For Shama

I have no idea any longer how it is spelled, but in Old Norse tradition for shama means "for shame". As I recall, the saying turns up in the written versions of oral tradition -- where the orator editorializes about what has just happened in the story. I feel deep shame and anger over my sister's most recent visit.

As readers of mrsguy are aware, her visits of late have been plagued by misfortune. In October she arrived just as my mom got Covid *and* fell and had to go to the hospital where she turned into a beast. In November my sister decided that someone had to spend Thanksgiving with Mom, so she did and inadvertently slept through the alarm, allowing my mom to get up unsupervised and fall. Mom's been mostly awful since then. During the holidays my sister directed me to do all sorts of activities for the family, do money stuff that makes me uncomfortable, etc. Each year my other sister and I hold hold our breath from the beginning of November until the passing of mom's birthday on January 20th.

Too soon after the holidays and weeks before the birthday I spoke to the offending child, who said: "I'm not sure what you have planned for Mom's birthday...but I'm coming to visit". Shoot!! For some reason, probably just reflex, I said I'd see who was available to come see mom. Then I realized that everybody had just seen her a few weeks ago at Christmas (not that she'd remember). I found one volunteer, a family friend. Then my other sister said she'd come see mom with my nephew. Fearing that they'd have to be face-to-face with our sister I joined them for solidarity on the weekend of the birthday proper.

The visit dates kept changing. My sister was going to arrive on the 16th with her husband. Then she was coming without, and coming later in the week. Her best friend was coming to town and she wanted to coordinate the visit in order to see her. She insisted that she only visit with mom on the same day that our favorite caregiver was working. Never mind that my sister has hired all of the caregivers and should want to know them and get to trust them.

During all of her machinations, she changed her tickets three times. Whatever, dude.

The weekend before and after dreaded mom birthday went pretty well. Mom was out of it on weekend one. But after my sister's visit the second weekend she was unbelievably upbeat during our visit. She spoke in complete sentences, thanked us profusely for coming, said she was lucky to have us. When I reported back to mrguy, he was in a state of disbelief that she could be so different from the biting angry mom of late.

Here's the punchline. I thought everything was great. But I checked in with mom and the caregiver the other night after work. Mom had her head on my shoulder and was watching Shark Tank while the caregiver and I caught up. Turns out that my sister had been bullying her about her work schedule in the weeks leading up to the visit, and she had asked her to move her husband's doctor appointment so that she could work on my mom's birthday. When the caregiver's husband said that the appointment couldn't be rescheduled for another week and a half, my sister apparently referred to the doctor loudly as "unprofessional". My sister didn't want to visit with caregivers who were "strangers", a word that our caregiver finds insulting. As do I. It's the same word, she says, that my sister used when describing people who helped my mom during her stay at the hospital in October. I can hear the tone of her voice when she says this word. It's pointed and elongated and ugly. In the end, our caregiver's husband canceled his appointment and the caregiver did what Margaret wanted. I was horrified when hearing this.

Speaking of tone of voice, our caregiver was describing the kinds of things my sister says to her. They are the same kinds of emotionally manipulative things she says to the rest of the family. "I'm not happy about this" is one thing she says that sticks with me. We were raised to believe that if someone else is not happy, we also are not allowed to be happy. And apparently she has groomed our caregiver to respond to this also. As tears streamed down her cheeks and as I clutched my chest, she told me about a time when my sister had taken both hands over her head and slammed them onto the coffee table violently, three times, completely losing her shit and yelling at the caregiver. Why she didn't quit then I absolutely do not know.

My sister behaves like a monster. The caregivers all know that my sister doesn't trust them. They know that my sister worries and is unhappy about the small stuff. They fear her wrath and feel that she blames them for things that happen that are beyond their control.

I feel a deep sense of shame. I am not responsible for her actions but she treats people horribly. She thinks that we're all a bunch of dumb shits, and she can't control the anger that she feels about how much we disappoint her. When we don't do what she wants, we are the enemy. She doesn't care about the wounds she leaves, and I truly expect that after our mom dies that she will want to have some sort of rapprochement. As our caregiver said the other night, I can't forget what happened.

Hawaii 2022 Day 5

When nerds go on vacation they swim, eat, go to the library and look at newspapers on microfilm for 6 hours. If you're us, anyway.

During the beginning of the pandemic, a friend who grew up in Hawaii told me that his grandmother had written a column for a newspaper called the Pali Press. He didn't have copies of her work. I was dying to help. I looked up Pali Press on Worldcat and it turns out that the only library with holdings is the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Two of my favorite things are Hawaii and research, and we didn't go to Hawaii for almost three years. It was so frustrating! So when people asked what I was looking forward to doing in Hawaii they laughed when I said that my very specific plan was to go to the UH Manoa library.

The campus has some really cool sculptures and 60's and 70's architecture. And on a Sunday, the week before Thanksgiving, I would definitely go there *just* to hang out.

