My right big toe was bothering me. It felt like it was uncomfortably rubbing against the inside edge of my right Croc. I finally looked at it. It was inflamed. I treated it with Tea Tree oil and soaked it in hot water with Epson Salts and vinegar. I also resolved not to walk a lot until the inflammation was gone and stop wearing my Crocs, so the toe didn't continue to be abraded. I put on a pair of Oofos slippers. Slippers is the word for flip-flops in Hawaii.
My morning walk was brief, just up and down my block. Besides the problem with my toe, the Oofos engaged a whole different set of muscles than my Crocs do.
I was home as Yvette was setting up her Tuesday driveway yoga class. She was expecting eight students; only five of those showed up, and I joined that group. I was a few minutes late. I had to feed Elsa. I left her inside the house to eat as I set up my mat and my chair, but I also left the door open.
Yvette's three dogs are part of her yoga class. Yoga with dogs instead of goats. The gate to the street is closed, which makes it safe for them. When Elsa was finished with breakfast, she joined us. She promptly visited each student to be petted. They all did so as they did their poses. I must take pictures of her doing this.
My body responded both joyfully and stressfully to the stretches. My core muscles loved it; my inner thigh and hip muscles felt the strain. However, I could see that I could do things I couldn't do before. I have been straightening out my back, which has changed how my body works.
I did some work on the blog when I came inside. The teacher I am working with called. After I shared a problem I am having with a student's mother, she told me she had issues with her too. She came to class during open school night and said to her," I have to get my son out of your class." The teacher said, "Why?" The mother said, "Have you looked at the color of your skin?" The teacher is white; this woman and her family are black. She assumed the teacher would not give her child the best she had because he was black. The teacher told her to speak to the principal. No changes were made. Besides the outrageousness of that request, there were no black teachers in that grade level. While Hawaii is very multicolored, there are very few African Americans anywhere. Our diversity is from the Asian and Polynesian communities. Whites, known as haoles here, are mostly from the mainland or from older families from England and Portugal. They were the first settlers on the island after the Polynesians found this little spot of land in the middle of the Pacific.
Judy came over for a massage from Yvette. She came out looking like melted butter. She asked Yvette what method she used. She said she was trained in Hawaiian massage, but her work is eclectic. I said it was "Yvette massage." She works by instinct, and those instincts are very, very good.
I had spent part of the morning getting packages ready for mailing. An old necklace from my mother and a birthday present for Sam went to Karin; a picture of Mike and me went to Carol and John in Maryland. I sent off two packages to Shivani, one with the remaining wooden flowers from the craft kit and the scrapbook her mother had made for Mike many years ago. It should be kept in the family. There are old pictures and original documents from Shivani's grandparents and great-grandparents.
The postal clerk complimented me on my improvised packaging. Because two of the packages were under thirteen ounces, they went first class and were inexpensive. The scrapbook is huge and cost quite a bit more. I will be relieved to hear that it has arrived safely.
I headed over to the old industrial area to go to Petco to pick up some items. I decided to Stop by at JAWS and just have Tasha, Edwin's receptionist, reset my car monitor. She had just left, but Edwin did it for me. He told me that his analysis showed there is something wrong with my hybrid battery. If this is the case, this car will have to be retired. Oh, boy.
I drove over to Toyota immediately, right next door, to see if they could take a look. Their technology is more sophisticated. They didn't have a technician available. I had to make an appointment for 9 am tomorrow. I texted Yvette to tell her about my situation and ask her if she could pick me up from Toyota and drive me home.
As I drove home, my car showed serious signs of failure. I had heard some suspicious noises before, but this was a whole different order of seriousness. I couldn't get my car to accelerate. After I stopped at a light, the car would slowly accelerate to thirteen miles an hour. After a little bit of time, it would get up to forty-five miles an hour. If I traveled long enough, it could get up to fifty miles an hour. It didn't look good.
I thought of how much stress I'm under—the virus, the police violence, and resulting racial unrest, and now my car. Compared to the other two, my car is a trivial problem. The first two are life-changing for all of us. One has to wonder how this will all resolve. I wished Mike were here to give me a comforting hug. I got that he is upset that I have to face all this alone. For a few minutes, I felt that way too. However, the Mike I am missing is the one before he got sick. If he had survived pancreatitis, he would have been another burden, miserably unhappy with his limited life, and another stressor on me. He wouldn't have had much to offer me, and the situation would have only made him feel even worse. He would have been helpless, totally dependent on me.
When he was in the hospital, I considered a long recovery time. I was optimistic as long as he didn't sink into despair and anger either with himself or his situation. But I realized in retrospect that his chance of full recovery was close to zero. My poor baby. He went through so much. He was so brave facing this terrible situation.
