Wednesday, September 14, 2022

 Wednesday, September 14, 2022

 

   The gardeners called yesterday to ask if they could come. I pruned in the back lanai, which I take care of, in anticipation of their arrival. I wanted to cut down a small dead tree. Cutting it was unnecessary. A few good tugs and it came out of the ground. I clipped some of the bougainvillea. It was out of hand. I was cutting it back a bit each month. The clipper locked. I tried WD-40 first. It did nothing. I threw it into the trash for pickup today. 

  I checked on the haole koa this morning. New leaves were coming up on the one branch I didn’t hit with the boiling water. That means the roots and trunk are still pushing nutrients to the leaves. Oh well. So much for that experiment. I guess boiling water won’t be the solution to these trees. We can add boiling water to the long list of chemicals that cannot kill the plant.

  I showered and headed out to my optometrist appointment. I ran into road work on Kuakini Highway. I called to warn them I would be late. The tech who was going to administer the retinal test said not to worry. I made it there only a few minutes late. Then I had to wait a good fifteen minutes. The exam only takes a few minutes. At one point, she said she would take pictures of the back of my eye. I said, “Do you want me to turn around?” She laughed appropriately. She said she loved my sense of humor. All Alia did was administer the eye test. Sandor would call me with the results this evening.

  We talked about an upcoming Duerte wedding. The Duertes are a huge family in Hawaii. Some of the family lives on a single piece of land, like half a dozen homes with Duerte Road running through it. Alia would not be attending. She did not expect to be invited. While her mother married a Duerte, she was too far removed from the bride’s family. That relationship would be close in my family because we are so few. 

    I have no first cousins. My mom was an only child. As far as we know, my dad had one brother who had no children. (I’m waiting for something to show up on 23 and me.) My mother has one cousin who was 21 years younger than my mom and is now 97. He had two children, one of whom had two children. Those two children have produced a total of six grandchildren. Our nearest relatives on my father’s side are the descendants of his first cousins. This is unusual in Hawaii, where large ohanas are common. Alia’s story was similar to my own. Her mom had been an only child—no cousins on that side. And there were no first cousins on her father’s side either. She was one of three children. She and her two siblings had planned on creating an extended family. 

  While I thought a checkup was worthwhile, I was not as concerned about my failing eyesight as I was when I renewed my driver’s license. I realized I did poorly on the eye test because I had to press my face into a viewfinder. That meant I couldn’t choose the optimal place on my progressive lenses for clearly seeing. Sandor also asked me if I put eye drops in my eyes regularly. Dry eyes interfere with vision. He instructed me to put drops in at least every morning and every night before I went to bed. Who knew?

    B called while I was driving home. He just had rotator cuff surgery scheduled for Friday next week. It wasn’t immediately clear, but it came out that he was in Oahu and would be on a return flight landing around 2:30. I would be in session with his grandkids then. Their mom can only give me once a week. 

    I stopped at Lowe’s to pick up a new pair of clippers and gardening gloves.   

   When I got home, I read more of Fish in a Tree and slept a bit before my 2 p.m. appointment. I kept checking the alarm. As it wound up, I hadn’t set it. But I got up in plenty of time. 

   I told Adolescent D about the exercise I designed with the hope of helping him improve the way he writes numbers on a page. His mother told me he is very neat and organized in his room. He straightens objects when they are out of place. I designed an exercise to help him use his excellent 3D visual-spatial skills to improve his poor visual-spatial 2D skills. He didn’t understand why my exercise would work, but he was willing to do what I told him to. He had success with my methods; it was worth a try.

  It took me a few minutes to get information out of him about the work he had to do. He finally copped to an assignment of his PE class on health, the circulatory system. I was rusty on the topic. I wouldn’t have been much help to him without access to the Internet. He read from the text. Many of the words he read fluently. But when he didn’t automatically know a word, he got stuck on the word circulation. He couldn’t remember that a c before i makes an /s/ sound. Then he couldn’t remember what sound ir made. Then, he couldn’t blend the two. He kept trying to produce a word he was familiar with- stir- instead of cir. He worked on cross-body blending. He followed my directions as he hadn’t before. He made a serious effort. Not knowing how to help him, I asked for help from the powers that be. I finally asked him if all his activity was on the right side of his brain. He said yes. When he tried to focus on the left, he became absent. The left is fallow. Nothing was going on there, nothing. He kept disappearing on me. I think he does that when he gets scared. He even said he goes into freeze mode when frightened. Fight is my first choice. Everyone has their own defense mechanism. 

  As the session ended, I asked him to focus on the left, if only for a few seconds, while watching TV, playing a video game, or eating. I didn’t think he could hold it for over a few seconds. When he focused on the left, his attention was repelled much as when the same poles of a magnet repel each other.  

  After giving the final instructions, I asked him if he understood. There was no response. I called his name. I yelled his name. Nothing. I realized he had fallen asleep. Later in the day, I texted him my instructions with compliments on how hard he had worked. He confirmed my suspicion. He had fallen asleep. I assured him that was not a problem.

  I had Mama K’s crew afterward. They were at the beach doing a clean-up. The kids sat in the car while they worked with me. We always work on the phone. They don’t have a functioning computer. 

   I worked with fourth-grade K first. I asked him how he was doing in school. He told me he had a test tomorrow on body parts. I asked all sorts of questions about the subject and format of the test. He didn’t have a lot of information. “It’s on parts of the body, bicycles, and plants.” I suppose this is possible, a conceptual exercise in understanding that things are made of parts that equal the whole. I had no idea; it didn’t look like he had much of an idea. It was frustrating. I wished I could speak to the teacher. I instructed Mama K to make sure he studied the parts of the body, bicycles, and plants on the Internet. She said okay. She’s got five kids with various needs and two additional adults living in her house besides her and her husband. Oh, did I mention she works six days a week? We’ll see what happens.

  Then I had Twin E. She still couldn’t remember the word there or how to figure it out (the+r). While that’s not the accurate pronunciation, it will get you to the word when you hear it in context. She read the rest of the passage slowly. I don’t have a clue how to help this child yet.

   Twin A was my next ‘victim.’ I always call out ‘next victim’ when it’s time to switch. The kids adopted it. I assume they know what it means. Maybe not. But it’s funny. 

  I started with the third Carpenter story. She didn’t remember the word there either but did well with the rest of the passage. While she is still on a kindergarten level, she is light years ahead of her twin,

  I got an email from Joe Ludes of Hawaiian Prep about a student I was working with. He asked me to contact his science and language art teachers so they could tell me what they were working on.