it, 'It's like a puzzle we have to figure out." Precisely. What is the relationship between the first half of a sentence to the second half? What is the relationship between the second sentence to the first one? What is the relationship between the second paragraph to the first? No, it is not apparent. Or I should say, it is obvious once you get it. S. said the work we did helped her a lot. We'll see how it plays out in her school work.
After they left, I lay down and read part of the NY Times. I couldn't sleep, so I got up and cleaned a bathroom cabinet, taped down the address on one of the boxes of books that's been ready for shipping for a week. I couldn't go to the post office; I couldn't go anywhere because of my back.
I sent out three blogs. My Internet connection and then Yahoo were most uncooperative. I kept a book by my side when I found I have to wait for something to download forever.
Elsa and I did our evening walk. Because I prepared her food, Dr. Marty's mixed with her prescription food, before we left, she wasn't interested in going too far from home. I didn't want to stop off and visit Darby today anyway. I feel a little sluggish.
Yesterday, Elsa and I stopped by, and I gave Darby two soft MELT balls after teaching her how to use them for her hands. She still has a lot of work to do before she regains control over her left arm after her stroke. She has made incredible strides in her walking. There is only a slight hitch still left.
When I got home, I ate some dinner. After dinner, I sat in the red armchair and read more of The Master and His Emissary. This book will take some time to finish, but I do find the narrative sections going faster than the first part, which was detailed evidence on the different functions of the hemispheres.
I worked on the blog then. Elsa jumped up on my lap. For a while, I just sat and hugged her. We were bonding more every day. I balanced the computer on one of the arms of the chair and tried to type. It was awkward, but worth it to have her sit still by my side. Her position switched, so her head was resting on my keyboard but leaving me enough room to hit all the keys. I wanted to take a picture of her doing this. I reached for my phone, and she moved. She moved to lie right next to me on the chair while I work. Lovely. Not quite as good as having Mike around too, but way better than nothing.
There are these little gnats that fly around at night. They're not too disturbing. But one bug came along and landed on my screen. I believe it was a termite. Damn! I just spent a fortune tenting the house and having it fumigated against termites. They better not be moving back in this quickly. Supposedly this procedure is supposed to be done once every ten years, not in under ten weeks.
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Musings:
The book on the brain hemispheres' functions talks about how the right brain deals with constant change, and the left deals with abstracted images or concepts. These facts led me to think again about something I experienced when my dad died when I was 15. My inability to remember his face struck me. I thought it was trauma related at the time. But I no longer do. I can't remember Mike's either.
I now think this is because we don't have a single image of the people we see every day. We see their faces from so many different angles and so many different moods that we don't have one unchanging face for them. I can remember Meryl Steep's face better than Mike's. Trust me; she is not more important to me than he was and is.
I would imagine if we had a fixed image of the people we live with, we would have trouble recognizing them in all their different forms. Maybe over time, I will select one face, one I loved, one where he was smiling at me with love shining out of his eyes, and fix that in my mind as the Mike I knew and loved. It was a face I saw often, but it was far from his only face. And that face was never photographed face on. I will only be able to find it in my memory.
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