21
Feb
Income Inequality and the Unseen Barriers to Good Health
“I tuned out her blessings and her current list of maladies until she told me about her terrible arthritis. I shouldn’t worry, she said, because between the power of prayer and WD-40, her joints were working fine. I asked her, in my halting Spanish, to repeat what she had just said, especially that bit about WD-40. “The spray stuff, we we used on the trucks, Gramma?” I asked. “El es-sprayo por los truckos?”
“Yes, that’s the stuff,” she said (en español). “I just say a prayer over it and spray my knees and my elbows, and, in the name of Jesus, the heat from the WD-40 loosens my arthritis.”
“What are you now, a robot?” I yelled at her (in English). She didn’t understand me. But she laughed.”
—Domingo Martinez, “Quarantined: The unseen barriers to good health.”
