I spoke to my friend Jean M. during my morning walk. She was feeling fantastic today. Yeah. She said she felt okay after her chemo treatment for a couple of days and then miserable for two days, that kind of miserable that makes you feel if this is going to be it for the rest of my life, I’m prepared to cash in my chips. But then it all cleared.
I also saw a homeowner on my walk who has done a lot of work on his property. I asked him if he was planning to use it for farming. He said yes if he can keep the house. He takes tourists out fishing, and his business is shut down. He said that the insurance company would not let him off the hook when his boat was sitting useless. He was scared and angry.
I used Yvette’s cheap razor to trim Elsa. I didn’t put one of the combs on, so she has a few bald spots. I must say she was remarkably good, sitting still while I worked.
Kingston came up for another session. Yesterday, when I coached him to use ‘natural speech’ when reading and asked him to correct his word-for-word enunciation, he said he spoke that way. I finally called his brother to ask him if he did speak in a jerky manner. Yes, indeed, he did. Today, I selected a second-grade book a year ahead of the book I worked with yesterday, one with more complex sentence structures. I told him that he had to listen to the music of language. The words were hung on the music, like ornaments on a Christmas tree. When he started, he had some problems, but not as much as he had yesterday. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better.
When he came up the second time, we continued in the Frog and Toad book. When he came up the third time, I started him in a Magic Tree House book with more complicated sentences. I said the sentence, then banged out the rhythm without the words, and had him repeat the sentence using the rhythm. He is good at remembering all the words. Then I asked him questions about each sentence, doing a form of sentence diagramming using questions. His comprehension was surprisingly good. He knew what ‘appeared’ and ‘mysterious’ meant. When I explained words, he didn’t know, he could follow up on my instructions with examples from his own life. Wonderful!
After he left, I loaded up my spray bottle and headed out to kill weeds. I sprayed the other half of the strip in front of the house at the base of the rock wall fence. Then I went down to the bottom of the property to spray the greenery growing out of the rock wall. Those plants have to be killed, or they will break the wall down.
I did a lot of work on the writing today. I started by giving a label to each paragraph, identifying what it is about. I did more rewriting. I don’t know if this is an improvement or not.
Saturday radio shows. On the Moth Radio Hour, a woman told a story of how the police dealt with her and her husband when their 10-month-old baby died. The police lied to them. They told them that she didn’t die a natural death because there was a bruise on her head. For several days, they questioned them about their actions just before the death. It created self-doubt; did she do something wrong that caused her child’s death, and doubt in her husband for the wife, and doubt the wife for the husband.
The police had lied about the autopsy. There was no indication of bruising. The child had died of SIDS. The police had lied. This approach to extracting confessions from people should be revisited. There are so many who wind up in jail, confessing to crimes they never committed. I am thinking of the Central Park boys, teenage boys who were tricked into confessing. They were exonerated when the real perpetrator confessed. Only then did they win their freedom. Horrible!
Is this method valuable or necessary? Let’s see. I suppose we could give the police a break if they have reason to be afraid that the person(s) being questioned might hurt others. If you are breathing and black, particularly if you’re also young and male, are you automatically a danger to society?
I had videoed my sessions with Kingston. I listened to one of them. OMG! I am saying no, with the same enthusiasm I’m saying Yes. Wow! I would scare the bejesus out of me. How embarrassing. I don’t know if I’m that way a lot. I just know that the kids see me as nice and kind, trustworthy. I’m planning to find a dog clicker and use it to signal a correction is needed. That at least will eliminate emotional intensity from the situation.
I finally put away the pillowcases, which have been draped over one of my sofas, waiting for me to choose which to keep and which to give away. I took out all the sheets for my bed stored in the drawers under the bed and chose some of the waiting pillowcases to keep as extras. The other 20 I put into a box for donation to Memory Lane. I put seven ironed shirts on top. Order! Ah! Mike is so proud and so sad that I couldn’t do it for him when he was alive. He loved order and feared chaos. I am daily figuring out little ways to make my home look more like a motel room.
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