I stopped at Costco on my way home to pick up the collagen product Yvette recommended, which says is helping Josh with his knee and has improved her skin. I also picked up baguettes for her, blueberries, onions, Clorox 2, and another case of almond milk for me. I bought the chopped onion in the spice aisle because there's no point for me to buy a fresh onion. I don't use it enough. As I walked to my car, I was wondering if I would make it out of the parking lot. The car strains more on hills than on the flat ground, and I had a three-mile hill to climb to get home. Fortunately, I had a straight run at the exit on the hill out of the parking lot. Then it was downhill to Queen K, the major highway running parallel to the ocean and, therefore, flat roadway. I made the right turn onto Kaminani to make that three-mile climb. I never got the speedometer above thirteen miles an hour. I signaled other cars to pass me. But I made it home.
When I got home, I listened to an NPR interview with Christian Cooper. What an amazing man. He is the one who confronted a woman in Central Park asking her to put her dog on a leash while videotaping her. She didn't want to be videotaped and threatened to tell the police that an African American man was threatening her. I had assumed that she said this in a moment of panic and confusion. Yes, fed by bias but not a deliberate manipulation to get him to do something her way. I heard the video. Wow! Really. This is a clear threat on her part. Since all he was doing was videotaping her while he was backing off from her advances, there is no question that she didn't feel in danger. She was just outraged that he would ask her to obey the law. How dare he! Really? This is stunning. This woman's life is in ruin. Does she deserve this much punishment for literally threatening an African American man by threatening to call the police and telling them that she was being threatened? Holy cow!
Like Christian Cooper, I agree that while she deserves punishment, she doesn't deserve what is currently happening to her, the loss of her job, and the death threats. This is way beyond what she deserves. I know a way out of her situation. She either has to move into a white supremacist group or reform and get on the speaking circuit explaining who she was and how this experience has transformed her. She can become a champion for human rights for African Americans. Does she have the brains and self-awareness to do this? We'll see, won't we? Either way, she does not deserve the worst of what may come her way any more than Christian deserved her treatment of him, or George Floyd deserved what he got.
Trump! However, frightening I have found him in the past, he is outdoing himself now. It's like he's taken lessons from Dylan Roof. He committed his deed, hoping to ignite a race war. Had he waited a few years, he wouldn't have had to sacrifice his own life to achieve his desired end; Trump would already have been in power. This is all very painful for me.
Yvette came up to get the baguettes I bought for her from Costco. I talked about my concerns about police violence, racial tension, and Trump's response to the situation. I don't know which of the many emotions I am feeling dominate, fear, sadness, or anger? I am grateful that I live in Hawaii; it's pretty peaceful here. People are demonstrating. I am terrified of group activities and am thinking of joining in on the demonstrations against police violence.
Here is a simple solution that would reduce the number of violent police acts: fire any police officer with more than, let's say, three convictions for inappropriate use of violence. This behavior costs the police forces across the nation a ton of money. I believe these bad cops don't get fire because of the unions. I propose that we start suiting the unions as well.
I am a strong advocate of unions. I have a good understanding of what life was like for workers before the unions. No, I don't want to go back to that. But that does not mean that I think everything unions do is right. Absolutely not. There is a large room in NYC filled with teachers who could not be allowed in the classrooms and can't be fired. They have to show up to this room every day and sit there for the hours that school is in session- and receive their full pay. What a waste! The unions also make it impossible to fire police officers that are not suited for the job and give everyone else in the profession a bad name. There has to be some reasonable criterion for getting these folks off the payroll and, in the case of the police officers, off the streets.
I vented to Yvette. We are on the same page, which is nice. We both are the beneficiaries of white privilege. Yvette finds her position confusing because she is mixed race. Her father's family is from the Dominican Republic. Their skin is darker than a white person's because of their mixed racial heritage. Yvette's mother was white.
I have experienced something similar. I come from a mixed marriage: my father came from an upper class German Jewish family and my mother from a German lower-middle-class Lutheran one. I was born right before the US entered WWII. These distinctions were important in those days. I had encounters with Jewish people who were prejudice against Christians and Germans. In that case, I made it plain that I was Christian and German. Then there were Christians who were prejudiced against Jews. In that case, I identified with the Jews. People usually backed off when I confronted them, but in each case, it was because "I was different." No, not really. Prejudice like that doesn't make exceptions. All I managed to do was get them to back off.
Talking to Yvette did help relieve some of my stress. As a result, I was able to do quite a bit of work on my article on my reading method. After the Zoom meeting to discuss the article with Dorothy and Shivani, I was frozen for two days. I'm not quite sure why. I got a little bit of work done in the intervening period, but not a lot. Today, I actually enjoyed working on the project.
I continued watching "Five Days- The Train" after dinner. I love this show. It shares a structure to the movie "Crash.". A single incident brings all these different lives together. It is also a murder mystery. I find it very engaging. I recognize many of the actors from other videos. It is a very good crew. It got only three stars. Not in my book.
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