Changes

I was so tied up in telling about my brain freeze yesterday that I forgot to mention the beautiful Sunday we had.

The weather was perfect: first hints of crisp fall air, sunny with only a few wispy clouds. In the morning, Barry and I took Joshua and Ella to the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence. With families in “school mode,” this is a wonderful time to visit the zoo. For the first hour or so we were one of only a handful of folks there. But as the moring progressed and the weather warmed, the number of people grew. Still, it was a wonderful morning. We had brought along a picnic lunch, so we ate outdoors in the picnic area. Joshua had to be back to Sharon by 1 pm for a friend’s birthday celebration. Otherwise we would have stayed much longer. This is why the zoo and museum memberships make so much sense: after only 2-3 visits you are already saving money, and you don’t have to feel badly about “wasting” a visit that has to be cut short. Maybe we will make it again just once more before the cold sets in. They are open year-round but I am hard pressed to think about going there in the New England winter.

We had arranged quite a bit of time with Joshua, Ella, and Eliana, but not with Maya. So yesterday was her turn. We went up to a local place called Crescent Ridge Dairy where they have delicious homemade ice cream and a few animals. After we ate the ice cream, Maya started playing with Barry’s iPhone. I was taking pictures of her and she asked if she could take some pictures. She took a quite nice picture of the two of us. Not bad for a 5-year-old!

I received quite a few e-mails about my last post, assuring me that my forgetfulness is quite normal for a 60-something, even without a tumor. As I read them, a thought came to me.  The changes I have experienced in the past year of recovery have been sort of like going from 0 to 100 in 10 seconds: it gets you where you’re going relatively quickly, but you're disoriented when you arrive and need to spend some time to acquaint yourself. Ultimately, I need to accept that even after I have settled in, that person may just not be precisely the same one she once was.

Meanwhile, I cooked a pot of chili and made stuffed shells this morning. And in a short while, Barry will pick Ella up at school so she can come have a play date with her Nana. Life cannot be sweeter than that.

Now, if I could just figure out how the same world that has Maya’s smile can have all these senseless shootings….

Love,

Rebecca

Proper perspective

With the solemnity of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, behind us, we are gearing up for the more festive holiday of Sukkot. We will be in Sharon for the entire week. Since we have an apartment (rather than a private home) here, we are unable to build a Sukkah. But our children and grandchildren live a short walk away, so we are planning many meals with them and have been invited to the homes of other friends for the remaining meals. Barry and I are doing quite a bit of the cooking. I got started today with large pots of two different soups. Tomorrow the plan is chili (vegetarian, of course). Then some stuffed shells. “Festive holiday” clearly translates into “favorite foods.”

Having said that, I had a brain freeze this morning that threatened to completely derail my upbeat mood. Since we will be here in Sharon for over two weeks, I decided to bring along the checkbook, just in case something arose requiring us to write a check (being that we are still living in the stone ages and have not moved to a fully paperless existence). But this morning I could not find it. Barry did not know where I had put it, so I started tearing things apart. One of the first places I looked was a large manila envelope full of papers sitting on the computer desk next to my laptop. I remembered this envelope because it has some information related to my long term disability that will require follow-up over the next week or so, so I had made a copy of the material to bring along with me to Sharon, and put pop-up reminders on my Google calendar. But I did not see the checkbook in that envelope. Well, not until I had gone through quite a few other places, with increasing anxiety, none of which were ringing any bells, and again picked up that envelope. And there it was! How did I miss it the first time? I was relieved but the frustration made it difficult to rejoice.

Many of you 60+ folks will probably react the way Barry did: this is what happens as we get older. I understand that, but for me both the starting point and the trajectory were not routine. I used to be a person who would meet someone, ask for their phone number, and be able to remember it without writing it down. Then, 18 months ago, almost suddenly, that skill simply vanished. You may be wondering why I have seemingly not yet adjusted to it, but in the same way that I still think of myself as overweight, I still think of myself as a person who easily remembers minute details. All those Lumosity games have certainly helped improve my short-term memory. But I am still working on finding ways to alleviate the frustration of not being able to rely on it.

Thanks for letting me vent here! And if I have already written on this topic, thanks for understanding.

