Author: betweenstops

Medical Money

| betweenstops

I’d had the same assistant for 5 years. He was a 25 year younger than me soulmate. He anticipated what was needed. He was never sick, late or on his phone during class. However, all things come to an end. “You’ll never find another Joseph” everyone said and I knew they were right

My next assistant Ann, was late, was sick and talked on her phone in class but she was OK.

What I can offer someone is just gig work. To post a Craigslist ad for help with a gig is $10. For help as a job is $75. I need someone to help Monday, Tuesday & Friday for 2 hours each afternoon. It’s 6 hours a week and even though I offer a way better than average hourly wage, it’s not gonna pay your rent.

The crazy thing is on Tuesday I teach 20 kids in a public school. I teach an afterschool class. Just an hour. For that hour myself and my assistant must have a TB test, a fingerprint scan, liability insurance, and most difficult: take a course and pass a test about children being neglected or abused. It’s a lot of fun.

Imagine the prospect of getting someone to jump through those hoops for a few hours a week. And yet there are people who need this job. Recently the best man for this job is a cheery 36 year old from Africa. He’s way overqualified but is in a pinch.

He jumps through all the hoops and only has the TB test to go. Seems simple, right? Not so. The only place you can get a free TB test is in the Village Free Clinic. It is the only free clinic around for many towns.

Everywhere else charges anywhere from $100 to $300 to get an office appointment with a TB test. Highway Robbery. The test itself only costs $5.  The Free Clinic only does the TB tests on Thursdays. It is mobbed. Cherry can’t get in. 

My friend said she used to work for a startup that did insurance billing for doctors and they horrifically would try to charge $100. for a bandaid and $200 for Advil.

When Saturday Night Live mentions Luigi Mangione  on weekend update, the audience immediately cheers a loud “Yaayy!!!” and Colin Jost makes eye contact with us in the fourth wall and says “Woooooo…”     And I’m right there with both of  them.

In an insane world, what’s sane?

Fire!

| betweenstops

In 1991 my ex-husband’s Oakland house burned down when I was walking around in San Francisco on Valencia Street with my friends. Pages of burnt books were falling on our heads. By the time we made it to Market and Castro there was a big TV store and through the street store window we could see all the fancy TVs. Every single one of them had live footage of the Oakland Hills burning.

Not long after that, I married my husband and moved to the new house in the Oakland Hills. The winds get very strong up here and when they get violent, the electrical company turns off the electricity and we get loud alerts on our phone. An alert is what you get before you get an evacuation notice. The alert says “hey, you might get evacuated!” more or less.

I don’t just have a ‘go bag’ I have it all figured out. I know what I can get in my Honda Fit and how I would pile it in there. I’ve got it written out because I know from my friends who’ve been through this; it takes 20 minutes before you get that evacuation notice and your house is burned to the ground.

I am now watching from Northern California some of the most expensive real estate in the world burn to the ground in southern California. L.A. City of the Angels. Pacific Palisades before and after images resemble Gaza and Ukraine. The whole entire thing looks like fiction. Except it’s horrifically real, and happening to people and places I know.

I heard of one man who is an artist like me. He is in his early 80s and did not want to lose his life’s work. Mostly he had accepted the situation. However, just one painting he wanted to save so he walked out of the house with it and the hurricane level winds used it as a sail to lift him high in the sky, and then drop him down breaking a few ribs.

I heard another story where a newsreporter was interviewing a woman who couldn’t talk for her sobs watching her house about to burn. She was most distressed because she had chickens and ducks in the backyard. The cameraman took pity on her and ran back there and got as many chickens and ducks out of that backyard as he could before the thing went up.

Holding a saved chicken, she could then talk a little bit. She held onto that chicken as if it was keeping her alive. Funny thing though, most people eat chickens.

Graffiti

| betweenstops

Risking one’s life to express ones self

Here I am trying to drive to San Francisco with thousands of other people.

