Tuesday, September 13, 2022

 Tuesday, September 13, 2022

    I did one of my around-the-block walks. I went up Kukuna to the first fire hydrant. I could easily have gone further, but I didn’t know how long my legs could last. The climb to the top is challenging for people younger and stronger than me. I went home via Punawele instead of walking down Kukuna to my street. I saw a woman in front of her house weeding. I guessed it was the woman Isaac had met whom he thought I would get along with. I stopped to chat. Sure enough, it was Jackie. Isaac had given me her number, but I never got around to reaching out.

     Jackie was a widow, as I was. She had been living alone since 2018 when her husband died. Mine died on March 3, 2019. It did seem she would be a kindred spirit. Let’s see how it develops.

    When I got home, Scott came out of his room with Yvette. She did a remarkable job tending to him as he recovered from neck surgery. There had been a disturbing incident last night. While Yvette was visiting, he passed out. Worse yet, his arms twitched as he lay there. They asked me if I didn’t hear Yvette scream. I must have been out walking at the time. If I had heard, I would have been there like a shot. He came to quickly. Yvette proposed getting him to the hospital immediately. Scott said no. She tormented herself, wondering if she had done the right thing listening to him.

  They called the doctor’s office the moment it opened in the morning. The nurse who answered the phone was unconcerned. He had gotten the wrong instructions from the discharge nurse to take Aleve. He was on another medication that conflicted with it and caused whatever he experienced. He looked much better than he had once he was off the Aleve.

   Someone talked about the prevalence of loneliness on NPR. She used to think she had been depressed as a child. She now realized she was lonely. That’s how I felt as a child. The feeling predated the birth of my sister when I was four and a half. My mother was very involved with my physical care, but there was no affection. Thinking of myself as lonely instead of angry impacts me.

  I had a dream about my work. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to promote my teaching methods; That was the problem at some level. I didn’t want to promote it. I dreamt I couldn’t move. My feet were locked in place by grass that reached the top of my sneakers. I was locked in place. This relates to my early childhood experiences. My mother wouldn’t allow me to do anything because I couldn’t do it well enough. What three-year-old can do anything up to adult standards? She would scream at me for trying. You would think it was a life-or-death matter. I was treated like a precious doll whose place was always on the shelf, away from everything else. I hated it.

  In the late afternoon, I had a phone call from JL, the educational support teacher at the high-end private academy who recommended me as a tutor. I shared some insights about ninth-grade K. 

While he could generate visual images about his experiences and even the spelling of words; he had difficulty translating his visual images into words and words into visual images. This was not going to be an easy fix. I recommended that K listen to the 5 Stories audio file on YouTube in hopes that it strengthen his auditory processing skills. It is K’s first year in this rigorous academic school. I worry about him. JL also told me that the sixth-grade W was holding her own. I suspect she is going to be just fine.