You Can Take The New Yorker Out of New York, but......

Well, I'm discovering this old saying has a lot of truth in it.  I'm really having fun spending time with all these fellow New Yorkers - some from my youth and High School, some new friends I've made out here.  It's kind of like I've come home.  I've been running away from my past and my childhood and my roots all my life, and now I've come full circle and am finally embracing all of it.  It's allowed me to become a full person for the first time ever, merging my beginnings with my journeys and various paths I've taken, and blossoming into the this amalgam that I now am.  I've never felt so "good in my skin" as the French say.  It's as though it was always meant to come to this, to the carriage house in Redwood City, where I am finally able to be me, whoever that is.

I know I haven't posted for quite a while, but it's for a good reason - I've been busy!  Busy working and busy playing.  The MS drug Ampyra has given me my life back.  I still get tired, but not like before.  As long as I remember to pace myself, give myself a free day or evening every now and then, I do fine.  I think the most exciting thing that has happened in the last two months is that I spent a wonderful day in San Francisco with Francine.  She picked me up at the train station and we went straight to the new Academy of Sciences museum in Golden Gate Park.  The Aquarium and Planetarium has only been open 5 years and I never thought I would ever get to see it.  Well, not only did I see it, I saw the whole thing (the Aquarium anyway), on my legs, vertical, with only the use of my cane and my new brace.  I was ecstatic.  We spent 2 1/2 hours in the museum, then went to Francine's house for a lovely dinner on their back deck, joined by Linda Hom, and then I took the train home and was still filled with energy.  Now that is a miracle.  The next test will be the Impressionist exhibit at the De Young Museum.  Carla, Liza, Maura and I are planning to go and I'm hoping it will be a repeat performance.   The prior two times I went to that museum (once with this same group and once with my college roommate Andrea), I had to be pushed around in a wheelchair.  They didn't mind, but I did.

Speaking of college roommates, there is an exciting reunion looming on the horizon.  There were three of us at Cornell - we were roommates our sophomore year, shared an apartment senior year, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris the summer after our sophomore year and then traveled for 6 weeks on a Eurail Pass, then the three of us went to the French Riviera after graduation, after which Joanne and I moved together into an apartment in Paris and Andrea returned to the U.S.  Andrea now lives in San Francisco, but Joanne lives in Wisconsin.  We've had reunions before when Joanne would come to San Francisco, but this time it's a REAL reunion in that all three of us are spending the night at Andrea's.  This will be the first time we've ever all three of us spent the night together since France.  What a treat.  This will be on November 16th.

Life just keeps getting better and better.  I'm feeling so good inside that I've decided to work on my outside.  I wrote earlier about my having gone back to getting my nails done on a regular basis.  Well, now I've also gone back to getting my hair cut professionally.  And I'm now having my apartment cleaned professionally - well, actually better than professionally.  Maura, Liza's sister who moved out here from Arkansas to live with Liza and help care for their mother, and I have become good friends and when she heard I was going to hire professional cleaners, she volunteered to do it.  For pay, of course.  But am I getting a good deal!  Not only is my apartment sparkling, she keeps adding little touches, ie bringing over cute baskets to put things in, rearranging things so they look neater, etc.  I love it.  I was pretty religious about keeping everything clean when I first moved in, but have not been able to keep it up because of the fatigue.  So I finally bit the bullet and decided to rearrange some of my expenses to allow for all of this.  And boy is it worth it.  So now my outside and my surroundings are starting to feel and look as good as my inside.

I'm also finally ready to start traveling again.  People have been urging me to come visit ever since I moved - Brenda in Seattle, Evelyn and Art in L.A., the gang in N.Y., Kate in Texas.  I just wasn't up to it, plus I didn't know how I would do with the MS which had gotten worse, and the rules and regulations of travel nowadays which have also gotten worse.  I had promised Carla we would go to France together this past Spring and I backed out of that as well.  But now I am mentally ready.  I've always loved to travel and couldn't understand why I kept avoiding it.  I now promise everyone I will eventually get there in the next two years.  My first planned trip is this March to New York.  I can't even remember the last time I saw the gang - Karin, Cynthia, Joan and Marv.  Then I've promised Carla we will go to France later in the Spring, probably late May.  We're going to start looking at our ticket options.  I also need to contact my cousin Martine and my good friend Rick to make sure they will be there, as we will be staying with them.  And finally, I will talk to Brenda as to when a good time would be for me to come up and see her and my two adorable grandsons.  This will be all in the next year.  Wow.  Time is a wastin' and I don't want to put it off any longer.  No one knows what the future holds.

