March 30, 2023

Six years ago to this day of this month my now wife  Rebecca, son David, and our trust attorney met at her office in downtown Honolulu to discuss changes in our trust since we planned to marry. At the close of this meeting I asked our attorney if she knew someone who could marry us. She smiled saying that years ago she obtained the license to marry and after checking that day found out she had six more days on her current license. She had a luncheon appointment so Rebecca and I walked to the Health Department building and paid our $35 for our marriage application. On our return we were married with David as our witness. 

I was widowed two years before. My wife had pancreatic cancer and died some nine months after the diagnosis. Our life together just got better and better so our past issues of estrangement due to my immaturity and work stress issues were uncomfortable regrettable fading memories. Rebecca had her own history. We met while hiking together so all I knew was feeling better when hiking with her. 

Now eight years later, six married we're very close, trusting, enjoying our conversations, and my lustful enthusiasm. Our journey together has required perseverance and commitment in communicating since we both placed barriers and projected our own insecurities and mistrust onto each other. Our human tendency to make stories and believe our narrative story was overcome through trust and dialogue not dissimilar from my experiences in my first marriage. 

Yesterday, I went hiking with a great group of middle to senior aged enthusiasts. In the rain we meandered up and down ridges, through guava, paper bark, Cook pine, and bamboo forests. Our final push up besides a sometimes cascading stream to twin waterfalls over (to me) 1000 feet high we stopped. Then back the same way with my careful paced wearing my left ankle to knee brace, two hiking sticks for balance and stability for my peripheral neuropathy, and watching my pulse rate on IWatch since I have atrial fibrillation, heart valve wear and tear, and an electric pacemaker. My metal cleats helped while walking through puddles of mud and water and hiking on inclines with slippery rocks and roots. I had some eye irritation during this hike so I wiped my eyes with my handkerchief. When back at my car I suddenly noticed that my left eye had half the field obscured! Even again after wiping my eye this persisted. So I became very frightened concluding that I had a torn retina again. Some seven years ago I had surgery for a macular hole and then more severe surgery for a retinal tare. Oh, no! I called my retinologist when I got home and then took a shower. Drying off I looked at my left eye in the mirror and saw a plug of darker mucous obscuring my vision in this eye. Wiping this away my vision cleared though this eye and my other eye felt itchy with some minor pain. Rebecca called me after my relief view and clearing of my left eye and I told her this story and she hurried home. We had our emergency visit with my retinologist and she diagnosed bacterial conjunctivitis easily treated with eye drops.

Rebecca has her health issues and less occasional more serious problems and she has been so supportive through my health issue crises. There is no question regarding our commitment of support but what remains delightful is our continued regard for each other and enjoyment of our times together. 

So being a curious person interested in analyzing and understanding how are we so fortunate? Another way to pose this issue is how come some people stay stuck in unhappy relationships that to an outsider seems so apparent yet to the couple conflict and unhappiness continue? One way to view this is to understand that we have evolved to associate and attempt to bond by creating a more idealized version of ourselves and our significant other but we don't go further to see if our idealized images are real and coincide somewhat to the actual person. Well, could I be in the same boat? I don't think so for the following reasons. My wife and I talk and challenge each other and gain insights to each other and our vulnerabilities. Secondly, we share some of our issues with others including the readers of this blog. I'm also aware that we can criticize each other with love and respect and modify some annoying quirks and mannerisms that may irritate and even offend. 

Monday group luncheons remain interesting and challenging. Our group discussions don't go on any script so we cover various interests and topics. Our individual enthusiasm to convince others, move others emotions and opinions, and show our egotistical side is tempered through our healthy group  interactions. I wanted our group to look at a chapter of Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste on the symbols of caste. I did not think this was an easy book to cover. When I started it, her writing about slavery and the Dalit's plight in India its horror and injustice highlighted by her well researched factual descriptions was hard to experience though vicariously. Her description of the history of how the Nazi regime in Germany decided on the changes in their laws to have a caste system with the Jews (and other defective and inferior groups). The model the Nazi used was the then current Jim Crow laws of the south (1934). Wilkerson describes how the Christian religion was used in the story of Noah drunken with his three sons disparaged Ham the outcast whose progeny are the caste of the world worthy only of slavery! I will not give a book review here but here's another's example (https://www.shortform.com/summary/caste-summary-isabel-wilkerson?gclid=CjwKCAjw5pShBhB_EiwAvmnNV_4K4np5hH073kXv1L6zYHVNmPONfWKisgt0XxPDHgesupX3pi1HvRoCLTIQAvD_BwE

I also did come across a podcast from the Atlantic magazine about modern Germany and the memorialization of the holocaust and some suggestion for the U.S.A. ( https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2023/03/germany-holocaust-memorial-slavery/673562/). I messaged some family and friends this explanation. 

In our last Monday meeting I discussed Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste.

This podcast describes some recent history of memorializing the holocaust and attempts to open up for discussion the complicity of many ordinary citizens in Germany. There is an attempt to compare USA citizens complicity in the horrors of slavery and even mention of efforts to “white wash” or misrepresent this history so the shame and horror are absent. 

We need to work on accuracy and acknowledgement which includes removal of the symbols of Jim Crow and slavery erected to perpetuate a myth of victory and caste debasement as well as new approaches to more accurately represent our history and legacy of genocide, hatred, and slavery.

Leonard

As part of our last Monday meeting we touched on how caste effects medical care. for example, a simple search on google 

"New research offers more insight into potentially dangerous racial disparities in cesarean deliveries: In first-time live births, healthy African-American and Hispanic mothers were 21% and 26% more likely than White mothers, respectively, to deliver by cesarean section despite being low risk.Jan 4, 2022" 

This is an example in medical care in which caste has influenced medical care. 

I'll ask my son for other examples that may be more relevant.

I'm reading Philip Dick's novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Dick’s imagination is very clever so his dystopian 

description of climate changes and our colonization of Venus, Mars and foray

to other Solar systems as a backdrop we have settlers grubbing 

about getting some space through chewing on an alien hallucinogen

which assists the addict couple to spend time in a miniaturized

 home which is real. More to come.

I'm satisfied that I've cleared some from my forebrain, processed some health 

concerns that are now assessed as minor and reviewed the reality of love

 versus the fantasy of what could be. I can't change the world but

I know change is inevitable.

I came across this opinion which deserves pondering.

Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/paulo-freires-oppressive-pedagogy?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

 In antiquity, the sophist Protagoras similarly argued that "man is the measure of all things — of things that are, that they are; and of things that are not, that they are not." There exists no perspective on being besides man's perspective, no realm of being besides what we see and think and make. (Just substitute "Man is" for "we are".)

Leonard