Love,

Rebecca

Reflections

Sitting here during the hours before the start of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, I am thinking about how far I have come from last year at this time. Here is what I wrote on the eve of the holiday last fall:

In a few hours the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, will begin. This is a solemn day but it can also be a very uplifting opportunity to think about our lives and the things that really matter. Although I am not up to the lengthy synagogue services, I hope to spend some quiet introspective time at home, grateful for the wonderful family and friends who have helped us through these very difficult months.

Although I continue to struggle with reading and memory, what I wrote a year ago is an encouraging reminder of just how far I have come. Last year I stayed in synagogue only briefly for Rosh Hashana and did not attend at all on Yom Kippur. Now I feel ready for a day at synagogue, surrounded by my children, grandchildren, and friends. The deficits continue to make the lengthy holiday prayers a challenge. But I will do the best I can, and leave the rest to the One above.

May you all be blessed with a happy and healthy year!

Love,

Rebecca

A sobering day

A couple of months ago, I wrote about visitors to Walt Disney World who are using people with disabilities to enable them to take advantage of the “perks” WDW provides to families traveling with them. As someone who greatly benefits from the accommodations made to people with disabilities in various settings, and on the eve of a trip to WDW, I found this extremely disturbing.

Well, this morning I woke up to the following story on National Public Radio:

http://www.npr.org/2013/09/11/221017467/four-legged-impostors-give-service-dog-owners-pause

  

Lauren Henderson goes everywhere with her service dog Phoebe — to the grocery store, Disneyland, the beach. For Henderson, who used to be paralyzed, her 100 pound, lumbering Saint Bernard is a necessity.

An actor who lives in Malibu, Calif., Henderson uses her dog for stability and balance. And if she falls, Phoebe helps pull her back on her feet.

"She's basically like a living walker," Henderson says.

Lately, Henderson has noticed more dogs wearing vests that label them as service animals, but she can tell they're different from Phoebe. They'll shake, pee, bark incessantly or growl at people.

"I know how service dogs are trained, though, and I know the behavior they're meant to display in public and definitely are not," she says. "And that's not a service dog."

A service dog is highly trained to perform a specific task for its disabled owner. It's different from a therapy dog, which comforts the sick and elderly, or an emotional support animal, which soothes anxiety.

But a dog wearing a vest might not be any of those things. For people wanting to take their pets wherever they go, a brisk business has developed in the sale of bogus service animal certificates and vests.

Tim Livingood runs one of many websites that sell certification paraphernalia. For $65, customers can procure papers, patches and vests to make their dogs look official. They can even buy a prescription letter from a psychiatrist after taking an online quiz.

The laws are broad enough to allow that, Livingood says. While his business, the National Service Animal Registry, sounds official, he says government-sanctioned registration agencies do not exist — federal law does not actually require registration or identification patches. Property managers or airlines cannot mandate that service animals come with patches, and they can't ask owners to produce ID cards.

Joanne Shortell, who has a service dog, works to educate people about their rights to have service animals. And there's a lot of confusion, she says. Animals are helping more people cope with a range of illnesses and disabilities, but the terminology and web of access rights make it almost impossible to sort out the frauds from the legitimate helpers.

Is this the lesson we have learned from the horrific events on this date in 2001? Has the glimmer of hope and decency and shared purpose that we saw in the dark hours and days following that tragedy been replaced by despair and self-interest and cynicism?

I appreciate that this seems a very small concern next to discussions of military intervention in Syria. But perhaps the root cause is the same: our human tendency to view ourselves as more important than anyone or anything else. That tendency has undoubtedly led to a multitude of inspired ideas and inventions that have enhanced human existence. Our survival depends on our being able to keep the negative aspects at bay. Are we up to the task?

Love,

Rebecca

A good start

Has it really been an entire week? My last post was on 02 September, so I guess it has. How did that week fly by so quickly?

The long and short story is that we had a wonderful holiday. The first night, the ten of us gathered at Simmie and Ronen’s house for a lovely dinner. Ronen’s family follows a tradition of eating particular fruits before the start of the meal, with an explanation of the significance and symbolism of each fruit before it is eaten. Simmie, ever the preschool teacher, put the explanation for each fruit on a piece of paper, and Ronen distributed them so that we would each have something to read. This sounds quite a bit more serious than it is, particularly with the children enthusiastically expressing their pleasure or displeasure at some of the selections (beets, pomegranates, cabbage). The tradition is to have a whole fish on the table as well as fish tails. In deference to the vegetarians, Simmie has found a fitting substitute: candy jelly fish and chocolate fish. The latter are made every year for the holiday by a local chocolatier, and Simmie told us that every year she has the same discussion with the proprietor about why people are coming to her shop before Jewish New Year asking for chocolate fish!