The library staff were suuuper helpful, and mrguy's has a keenly honed sense of where to find things that are eluding us in a library setting helped us home in on the right microfilm. Recall that although I went to library school, he's the only one of us that has actually *worked* in a library.

For the first few hours we were having a good time looking at vintage newspapers but not finding grandma's column. And we were going to starve, so we went to find some lunch. We had some yummy Mexican food at an outdoor spot near campus, where we were treated to some bawdy gossip by nearby elderly white ladies -- "You put it down and it goes 'wah, wah, wah'...You couldn't insert it if you tried, or at least I can't!" 

Oh. Vibrator talk! 

We went back to the library. I was looking at newspaper issues from the 1970s, and mrguy was in the 1960s. Just as we were ready to throw in the towel, he found grandma's first column! Now that we knew the years in which she wrote, we went to work and found a ton of them for our friend. Microfilm readers are so much fancier now, btw! You can email images to yourself. We were very happy to provide our friend with 40+ articles. That was so much fun.

In the meantime, things were blowing up at the forklift factory. The top guy toppled, and I got a text from a friend telling me the news. I texted her back: "Current view" (microfilm reader).

What a day! We scratched that itch, and went home. On the way out, the lights were on in Keller Hall, illuminating the stained glass from within. Love that font, too.

Hawaii 2022 Day 4

After our morning swim, Mrguy found us a new place to eat, in walking distance from our hotel. They had a weird homemade veggie burger, which made so happy that I ate it on two different occasions. Super tasty -- with flavors in the curry palate.

After lunch we went to see some friends play at the local ukulele festival at the Waikiki Shell, also walking distance. It was sparsely attended, and mostly keiki were playing, but it was fun. 

Since we were halfway there we walked up Monsarrat to Diamond Head Grill. Nothing inside really spoke to us but our usual shoyu ginger wasabi ahi did *not* disappoint.

We took it back to the shack and had a beer on the lanai and then our ahi.

Gratitude -- A Throwback Post From 2020

Mrguy asked me to find my post about getting rid of my mom's car. Found it in my drafts and am finishing it for him a few years in arrears. Flash back to 2020!

+++

Today is a beautiful day. It's my birthday. To mark the day, I am sending my mom's car into the void, and benefitting my favorite public radio station.

That car has been a pain in the butt. It's been our responsibility for most of the last five years. If it needed service, or smogging or the check engine light was on (frequently) and everybody was freaking out, that was our job.

Here's how we came to own this albatross of a car:

Mom lost her parking space a year ago, and my sister wasn't ready to get rid of the car. Mom's obsessed with having the car, and my sister wanted to be able to drive mom around in mom's car when she was visiting. Her car needed a place to stay, so I had to take it home and keep an eye on it.

In order to have the car ready for my sister to drive every three weeks, as she was doing, I had to transfer ownership, register the car, insure it, smog it and drive it regularly so the battery didn't die. And deliver it to her in another city (which would take two people to do) and then pick it up when she was done with it (also requiring two people). Then there's the matter of getting it to pass smog. Smogging the car is never straightforward. You take it to the smog guy, it fails, he tells you to do "an Italian Tuneup" (which is what he calls driving it for 30 miles two days in a row) and bring it back. Then it passes smog.

It's a fucking ordeal that we are going through so that other people can have the car they sometimes want.

When it was time to renew registration the second year we owned the car, we had to smog it again. When it didn't pass smog this time, the guy said the "tuneup" would not work and we would need to take it to the dealership. They said that it needed $1000+ vintage parts plus labor to make it pass smog. I told them to go ahead. Then I came to my senses and decided to take it off the street. Why am I doing this absurd thing? It's not like keeping this car alive makes people happy. It just makes them (maybe) not unhappy on the occasions when they think about it. How often do they think about it? As much as I do when I'm doing all the things?

I sucked it up and wrote my sister and told her that the car was dead and I was donating it to charity. I had hoped that it would outlive Mom and it simply didn't. If she wanted to borrow a car on a future trip, she could borrow mine. I really put a lot of thought into how I expressed myself, and hoped that maybe I'd get a say. But no. Gotta keep the car. She asked me not to get rid of the car. She was "over it" but she couldn't handle Mom's reaction to the loss of the car. 

In the meantime, mrguy and I started noticing how much the mama doesn't know that my car isn't hers. Both silver Toyotas of the 2000s. "That's my car, right?" "Yep!" "Good. Take good care of my car". I tried this out for a few weeks. Another time, when she was visiting our house she said "Is that my car?" and I said "Your car didn't pass smog, so it's in the shop" and she said "OK. The REAL question is: 'where do you think your father is?'" Like that.

At one point in the summer, my sister came to visit. She wanted the car. I forgot that I had taken some picnic gear out of the trunk that she expressly forbade me to take out of the trunk (I needed the trunk space for something, probably mom-related and forgot to replace the picnic stuff). I delivered the car to her. She reamed me out when she saw the empty trunk. I made an hour-long drive to give her some paper towels and plastic forks.