It’s a very very foggy day. Not foggy in San Francisco foggy in Oakland… 

I mean in a way it’s probably good. We’re not going quickly.

 I have driven this road thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, maybe hundreds of thousands of times 

and I know the buildings that should be there but instead of them being there it’s just a light soft gray large space of nothingness. 

I am in a freeway parking lot. I’m sure you know what I mean.

So I have time to look at the graffiti on the side of the freeway in a way that I’ve never had before. I’m stopped in front of the tags.

I’ve always held a lot of admiration for graffiti artists. 

Sometimes you see graffiti in places that are inexplicably difficult to get to.

 Almost makes you wonder if aliens put them there… Or angels… Or are there people that can somehow hover in the sky with battery packs or I don’t know.

Anyhow, these guys painting on the side of the freeway have easy access. 

There’s a teeny tiny little space where they can put their young bodies and write something on the side wall. 

One person wrote a word, which I’m guessing is a name, in a newly invented calligraphy with fantastic ability… The person could be designing fonts, the visual is compelling

Anyhow, next to the word/name the street artist wrote “art meets crime”.

I Love that. 

What is the 6 million dollar banana sold recently at Sotherby’s as art, if not a crime against all people working hard for an hourly wage?

Capitalism gone mad

| betweenstops

I live in a neighborhood that has a name. Which makes it a town within the big city.

In my town, there is a Safeway and there is a Lucky. I prefer to go to the Lucky. I’d rather be lucky than safe.

My son is needing something so we go at 8 pm. Next-door to the Lucky is a Rite Aid or is it CVS or does it make a difference?

My son decides he would rather shop there. I give in even after I explained that the grocery store has a better vibe which doesn’t make any sense to him.

We go into bright bright light. Brighter than bright. The store is Caverness. Huge. There are more than 21 aisles. It seems no one is in the store except my son and I.

We are going up and down the aisles trying to find simple things like toothpaste and Kleenex. We do this for a while.

We are in a vast wasteland desert of commercial products under lock and key passing by empty nail polish displays. It has a scary feel to it like a stranger might jump one in any empty aisle for any reason.

Even the minimally valuable items are under lock and key. It’s a giant store with no one in it. It’s capitalism gone mad. It’s creepy and crawley and suffocatingly artificial.

We finally ask the person at the register where to find the Kleenex and on my way to that I spy something on a lower shelf.

It is a translucent plastic bottle in a certain shape with a certain color blue label and I think to myself “I am out of rubbing alcohol, I’ll get that too”, so I pick it up.

Thank goodness, I have parked a little bit away so my son and I, in walking back to the car, have a chance to mutually acknowledge how strange the situation was.

When I get home, I realize I have witch hazel, not rubbing alcohol.

Christmas Lights

| betweenstops

I just taught an impossible children’s ceramics class today. But no matter. We made a lot of trees. I have a way (based in geometry) for them to be easy for any age to make and they look terrific.

Driving home in the dark I enjoy passing by the houses with the Christmas lights.

Looking at the white lights brings me back 26 years, when my sister died. For the funeral, I flew to her home with her three small children and her husband who was now her widow, and I was shocked to see the Christmas decorations.

I wasn’t sure how something so happy could juxtapose with something so sad. None of it made sense.

I had experienced a week before wanting something 1000% which I had never done before. I had never wished something with every cell in my body. I wished she would live.

But she didn’t and the lights were confusing. There was one kind in particular that I found especially irritating.

A string of white lights and every now and then it went down so that it was three lights in a row one below the next at various intervals. They really bothered me.

I don’t think they make them anymore. I don’t see them anymore. Maybe the electrical wiring was too confusing to survive year after year.

No ART at Public school

| betweenstops

Tommy (not his real name) has been working In the office for years. When he first came, he seemed a certain kind of proper and prim. They’re quiet as well from that background different from my loud one, which is what I assume gives him his ultra upright demeanor.

