Tuesday, February 22, 2022

 Tuesday, February 22, 2022

      Last night I watched the last of the DVDs Mike and I ordered from Netflix.  They must have been sitting on the bookshelf for at least a year before Mike died.  I'm glad I watched them.  One was a modern story based on a Shakespeare plot, and the second was a biopic on Hitchcock.  The last, which I watched the first half last night, was The Sapphires, based on a true story of four Aboriginal girls who formed a soul group and performed for the troops in Vietnam.  

   I slept well last night.  I had none of that shaky feeling.  Could it be caused by the Kangen water?  I agreed with Judy; I should get off the water until the shaky feeling stops and then get back on and see if it reoccurs.  It may be that I'm hypersensitive to the change in PH.  I am to other chemical changes.  When I proposed that to Paulette, she suggested lowering the PH from 9.5 to 8.

     In the early morning hours, I thought of Mike and missed him.  I was struck that when I thought of Mike's face, as in a portrait photo, it meant close to nothing to me.  Mike was a verb for me, not a noun.  He protected me, sheltered me, loved me, made me laugh, brought a smile to my face, fed me, watched over me, supported me, told me I was beautiful every day, made me proud to know him, and delighted me.  There are more, but I've run out of adjectives. 

    I was reminded today of how much he made me smile.  I have pictures and a video of the weekend we picked up Elsa from the breeder.  Mike's tenderness and pride in being a dog owner are apparent in these images.  Thinking about them brought a huge smile to my face.  I don't smile like that anymore.  My face muscles asked, "What's this?" when I smiled, thinking of Mike.  Boy, I loved that guy.  But I can't imagine feeling that way about him when I think of him as a man I might meet now.  Those feelings were developed over forty-five years together.   

    I washed the bathroom floor.  Colleen is coming in today for 10 days.  She's an esthetician.  Many professionals live on one island and travel to another for a day, a week, or more to work.  That's what Colleen does.  The place she used to stay became unavailable.  Yvette asked me if she could stay here.  Sure.  She's arriving this afternoon.  Yesterday, I vacuumed and dusted the guest room and did a job on the bathtub and sink.  Today I washed the bathroom floor. 

    The tub was another matter.  It hadn't been cleaned since Christmas 2020 when the young woman who stayed with me left.  I hadn't seen grime like that since I cleaned the windowsills in my uncle's Manhattan apartment in the sixties.  Smog was at its height then; the 'dust' was grime.  We don't have that kind of pollution here.  On the contrary, we have the cleanest air.  Today, it isn't good for us, 41.  Anything under 50 is good, but we're generally in the twenties and below.  Where does that black soot come from?  The soil.  It's the lava rock.  My home is in an area with a lot of open space.

    I had an appointment with the acupuncturist.  She worked on my legs and my feet.  When she put the needles in my feet, they screamed, ow.  The pain quieted down quickly.  It's hard to know what's effective; I've done so much: acupuncturist, chiropractor, and two physical therapists. 

   I saw my PT Terry later in the afternoon.  I came in with a back problem.  The work the acupuncturist did probably caused it, but not in a bad way.  An adjustment, even a good one, stimulates complaints from the body.  It complains, "This is not what I'm used to!!"     

     Terry has all these tricks for fixing my back, which are incredible.  As I was lying on the table, she had me push my right foot against her leg while it was turned in and slanted to the left.  Then she gently pulled on my left leg as far as she could.  When she had gone as far as she could, she told me to give a deep belly cough.  She did the same procedure two or three times more.  Voila!  Terry also commented on how different my left leg looked since she started in October.  While I have made significant progress, one could also say I had gotten nowhere.  Am I a work in progress, or am I just moving problems from one place to another? 

    Collen, my house guest, arrived just before I started my session with adolescent D.    She came loaded with groceries for the week.  She put moved them into the kitchen while I worked with D. Crash!!!  I stayed calm.  How bad could it be?  Pretty bad, as it wound up.  She dragged a trivet over the edge as she pulled the grocery bag across the counter to pick it up.  It was in pieces.  It's an old trivet of my mom's.  It says, "Margaret's kitchen." Because of my mom, I can afford the lifestyle I have, and I can afford this home.  My dad died when I was 15.  He was on the verge of earning a good living, but it never happened.  He didn't leave my mom with a lot of money.  She invested the little she had and parlayed it into a substantial amount through good investments in a booming stock market.  It was all her.  This kitchen is hers and Mike's.  The kitchen was designed to be Mike's dream kitchen.  I thank my mom that Mike could have that joy.  He loved his kitchen.  Whenever I think of things that gave him joy, my heart swells.  I loved to make that man happy. 

    Despite my sorrow over the broken trivet, I stayed calm.  The ceramic pieces can be glued back together.  It will do.  However, I did ask Colleen if she tended to break things.  If she did, I wanted to move objects that I valued out of her reach.  She said no. 

     My session with D went well.  His mom told me there was a substantial improvement in his last report card.   I asked him if he was pleased with this.  He said yes, a clear, unambiguous yes.  He would have said, "I guess so," very noncommittally in the past.  This is a huge improvement. 

     I asked him the usual questions: did you do any reading in school today?  What class?  Were you able to understand it?  He said he wasn't sure.  Wow!!!  Wow!!  For those for whom those words expressing uncertainty come easily, you have no idea what breakthrough it was for this boy.  He knew he understood some of it but hadn't understood all the words.  He didn't know what additional information those words provided.  He was having trouble decoding multi-syllable words.  He followed the procedure: identifying the vowels and attempting to identify the syllables.  I thought, at first, he had difficulty blending the syllables.  However, when I had him divide the word devastating into syllables, he only identified three instead of four.  He needed to be more secure in the rule: there is a syllable division between every set of sounded vowels.  I had been working with him on third-grade material.  I suggested we return to working on eighth-grade material to encounter more multi-syllable words.  He was game. 

  He approached this material with trepidation.  He made mistakes with words he could read automatically.  I didn't see this as a bad thing.  I saw it as him approaching the work from a whole new perspective.  When you look at the familiar with fresh eyes, it can look weird.  You suddenly don't know what it is or what to do with it. It's the Beginner's Mind.   I assured him this was a natural step in the learning process, and I thought it was a good sign.  Of course, some of it may have been fear interfering with his perception rather than a beginner's mind.  That wouldn't be wonderful, but I chose to emphasize the positive. 

   I was in the second half of The Artist last night.  Then I started a movie my friend Melissa recommended, The Rabbit-Proof Fence.  Melissa is an OBGYN and surgeon who volunteers in the Australian outback for several months a year.  She loves working with those people.  The movie is the story of the white Australian government's attempt to force 'half-breed' children into the European way of life.  They were kidnapped, taken from their parents, and raised in camps.  The government official who headed the project genuinely believed he was doing what was best for the aboriginals.  The road to hell is paved with good intentions.