Rollercoaster: How a caregiver can survive a partner’s breast cancer or any other lethal disease is an intimate look at how I and my wife, Nancy Fox, coped with her three bouts with breast cancer. It shows, for example, her plea to the universe: “I can be happy and healthy. I deserve it. I’ve worked hard. As a card-carrying member of the Cancer Club, a card-carrying member of the human race, I want joy in the years I have to spend here.”

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The instant that diagnosis of a life-threatening disease takes place, going it alone vanishes as a viable option — for either patient or caregiving partner. But the big question is where to find assistance and support.

For Nancy and me, the basic order was a no-brainer. First, Western medicine practitioners. Then, Eastern, then holistic. But even as the pros labored to heal my wife’s flesh, we sought others to soothe our minds. Friends helped enormously. So did family. Therapy ameliorated an issue or three. And finally, after trial-and-error searches, we separately joined fledgling, single-gender support groups. 

Along with that multitude of safety nets, we relied on reading materials — books, magazine and newspaper articles. Then, endless bits and pieces of information from a variety of media. And a massive amount of this ‘n’ that.

We had to learn, absorb, and discard. Absorb and block. To siphon out redundant information and, in fact, anything not needed now.

To learn each person is an individual, not a statistic.

To learn breast cancer tends not to pinpoint race or political viewpoint but is the most common cancer among Israelis and their Palestinian neighbors in the West Bank and Gaza.

To learn there will be difficult “I’m-all-alone-and-nobody-understands-what-I’m-going-through” times no matter how much support we gathered. We found that to offset the bad patches we usually could illuminate the dark alleys of our brains by sticking to the here-and-now and appreciating the good stuff that was then flavoring our lives, no matter how minute in importance they may have seemed at first. Yes, a chain of small, positive things can ordinarily add up to gusto and peace of mind.

No matter how bright a life-threatened patient or caregiver’s outlook may become, however, fears of potential loss can suddenly morph into a gargantuan ogre. Even sessions of my Man to Man group, which forever tilts toward the optimistic and constructive, occasionally churned up feelings that the guys would rather not confront. We’d never been able, for example, to make anxieties about a major cancer bogeyman, recurrence, go away permanently.

Death fears also might, however, disrupt our Wednesday morning sessions — infrequently, thank goodness. And it could be outright dispiriting when we were sometimes force-fed sometimes such factoids as breast cancer having killed 339,000 American women during the Vietnam War while a total of   59,000 Americans died in the conflict.

Nor was it easy when a dropout from our Marin County, California, group, a sailor, phoned me from Florida. He’d fled there to clear his head after his wife booted him out. I comforted him, temporarily. But she died only a few weeks later, the first fatality linked to Man to Man. “It was as if she pushed me and everybody else of importance out of her life so she could let go,” he subsequently lamented.

It took the group a while to embrace that thought as attendees struggled to keep conversations airy and detached. No one admitted projecting himself into the widower’s place, but we all did it. My own anxiety lit up like a flare on a moonless night.

In due course, cheerful outlooks prevailed again. “We don’t talk about it much, but there’s pride in our very existence,” one member commented, “especially since there’s so damned little support for male caregivers anywhere on the planet.” Most guys who joined us, regardless of whether they became regular eat-and-talkers or visited only a few sessions, would endorse those words. 

But many of them had checked us out only because of their partners’ nudging. Nance, of course, was my prompter. On an early Man to Man website, she explained her motivation: “Since my bout with cancer sucked up all of my energy, physically and psychologically, I know I was not ‘available’ in many ways to comfort my husband, a role I generally assume as his wife. I was too scared, hurting, focused on my own healing, schedules, aches and pains to deal with ‘how it was for him.’ I just wanted him to be there. And he was.

 “I should have known he was equally frightened, but I didn’t. I should have known he needed to talk about it, but I was the wrong audience. I should have been able to be there for his concerns, but I wasn’t. I was too wrapped up in my own.

“There were even times when he accompanied me to my treatments that I wished he weren’t there. I didn’t want him to see it. I didn’t want to worry about his reactions to what was going on. 

“So, when we found out about Marin Man to Man, I was thrilled. A place to vent. A place for him to articulate all the stuff that was swirling around in his introspective head.”

 Articulate I did. I relished being able to confide in my Wednesday morning buddies (“Nance was big- time bitchy last night”). They accepted an outburst like that as a fleeting perspective, a manifestation of my inner scaredy-cat. They knew I treasured my wife yet found the rollercoaster too difficult to handle in that moment. And I knew they knew that tiny gripes could pop up anytime despite data that support-group members generally fare better than those who meander the life-threatening landscape solo.

