When a repairman is in the kitchen and my cell phone battery is nearly dead

When a repairman is in the kitchen

and my cell phone battery is in the red zone

I rediscover

after 3 months of drought

and 3 days of rain

the stream is flowing once again

I lie down in the hammock

and look up into tree branches

grown wider and taller

since last I stopped to look up

I watch a convention of clouds

tumbling and tripping over each other

in their rolling white race across blue sky

I spy a single red cardinal

land and hop from branch to branch

so close, so near at hand

Had I moved an inch

say to reach for cell phone camera – had it been charged

he would have startled and flown

So please accept this word photo

and view it in your mind’s eye

I have a dream…the night before Mom’s birthday

Happy birthday to my mother, Elizabeth Bogue Stoney Segal aka “Lib” aka “Libba” on the 101st anniversary of her birth. Mom, who departed this earthly coil 3 years ago, appeared in my dream last night. However, in the strange imagery of dreams that makes perfect sense while one is dreaming, but little sense upon waking, the elderly lady in my dream was some combination of my mom, Peter’s mom Yasuko, and a Hawaiian tutu lady I saw the other day in a video of Liko Martin playing Nanakuli Blues.

In this dream, the Obamas (Michelle and Barak) were visiting us. The visit seemed to be going well and they were enjoying Mom. There was also a small cute furry creature that we were keeping as a pet and I was carrying it around in my jeans. The little furry seemed to like it, but I was concerned about forgetting it was there and causing it some harm. At some point in the dream we were all at Waianae Comp, the community health center where I worked for 12 years in the 80’s and 90’s. I jumped up and made a speech about a delegation who had visited recently, one that had included Mitch McConnell. I held up a thumbs down sign and the crowd booed.

The next day, this dream sent me searching through my digital photo files for one specific photo. I never found it in my files but I did find it using the remarkable (and scary) Google Photos search function, surrounded by others from the year it was taken in 2011. I was visiting Mom at her Maryland home in a Quaker independent living community. A few months earlier, she had been taken to the hospital under urgent circumstances. At age 90, it was her first time in a hospital since childbirth. She was out in few days and healed quickly, Thank God. A few months after this incident, she took me to the Sandy Spring Slave Museum where, of course, she knew the curator. The exhibit – which included the horrific history, photos, and artifacts of slaves and slave owners in the Sandy Spring community – ended with a room intended to be more uplifting featuring black leaders, heroes and heroines.

It was in that room I snapped this photo of my Mom with President Obama… a cardboard cutout of him, anyway. He sure looks younger then near the start of his presidency.

Perhaps in my dream we all had another visit together, all of us a bit older and wiser.

Not sure what this dream was about, perhaps good guys and bad guys? and what now seems like simpler times? Of course they weren’t simple at all, only appearing so in hindsight. I can see now that the seeds of today’s danger to our democracy were being planted then, sprouting in ways I was too blind, or too busy, to see. Wish I could talk with my Mom about our crazy times now. I’m sure she would have a few choice words.

https://www.sandyspringslavemuseum.org/

A veil of vog

On my morning walk, the two sides of the street are a study in contrasts, as though inhabiting different worlds. Over the Kohala Mountains lining the north side of the road, the skies are sunny, clear and almost cloudless. Directly opposite, a veil of vog has descended upon the three mountains to the south, a thick white curtain against which the ghostly outlines of Mauna Kea’s lower hills are highlighted. Camouflaged in clearer weather by the wide green body of the mauna, the gentle slopes of these pu’u are now quietly front and center in nature’s show.

Hey, it’s an endemic-post-pandemic party!

President Joe Biden gave a decent State of the Union address, and in places it was a very good speech. But I am not here today to talk about that. I am here to talk about the endemic post-pandemic party that broke out on the floor of the House. Before the speech began, the floor of the House was crammed full of members of Congress, Supreme Court Justices, the Biden administration plus their staff, invited guests and security. They were mask-less, greeting each other, talking and laughing loudly, shaking hands, hugging, whispering in each others ears, handling each others cell phones as they took photos. A tiny smattering of people wore masks, like the man in a wheelchair. The party atmosphere was a shock to my pandemic-primed senses. During the speech, there in the front sat all the Supreme Court justices, none with masks, even Justice Sonya Sotomayor, who has diabetes and other high risk conditions. After the speech, there was Biden in the midst of the crowd, shaking hands, hugging, and talking closely with scores of people. And I was like, hey, none of y’all can get sick, none! All those octogenarian Democrats in that room, if just one of them get a serious infection, our agenda is dead meat. We need all of you! I could not help but visualize this becoming a super spreader event. Yup, party pooper, that’s me. I would not have been caught dead at such an event – ok poor choice of words – but I am not ready to take off my mask yet.

Sure I read about the CDC’s new guidelines and intellectually understand the science and public health approach behind them. I also know it is predicted we will experience another 2 variants this year, that no one knows how mild or virulent they will be; and therefore we might soon be advised to increase precautions again. I trust the basic integrity of the CDC, in a way I could not under the former president. Unlike some Republican critics who accuse Biden of doing what they do when they hold the reins (1), I do not believe that the CDC guidelines were the result of political pressure from this President. But only history will tell whether they made the right call or if it was premature – like last summer when they advised lifting mask mandates, then Delta roared in, and sent us all 2 steps back (if we were lucky; others got sent to the hospitals or morgue). Governor Ige kept Hawaii’s indoor mask mandate in place last summer and was proven right. He is doing the same now, saying they will reassess at the end of March. I am grateful for his caution, so frustrating in other policy arenas. Hawaii has emerged from 2 years of the pandemic with the second lowest mortality rate in nation, after Vermont, and as of March 1, our 7-day hospitalization is was one of the lowest, and our vaccination rate one of the highest.

I am encouraged that the administration has a new endemic plan (which Congress must fund and pass), that has some promising elements – like setting up a network of pharmacies where you can get a Covid test and if positive get anti-viral medication on the spot.

The assumption of the CDC disease modeling is that because there is now adequate community protection from widespread background vaccination, immunity, availability of PPE, Covid-19 treatments, and medical care services, the choice of which precautions to take can now shift to the individual. This means, each of us is left to do our own personal and family risk benefit assessment – and then decide what precautions we take. My go-to gal for all things Covid-19, Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina says: “Throughout the pandemic, public health practitioners (including myself) have been doing a terrible job of accurately communicating risk…. and that’s partly because it’s complicated”

Anyway, I am re-assessing. But in the meantime, I ain’t taking off my mask yet.

(1) https://www.nytimespost.com/ted-cruz-mocks-the-biden-administration-for-abandoning-mask-mandate-before-state-of-the-union/,