I had a bone density test done last week and just received the following results from my doctor: Hello Laurel! Your bone density is surprisingly good at all sites! You have mild to moderate osteopenia at the hip with really minimal osteopenia at the spine. I am pleasantly surprised! However, because of your fall risk, I am inclined to recommend treatment with either an oral bisphosphonate given weekly or monthly (like Fosamax or Actonel) or the one given intravenously (every other year for osteopenia). I would understand if you are hesitant to take one of these medications and I am happy to discuss this further with you by phone or in person. At the very least, it is important for you to get adequate calcium and D as we discussed and to minimize your risk of falling. Please contact me with questions. It was a pleasure to have met with you!  I also saw my regular doctor and my blood pressure is 108/72, BMI is 19.20, and pulse is 68 beats per minute (whatever that means).  In other words, other than the MS, I am in perfect health.  Not bad for a senior citizen.

Speaking of being a senior citizen, I am thrilled with all the new doctors I now have since leaving the HMO and joining Medicare.  The above doctor is an endocrinologist; I have a wonderful internal medicine doctor thanks to Kimberly; a great MS doctor thanks to my cousin Dana (his staff puts on monthly evening lectures for his patients and so far we've had a naturopathic doctor, a yoga for MS instructor from New Yawk, Art as Therapy and then this week Sex and Relationships with a Disability); and a wonderful dermatologist who not only has helped clear up my skin and scalp problems but also gives me tons of free samples so I don't have to buy anything.

I'm going to end this posting with a quote from the latest Reflective Reading from the support group I mentioned in an earlier email, on Rippling and Gratitude.  I think you'll like it,

Reflective material. On September 27 of this year I included an excerpt from Irvin Yalom's Staring At the Sun that featured his definition of "rippling." To make the best sense of this week's reflective material from the same author, it is important to have his notion of rippling clearly in mind, so I'm going to repeat it here: "Rippling refers to the fat that each of us creates—often without our conscious intent or knowledge—concentric circles of influence that may affect others for years, even for generations. That is, the effect we have on other people is in turn passed on to others, much as the ripples in a pond go on and on until they're no longer visible but continuing at a nano level." (page 83)

What follows are Yalom's comments on gratitude, especially as they relate to some of the "ripples" that have benefitted us:  "Far too often, gratitude for how a person has sent influential ripples out into the world is expressed not when the person is still alive but only in a posthumous eulogy. How many times at funerals have you wished (or overheard others express the wish) that the dead person were there to hear the eulogies and expressions of gratitude? How many of us have wished we could be like Scrooge and eavesdrop on our own funeral? I have.

"One technique for overcoming this 'too little, too late' problem with rippling is the 'gratitude visit,' a splendid way to enhance rippling when one is alive. I first came upon this exercise at a workshop conducted by Martin Seligman, one of the leaders of the positive psychology movement. He asked a large audience to participate in an exercise that, as I recall, went along these lines:  "Think of someone still living toward whom you feel great gratitude that you have never expressed. Spend ten minutes writing that person a gratitude letter and then pair up with someone here, and each of you read your letter to the other. The final step is that you pay a personal visit to that person sometime in the near future and read that letter aloud.

"After the letters were read in pairs, several volunteers . . . read their letters aloud to the entire audience. Without exception, each person choked up with emotion during the reading. . . .
"I did the exercise myself and wrote such a letter to David Hamburg, who had been a superbly enabling chairman of the Department of Psychiatry during my first ten years at Stanford. When I next visited New York, where he lived at this time, we spent a moving evening together. I felt good expressing my gratitude, and he felt good about knowing of it; he said he had beamed with pleasure when reading my letter.

"As I age, I think more and more about rippling. As [the head of a family], I always pick up the check when my family dines at a restaurant. My four children always thank me graciously (after offering only feeble resistance), and I always say to them, 'Thank your grandfather Ben Yalom. I'm only a vessel passing on his generosity. He always picked up the check for me.' (And I, by the way, also offered only feeble resistance.) (pages 135-136)
 
I have included this excerpt as my way of thanking all of you have been such a wonderful support to me the last few years.  I know I will pass it on in the tradition of Rippling.