 Nance, in her journal, habitually voiced thanks for not having to go through everything unaccompanied. She was especially pleased that I really heard her say, each time over several decades when her annual mammogram was coming up, that she was afraid. She might have expressed disbelief when I’d tell her she was being brave, yet she did savor all the other metaphoric shots in the arm from me and a substantial network of associates.

Being her principal caregiver could sometimes be more than mildly draining, though. That sensation, a report from the American Society of Clinical Oncology indicated, is typical. Depression might result from the “mental beating” partners of cancer survivors took while their loved ones fight the illness.

Somewhere along the way I learned that taking care of myself had to be a priority if I were to be an effective partner. That meant ensuring I’d listen to friends and co-workers who’d strongly and repeatedly advocate my leaving the house (if only for a few minutes), thereby getting away from both tension and partner, and eating and sleeping well, exercising, meditating, and doing selfish things that I especially enjoyed.

Nance and I worked hard at rejecting repugnant thoughts, many with the charisma of banana slugs, that periodically invaded our fragile minds. Enthusiastically, we, and most patients and caregivers, could shoo them away more often than not by clinging to anybody’s success story, even if were fairly weird. One Man to Man colleague reported his wife was “in complete remission, cancer-free after six months as a complete vegetarian, a vegan.” Before starting the diet, she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer that had spread to her spinal column. We’d all presumed she was in deep doo-doo and so were elated by the change. But her improvement prompted her husband to try what most of us guys deemed over-the-top — a wheat-grass diet that “features daily implants of the grain’s juice through a catheter inserted into the colon, daily oral doses of the juice, and daily enemas or colonics.”

We caregivers split evenly between “ugh!” and “yechh!” but the enema advocate was on Cloud Nine that his regimen continued to make him feel ecstatically happy.

As a group, we unanimously thought that each of us should “do his own thing” health-wise, whatever that entailed. But we also agreed that we must beware of “excessive sacrifice.” That groupthink stemmed from my chatting about Nance joining me at an Indian restaurant and ordering spicy food she hated during an attempt “to do something nice” to repay my caregiving that week. She became really sick the next day, so neither of us ended up feeling good about her offering.

Thankfully, that incident was overshadowed soon thereafter by a 50th birthday party for another wife in Nance’s support group. The middle-aged confederates rallied like squealing cheerleaders at a high-school playoff game. Their male tagalong partners, forewarned that jubilation was mandatory, obediently displayed signs of euphoria.

Hors d’oeuvres, dinner, and cocktail twaddle each earned a passing grade, but the restaurant’s incomparable dance-floor energy was what best energized our crowd. Celebrants acted as gleeful as if an estranged relative had hit a $100 million lottery and divided it. All of us twitched like dogs shaking off bathwater as we jiggled to rock ‘n’ roll from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s and ignored how clumsy, or dated, we may have appeared to bartenders, servers, and other diners.

Changes from gloomy to giddy, from morose to mindful, happened frequently when we found ways to reinvigorate our positive feelings. Giggles, titters, and full body laughs once were invoked, for instance, by a prosthesis peddler displaying a variety of wares for Nance and her cohorts. Samples ranged from plain bra fillers and fake boobs to bogus nipples. Grinning like pubescent schoolgirls, the women merrily swapped items, compared sizes and colors, and tried on lines of matching and non-matching breast “accessories.” Former proud possessors of long, straight hair opted for naturally curly wigs. And vice versa. Women normally afraid to dip into bottles of bleach or dye or rinse slipped easily into new looks and, with them, an ephemeral personality transplant. 

Mercifully for Nance and me, our mental sifts from ebony to light rose usually didn’t take long.

While strolling in downtown San Francisco, I’d often seen despair on the faces of the homeless who slouched in doorways, a ragged army battling against starvation and exposure. One drizzly morning a group of pedestrians was approached by an old, old African American caressing a red blanket so ratty that Linus would have trashed it in a microsecond. But the beggar stimulated smiles, spurring the tourists to dig into their pockets or purses, with a one-liner: “Can you help this very young Jewish boy work his way through college?”