We then ate our way through three days. After a lovely dinner with Simmie and Ronen the first evening, Barry and I prepared lunches at our apartment for after synagogue, the first day with Simmie and family while Dina and family were with friends, and the second day with Dina and family while Simmie and family were with friends. I had it all written down to keep it straight! Then on Sabbath, Simmie and crew went to a friend while Barry and I had lunch at Dina’s house. It was a beautiful day so we spent a good part of the afternoon sitting outside. All in all, it was a very lovely three days that went by very quickly.

We drove back to New York Sunday morning, and spent a good part of the day doing mundane things like laundry and taking care of the mail. Today Barry had meetings most of the day, so I am here having a quiet day.

I have a new project in mind. All these picture projects got us to thinking that we should try to put together albums to chronicle our lives over the past nine years as grandparents. I cannot quite remember just when I started loading pictures on to Kodak Gallery (now Shutterfly), but I believe we had the digital camera by the time Joshua was born and that I have saved all the memory cards we used. At least I hope I did. Putting together some pictures and writing a few paragraphs on Simmie’s early months, which I did for the daughter of a Pfizer colleague for a Bat Mitzvah project, got me to thinking about doing this. I suspect it could keep me busy for a long time.

Have a good week!

Love,

Rebecca

You can’t love ‘em all

It is Labor Day and the weather is lousy here in the northeast, so we figured we would go see another movie. We headed off to the AMC Loews 84^th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to see “The World’s End,” which had received a reasonably positive review in the New York Times and a score of 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. To the best of our memories, we had never been to the theater where it was playing, which was recently renovated. They put in large, plush leather seats, and you buy a ticket for a specific seat. But they are missing the other nice aspects of the Lux Level found in the theaters in the Boston area.

This film was apparently the third of three comedies starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost directed by Edgar Wright, following the successes "Shaun of the Dead" (2004) and "Hot Fuzz" (2007), neither of which we had seen. In the opening moments, you learn that, twenty years earlier, five friends had attempted but not quite completed a “pub crawl” of a dozen hometown establishments, the last of which is named “The World’s End.” The five friends reunite at the urging of one of them who is determined to try the drinking marathon again. It turns out that reaching the pub “The World’s End” is the least of their worries.

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but rereading A.O. Scott’s review in the New York Times, I see that we had perhaps glossed over or not fully appreciated some of his words. “… then the robots show up… I honestly don’t want to say too much about the robots, because their arrival sends “The World’s End” spinning into an absurdity that must be experienced fresh.”

Must it be experienced? Frankly, we think we might have been better off without that particular experience. 

Ah, but food is always the antidote to a not-so-good movie, so we went to a restaurant called Deli Kasbah that was just around the corner from the movie theater. When our daughter Dina was in high school she had a good friend whose family lived very close to this restaurant and we remember Dina often eating there with her friend, but we had not been there in many years. It is a fairly serious meat restaurant but they did have a very tasty plate of falafel and Israeli salads, which I always enjoy.

www.delikasbah.com

If you or your families are going back to work or school tomorrow, travel safely and enjoy!

Love,

Rebecca

Music, art, and inspiration

Where to begin? It has been a very full few days and I have quite a bit to share. I suppose the best place to start is from where I last left off, last Wednesday.

Barry spent Thursday morning in his lab and office, and then came home in the early afternoon for our drive up to Tanglewood. Some of you who have been following my blogging since last summer may recall that we had bought tickets for three James Taylor performances at Tanglewood the first week of July 2012 that we were unable to use because I was still undergoing chemotherapy. We also had reservations at a nearby bed and breakfast for which we had made a deposit of one night’s stay. At the time, Barry did not tell the owner why we cancelled, but she did say that if we rescheduled within six months she would honor that deposit. But there was not an opportunity to do that. Nonetheless, we figured that since we had wanted to check out this place, we should see if the room was available for last Thursday. We contacted the owner and explained the reason for our cancellation last summer, and she insisted on extending the ordinary six month time limit and considering the room paid. It turns out that her mother had been treated for lymphoma many years ago, and died only recently of other causes. So we had a nice place to stay near Tanglewood. Actually it was a very good location because it seemed to be in the opposite direction of the bulk of the traffic leaving Tanglewood after the show.

