Tunisia on the Subway

 On my way into the city, a young man next to me asked how to get to Tompkins Square.  Laughing, I told him I got sentenced to 10 days of cleaning that park and that I still feel protective towards it.  He was puzzled, so I explained that I was arrested at a protest and this was our community service.  He asked if everyone at the protest had to do it and I told him just 16 of us were arrested. “Everyone else ran?” he asked, so I explained that it was just us doing the action. I asked him if he had heard of Rachel Corrie and he had not so I explained briefly about how the IDF bulldozed her to death, and then I told him how we chained ourselves together with our arms inside PVC pipes and blocked the avenue outside the Israeli bank.  They usually go easy on protest cases, I told him, but this was in 2003 before there was much support for anti-occupation activism so we were tried, convicted and sentenced. 

“I wasn’t in the US back then,” he told me. “I won the green card lottery in 2004 so I got here in 2005.” “Where did you come from?” I asked. “Tunisia,”he said, and then paused clearly expecting me to ask where it was. “Next to Algeria,” I said. “Colonized by the French.”  “Yes, he said, “growing up all my education was in French, math, physical science, everything.” “I’m surprised they are still using the French system so long after independence,” I said. “The first president was a strong supporter of the French system,” he explained. “The constitution is almost the same as France with a few tweaks. It was only in 2014 that Arabic was added as an official language. Now you can get government documents in either one, but doctors and engineers still use French.   Even the food is very French, baguettes and everything. Also tomato sauce, because we are so close to Italy.” 

 “People try to reach Italy from there in boats and sometimes drown,” I said. “Their families don’t always want them to go, but there are people who make a living by”- he was searching for a word. “Smuggling people,” I said, and he nodded. “There are those people at the southern border here too,” I added. “They are not just from North Africa but people from the rest of Africa come and work for a while to save the money to make the trip. They are trying to reach this island….” “Lampedusa,” I filled in. “Sometimes they wind up in jail.”  At that point I had to head to the hand doctor.

 

The hand doctor listened to my description of the pain that keeps me from being able to make a pinching movement with my left hand, like tearing open a sugar packet or pulling a zipper up.  He pulled up my  X-ray from a few months ago and enlarged the thumb so we could see the joint at the base.. I didn’t need him to tell me that the jagged white shapes we were looking at were bone spurs in the joint. The metatarsal is kind of shifted too he said, pointing out the bone overlapping another bone. He pulled up my right hand and enlarged that thumb to show me the nice clean line where the bones were keeping a respectful distance from each other, and then went back to the left where the shifting bone had completely obliterated that line.  “This is the same problem as the wrist,” he said, “severe osteoarthritis.” “Yeah ,”I said, somewhat grumpily, “I have it everywhere. Bones are a problem for me. But if we didn’t have them, we’d be gelatinous.”  The last part caught the doctor by surprise and he burst out laughing before saying, “we do need them.”

 The options aren’t great. Splint it to try to reduce the inflammation caused by motion, inject it, an intensely painful undertaking because of the lack of space in the joint, or surgery. He knows from talking to me about the wrist that I am not looking to jump into surgery so soon after my spine surgery, and the idea of causing pain as a solution to pain is not appealing, so we agree to start with the splint.

Thumb immobilized, I made my way back  to the office where I met with D., who is teetering on the edge of starting her physical transition to womanhood because she internalized so much transphobia from her parents.  Even though she is not living with them, they are living in her head.  She has made a couple of attempts to get started, but this time she is determined.  She told me that she told the guy in her local bodega that her pronouns are she/her.  Since she still has a beard and no visual signifiers of femaleness, that could have gone very badly.  Luckily, the guy told her that he could respect that she identifies that way instead of going into a hateful mode that would have destroyed her fragile budding confidence.

D. has an upcoming appointment with a doctor to start the hormone process, and she has a ton of questions.  Today she wanted to know about electrolysis, a question my assistant, herself a trans woman, answered easily.  Then she wanted to know how bra sizes work, so I explained how the measurements are taken and then the cup size is a ratio of those.  Last on the list was earrings – does it hurt to pierce your ears?  I had mine done in junior high, when my best friend and I took ourselves to a jewelry store in Park Slope, without our parents’ knowledge. I told my client what I remembered – the cold spray, the earring gun, and a quick, intense pain followed by days of scabbing and itchy healing.  D. was in no hurry to leave, but I had switch modes for the fundraising meeting where we worked on nailing down the final details of next week’s event.