Classes are going well. I must confess, though, that the Justice in Literature class isn't very talkative. I told them I was going to bring in the jumper cables to see if I couldn't get them jump-started. One of my students in that class is the son of a woman who was (purportedly) murdered by her husband. The young man insists that his father is innocent, that his mother committed suicide. The woman died from TWO bullets to the brain. She left behind notes that said if she died suddenly, look to her husband, that she would never commit suicide. The man was convicted of his wife's murder, and the son, now a grown man, is one of the angriest people I've ever met. He practically sits and seethes.
In another class I have a woman who is a ward of the state. She's in foster care. She's had two babies that were given up for adoption.
In another class, one of my students had brain surgery the day classes began. Doctors removed a brain tumor through her nose! She will presumably be back to school in a couple of weeks. In that same class, one of my students (a young married woman with two children) is the wife of a police officer who was fired for something she insists he didn't do. (He was acquitted but nevertheless fired anyway.)
Several of my students wrote in their "About Me" essays (first-day writing) that they suffer from depression and various other mental and physical ailments. One student rather openly discussed his horrible childhood and his homosexuality. I'm glad people are more willing to talk about these things now. It makes my job easier if I know who my students are.
Our new president will be sworn into office on Tuesday, and I can hardly wait. If only I didn't have class all day on Tuesday! Somehow, it isn't the same if I have to watch taped replays of the events.
I'm continuing with my physical therapy, as painful as it is. My landlady Betty told me that in 1995, she was working in her garden, stepped backwards into a hole, and tore her Achilles tendon in two. Her toes came up and met her shin, not a normal position for a foot to be in. Her children helped her into the house and then took her to the emergency room. After surgery to repair the damage, she was given exercises to do that would restore movement. No physical therapy facilities existed then in the area. But because it hurt to do the exercises, she didn't do them. As a result, she said her walking was permanently damaged, that she will always walk kind of like a duck. Betty's story definitely inspired me to keep working at my exercises and to keep letting John move my arm in ways that hurt like hell on steroids.
Yesterday at the grocery store we saw this older woman (in her seventies?) who apparently was hoping she'd be picked for some surprise attack makeover. It's hard to imagine that she knows what she looks like, much less that she deliberately works to look that way. She is a tall, angular woman, with a long narrow hatchet face. Yet she wears her hair teased straight up and back, like Nefertiti's headgear. It's dyed a peculiar shade of red violet. To add to that odd haircolor, she has adorned the sides of her face (not just cheeks) with a dark brown blusher. (Imagine if you laid your face down on the side on a big ink pad and then turned and placed the other side of your face on that big ink pad.) To add to the general sense that she was an escapee from a House of Horrors, this woman had the most unpleasant sour-puss expression I've ever seen. Scary. It's especially scary to me because I worry that I don't know what I look like to other people, especially since I've lost weight.
Back to the weather, a topic never far from my mind: It's snowing, and we're supposed to get more snow tomorrow, with windchills keeping us in the minuses. Big Rapids is getting even more snow than we are. Groan. This week, I had several instances of clearing the snow off my car and then having my fingers numb and aching for half an hour. (I was wearing gloves, too!) Betty's furnace is having to undergo repairs, so I'm dreading getting back to her house Monday evening and finding that it is frigid inside. (I've been augmenting her furnace heat with my own little portable electric heater. It's almost the only way I can stand that frozen bathroom long enough to shower.)
Today's photo is one of my favorite paintings, Christina's World. It's to honor the great Andrew Wyeth, who died this week. He was very old, in his nineties, but his work will live forever.
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