The show was incredibly great fun, and apparently one of the largest audiences ever assembled for “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me,” with 8000 folks in the shed and on the lawn! And they were clearly a very loyal and enthusiastic audience. When you buy tickets in advance to see a taping of WWDTM, hosted by Peter Sagal, you do not know who the co-hosts and the special guest will be. The co-hosts last Thursday were voices very familiar to WWDTM fans: Amy Dickinson, Tom Bodett, and Charlie Pierce. The guest was something of surprise: the classical pianist Emanuel Ax. He turned out to be quite a personable and amusing fellow, not necessarily attributes you expect from a classical musician. He talked about a proposal to form the Lizzie Borden Trio, with Emanuel Ax on piano, Yo-Yo Ma on cello, and Anne-Sophie Mutter on violin, whose three names shorten to the phrase Ax Yo Mutter. He then added that he is not an automatic axe, he is Emanuel Ax (you need to pronounce this out loud to make it work). Who would have thought to hear this sort of humor, delivered so well, by a classical pianist?

After staying over in the B&B, we wanted to see some Berkshires sites before heading back to New York. So we went to the Berkshire Botanical Garden, small compared to our beloved NYBG but actually quite a lovely place.

Then we went to the Norman Rockwell Museum. We had been there once some years ago, but they had two special exhibits that were quite interesting. The first was art by Norman Rockwell’s son, Jarvis Rockwell, called “Maya, Illusion, and Us,” an interesting exhibit of work very different from that of his father. This was not our own Maya, of course, whose name is Hebrew for a spring or brook, but we learned that Maya is (also) a Sanskrit word meaning “illusion.” The second special exhibit was “Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs: The Creation of a Classic,” celebrating the 75^th anniversary of Walt Disney’s first feature-length animated film, released in 1937. Apparently Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney had been close friends, and Norman Rockwell’s offspring wanted to do this tribute to that friendship.

We left the Rockwell Museum in the early afternoon and headed back to New York. The traffic was quite surprisingly light and the ride went smoothly. We had a quiet dinner at home. We went to synagogue on Saturday morning, where there was a guest speaker, Rabbi Jeremiah Wohlberg. The title of his discourse was “Standing on the Edge of Life and Faith as the New Year Begins.” He told about his experience last spring of collapsing and coming close to death due to a problem with his heart, and of the surgeries and therapy that brought him back to health. His main focus was on the effort to find an answer to why God allows such things to happen to us. He ultimately reached the conclusion that God is not determining all of these physical maladies, but rather can be a source of strength to help us get through them. I am truly not doing this justice, but what I will say is that I was pretty much reduced to tears listening to words that resonated so clearly. After services I was not able to speak with him but I did go over to his wife and chatted with her, and I hope she relayed my message of gratitude for one of the most uplifting talks I have heard in a long time. I am going to try and see if I can obtain a copy of this talk to share with all of you.

The weather is not great here, and most of our holiday preparations that can be done in advance are done; we are completely out of freezer space so I could not cook any more even if I wanted to. So we went to see the film “In a World,” that is playing at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center and had received very good reviews. It is a romantic comedy about a struggling vocal coach who strikes it big in the cutthroat world of movie-trailer voiceovers, only to find herself in direct competition with the industry's reigning king - her father. It was written and directed by Lake Bell, who won the Sundance 2013 Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for the script. The cast includes a number of familiar faces, actors whose names you may not know but you have undoubtedly seen in many other roles. I recognized Dmitri Martin from the 2009 film “Taking Woodstock,” and Barry pointed out to me that Nick Offerman from the NBC series “Parks and Recreation” was also in the film.

I received a touching request from a Pfizer colleague whom I did not know well. Her daughter, who was born 10 weeks premature with a very low birth weight, is about to celebrate becoming a Bat Mitzvah. She is trying to put together a collection of pictures of other premies to show how well they are doing. Apparently another colleague remembered that I had told him about our first child being very premature, and hooked us up. So now I have another fun project, to find some old pictures. Of course, Simmie was born in the days before digital cameras. But for my 60^th birthday celebration, our daughters and sons-in-law had put together a photo collage Powerpoint presentation, so they had scanned in many old pictures.

Have a nice Labor Day and back to work and school week.

Love,

Rebecca