Saturday, May 15, 2021

 Saturday, May 15, 2021

            I run into the same elderly couple on my morning walks almost every day. Vince is about to turn eighty. Julie is one year younger. They have been married since he was 21 and she was 20. She haole, and he's part Hawaiian and part Philippino. Julie said her family was not real pleased when she brought him home. I asked why. She said, "Look at his skin." Yes, he is definitely brown.

            I learned more about them today. I had heard before that Julie was dating a friend of Vince's when they met. The friend asked Vince to fill in for him one evening, and the rest was history. Today I learned that Vince knew from the moment he saw her that he wanted to marry her. I have heard more stories like this one. It's the guy who takes one look at the woman and thinks, "marriage." That's how it was with Mike and me. He had made up his mind that he would marry me before our first date. I had to be corralled. Those marriages, the ones initiated by the men, usually turn out to be good ones. 

            Today I also learned that Julie was pregnant when they got married. I asked about their firstborn. She said they lost him when he was thirty-five to AIDS. She said he was a changeling. I haven't heard that term in a long time. I wonder if it carried the same meaning as it did for her. Her son danced as a female impersonator in NYC. She said they knew something was different by the time he was five. Another interesting point. Her son would probably have done better in today's atmosphere with greater acceptance of people with nontraditional sexual identities. I didn't ask her how she related to her son. However, she was able to tell me that those impersonators had to be male. They had to show their wares to prove it. She must have had enough contact with him to get that information.

            I had adolescent D today. I started working on the eighth-grade material. I am using the paragraphs from Barnell Loft's Drawing Conclusions H, which is on the 8th-grade level. D has the language skills to understand the material; he just can't read it independently. At the end of this session, where he could identify a lot of the words, he still insisted that there had been no improvement in his reading since he started with me. He was reading on a low 2nd-grade level. No, he couldn't read every word on his own today, but he could read more of them than he had before. Maddening.                             

Again, we had a downpour. It's been raining every day, hard. The man across the street puts off painting his wrought iron fence because he needs a couple of dry hours or the job is in jeopardy. The positive aspect of the rain is we don't have to water the plants. The bad news is the weeds flourish, and the coquis love it.

Melissa had called to say she had seen the video I made and wanted to give me feedback. She said she loved it and only suggested that I change two words that she thought carried a negative tone. 

A's parents canceled again. Whatever. I listened to the Saturday NPR shows.

            Judy has a turkey living primarily on her property, Gloria. She has mentioned her before. Judy noticed a growth on her face that she anticipated would block Gloria's eye and her ability to eat as it grows. Today, she said it had reached this point; the poor animal would die of starvation, a slow and unpleasant death. I proposed killing it, but how? We talked about going after it with a machete, shooting it with a gun, or a bow and arrow. Adam, her son, has been talking more about getting into hunting to secure food for his family, but he's not there yet. I proposed asking around to see if anyone was already into hunting who could do the job. I texted Scott. He said he couldn't come over right then, but he might be able to do it tomorrow.