After having been the United States culture for long enough and at that the school long enough he starts to lighten up. He starts to become more “hood“. Whether he always was this and is now more comfortable showing or whether he has over the years become this, is not for me to know.

What I do know is that I am more comfortable with him this way.

As I am leaving the office, he says, “Hey Dana, wait a minute. I have something for you.”

Although we have become friendly over the many years by exchanging a sentence, or maybe two as I sign in, we are not friendly enough for him to be giving me a present. I wonder what’s going on.

He hands me a bag of art supplies that someone has donated to the school and hopes I can use them.

I am shocked that I am the one in the school of 600 students that the office associates with Art.

There is no art teacher. Neither is there a maker space teacher. There is no one there to show the kids how to make something with their hands!

I teach one class one afternoon a week and I am the one they associate with art. Tragic in my mind.

Offhand people say oh, there’s no budget for that.

They have no understanding that in art a kid learns how to listen to their inner voice. How to listen to themself. How to make decisions.

They learn how to get an idea and follow it through to completion.

If you don’t like sports, and you don’t like academics, you better have art in your school or you are gonna fall through the cracks.

Art builds confidence in oneself the way no other academic subject does !

What is a flower?

Holiday?

| betweenstops
Holiday?

This is a photograph of H&M on Bay Street in Rotten City, I mean Emeryville, next to Oakland, CA.

The entire store is full of clothing that is black or white. Some articles of clothing are black and white.

Did the holiday season included no colorful clothing ?!

I went in to get a closer look. I did spot a few things in a slightly muted red hue but the “exit” signs are the liveliest things in the store.

The shopping center is bright with white lights. No colored lights.

Everyone is playing it safe. It seems to be the state of things these days, mid November 2024

One third of the US is dressing in white. One third is dressed in black and the third of the country doesn’t care.

Thus we move into the holiday season

Somber and without color.

Teaching Ceramics at Elementary school

| betweenstops

Teaching ceramics at three elementary school is a lot of things. One of them is stressful. The stress starts early in the day when I am wondering if the school bus will be blocking the entrance to where I park. I need to park close to the school to unload the dolly full of ceramic equipment. There’s new school bus drivers this year and there’s new school buses. In fact, I think they are electric. There are nice school drivers and then not so nice bus drivers and then there’s those in between. The one time I had the trouble and was not able to get in some parent encouraged me just to drive over the curb into where I had to park and that I did.

The next week the driver was friendlier and moved the bus a bit.

The week after that, she wasn’t there, and there was a white haired lady who told me that she had fixed the problem. I asked her who she was and she was basically the all-around person at school.

I realized that she must be replacing taylor. What a change. Taylor had been there for many years and looked like an African-American Graphic novel hero: powerful young man with dreds and very black skin.

He seemed a little scary, but actually, he was friendly, and he worked with small children. He had his own office. He had a very fancy sports car which he parked next to where I parked.

Once in the driveway with the car unloaded, I can get into the cafeteria where I need to teach. The next stressful moment is: will I be able to find someone who can open the kiln room for me? The kiln room is the dungeon room, down a dark staircase holding electric curcuit breakers and storage.

No one ever really needs to go in there so when the office gives me the set of many keys, they don’t know which one it is. When Pete gives me the set of keys he knows exactly which one it is. André the janitor gives me a choice of three.

It’s best if this doesn’t take too much time. I give myself an hour to set up, half of that with an assistant. I set up on two very long tables in the cafeteria where some 200 kids are congregating after the school day. Eventually most of them leave. Then 20 select ones come to my class.

It is a fast paced, hectic meaningful hour full of love and instruction. I try to fully meet each child.

After the first 20 leave, the next 20 come in.

Same same: love and instruction but now with a little fatique mixed in

After the second group, the cleanup looms enormous, but it is doable, and eventually it ends with me going down to the kiln room, to load all the kid artwork into the kiln, while the assistant finishes up the last of the cleaning

It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it and the children are wonderful. As am I and

at the end of each Wednesday, I feel like I should get a medal for pulling it off yet one more time