At that point I briefly considered killing myself. And I think that this part of the story is the reason that I never finished this post -- because parts of the story are so painful. The situation with my sister and mom made me want to leave this world because that was the only way I could imagine freeing myself from their arbitrary needs and endless desire for control. I ended up suggesting family therapy instead, which was one of my best ideas ever.

I found a therapist, with the intention of my sister and I talking to her together. We did, once, but it was pretty much a monologue. I continued talking to the therapist alone, however, and my understanding of my family situation grew. I decided to go ahead with my plan to get rid of the car, because the car had absolutely no purpose. My sister couldn't travel during Covid, and didn't need a car. She said she was "over it". My mom thought my car was hers, and just to reinforce that idea my therapist suggested that I take a few identifiable items from Mom's car and add them to my car. It all worked.

I made an appointment to donate the car to my favorite public radio station ON MY BIRTHDAY. Best present ever.

Here's the car in the driveway bushes. And leaving the scene! 

Mom never knew the difference. Not long after the car went away. I heard that my sister was plotting to drive my mom's unregistered car to a relative's house for Christmas. The car that was supposedly in my driveway. Christmas fell through that year, due to ongoing Covid restrictions. When they eased up months later, she asked about the car. I told her I'd given it away. She asked to borrow my car, and I suggested she rent one. By now so much ill will had accumulated between us that it was crazy to accommodate the car-related requests.

I kinda can't believe that I complied with any of this, but I'm the youngest and I'm used to saying yes.

There you go. Probably filled with grammatical errors, but I was telling this story to friends the other evening and mrguy wanted to read the post I must have written.

Whew.

Hawaii 2022 Day 3

The previous post was a combo of day 1 and 2. 

On Day 3 we went swimming in the morning. Then we headed out to do some sculpture hunting. One of my ideas for this trip was to go in search of some of the sculpture listed in a book called Sculpture in the Sun: Hawaii's Art in Public Places. This book, which I'd bought about ten years ago, documents some of Hawaii's artists and artwork funded by the state's public art program. And my thought for the trip was that we could go find some of the art in person, which would lead us to go places we hadn't been before.

So we headed up to Leeward Community College, in Kaneohe. But before we could get to the freeway our path took us past Haili's Hawaiian Food, which is a favorite spot to pick up poi and other taste treats. We stopped and had a sit. They chopped up some dried aku for us, and packed up poi and served us chilled water while we chatted about how they'd fared during the hardest parts of the pandemic. They were a little surprised that out of towners made plans to visit them, but we're kinda used to surprising people.

On the way to Kaneohe we got the idea that all is no well when it comes to man and automobile:

Shiro's Saimin Haven

It doesn't take long to get to Kaneohe from town, and we were hungry so we stopped at a very old strip mall that we'd passed many times before. 

Our bellies full, we went across the freeway to Goodwill. I was still recovering from Covid and seemed to have an allergic reaction to something in the store that drove me out into the parking lot with a need for 800 kleenex and some cough drops. I recovered pretty quickly but WOW that was intense.

And then on to Leeward CC! Not sure why, but the campus was empty. The day was gorgeous. 

The brutalist design of the buildings was so lovely. We wandered around in search of architecture but there was none to be found. But when you turned around you realized that you were right there on the water with big big ships in the harbor.

Still on the hunt for sculpture we went back to the art department. Front doors weren't open, but I walked  around the back of the building and found some people sculpting outdoors. "Excuse me -- I'm looking for some public sculpture..." One person spoke up "I think it's outside the library. And inside the library."

Sure enough, the Satoru Abe sculpture we were looking for was outside the library. Thanks, sculptors! It was kinda awkwardly placed, and oddly monumental but tiny. But you could see how it was very cool at one time. None of my photos did it any justice. And I now see that we missed an exhibition by Tadashi Sato that was on at the time. Argh.

Outside the library was a lovely oculus, lined with mosaic, showing off the brilliant sky and a lone cloud:

Inside the library was some cool artwork by Kahi Ching.

A nice sunset awaited at the hotel.

We wrapped up our day at Stand Up Honolulu, a fairly new club on Cooke St. We met up with our old forklift friend, Ms T. One of the fun things about coming to Honolulu is that Ms T. lives here but she and we have none of the same points of reference. So we can take her to places she's never been. And she's up for everything and it's always a blast. So she met us at the club. She texted that she was scared to get out of her car, which was adorable. Anyhoo, we met in the parking lot and went up to the club. 

I like their bathroom keys!

We saw Andy Bumatai, who was fabulous. And it was a local crowd, but he didn't single us out like he did when we saw him back home. There was, however, a bit of a thing with a wiry guy in fatigues who came in late. He seemed to be altered, wiggly, and Andy couldn't resist dragging him into the act a bit since everyone had seen this guy enter the small club in the middle of his set. He was definitely walking the knife's edge a bit with this guy, and at more than one point I thought "This guy probably has a gun and we're going to die." But that didn't happen and we all had a good time. Except maybe for that one guy. 

I hope he's ok.