Groups, if a good fit can be ascertained, can rank among the best places for support. One of Man to Man’s earliest members, Marv Edelstein, wrote about it for our website: “My initial hesitation proved to be completely unwarranted. This wasn’t the TV sitcom style group-therapy session I dreaded; no one was going to ask, ‘And how does that make you feel?’ Instead, it was a group of guys who were (or had been) in the same place I was, complete with all the unknowns, frustrations, worries, etc. It was a place to ask questions, get answers to questions I hadn’t thought to ask, and find comfort in the realization that what I was experiencing was no different than what everyone else was going through.”

If truth be known, the fellows much preferred chatting about common topics that had zilch to do with life-threatening diseases. We gabbed about auto repairs and fix-it projects, buffets, computers, dogs and cats, five-legged cows, motorcycles, politics, religion, the size of mosquitoes, vacations, and weather. And, you probably guessed correctly — sports (after all, it is an all-male group). Plus about 7,394 other topics.

From time to time, we expanded Man to Man’s parameters upon request. With all attending members voting yes. The first time was when Gerry Bourguignon, who himself had breast cancer, joined us. He taught us that low awareness levels about his category persisted because only about 2,000 cases were diagnosed annuall

Men whose partners had rare, frightening diseases like ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s dsisease) later become regulars, although breast cancer always remained Topic A whenever anyone wanted to talk about it. 

If I should become frustrated that more men didn’t seek the help they obviously needed, or that some gave us only a single-shot trial, these words from Bill Bowerstock, Man to Man organizer who’d handed me the reins, reassured me: “Those who drop in and don’t come back take whatever they need and get support elsewhere.”

A year after her final Round 1 treatment, though excited with the level of support that enveloped her, Nance still occasionally had trouble expressing her innermost feelings, especially her anger at the disease and at me for being healthy. She also frequently felt guilty about needing me to watch over her. When she had to ask for help, she’d cite an instance when she’d taken care of me, as if that somehow had earned her credits.

As for my own oft-suppressed rage, I once let it loose when we were going over papers for insurance reimbursements, a pile we’d let slide for months because our priorities were elsewhere. Insurance companies, so profitably cold and far away, made wonderful targets for my misplaced wrath.

Nance one day decided to list both low and high points. I’m starting here with her negatives — which she’d learned to overcome — so we can wind up with the affirmatives:  

• Hearing the words, “It’s cancer.”

• Facing chemotherapy.

• “Feeling the chunk of hair fall out of my head and knowing the rest was coming out right behind it, exactly on schedule.”

• “Being scared.

• “Knowing how poorly and sickly and old I looked no matter how hard I tried to make it better.”

• “Going to endless doctors for endless exams and endless treatments.” 

• “Having dozens of hands punch and probe my breast.”

That list surprisingly acted as a tonic for my wife. After exorcising those demons, she was able to come up with some major highs. And without hesitation:

• “The first time I went out without a hat on in short, short hair.”

• “Being able to stay up a whole day without napping.”

• “Having everyone help me.”

• “Realizing there were many things I could do to feel better and to heal — and doing them.”

Nance also courageously gave herself new objectives, ways of making her future life sparkle:

• “I know I have a propensity for saying no, and I am trying very hard to say yes, to look for the good, the possible, the positive.”
• “I can be happy and healthy. I deserve it. I’ve worked hard. As a card-carrying member of the Cancer Club, a card-carrying member of the human race, I want joy in the years I have to spend here.

I, as the decades passed, leaned on any support the universe offered. I also hoped to achieve a permanent peaceful mindset. That, of course, didn’t happen. The lone hope I could ever fully grasp was that my quest for tranquility in the face of breast cancer and the aging process was likely to materialize faster than a lasting peace in the Middle East.

The following is a chunk from my VitalityPress book, MysteryDates®, which is subtitled How to find the sizzle in your relationship. The volume, which required a massive rewrite because so many places referred to in the draft were closed permanently by the Covid-19 pandemic, now contains hundreds of tips on what to do, how to do it, and where to go — locally, nationally, globally.

Permission not needed

There are approximately four zillion, three hundred thousand hair-trigger MysteryDates you can actualize without thinking too hard — or getting permission.

An entry-level art or home-improvement project, for example, might work even when your imagination or your partner’s is severely straight-jacketed.

Or you could…

• Arbitrarily alphabetize some list just for the heck of it.

• Assemble that emergency kit you’ve been meaning to get around to forever.

• Check your local newspaper’s community calendar for something going on right now.

• Compile an imaginary or imaginative bucket list (or use a real bucket, hot water, and soap to scrub your bathroom floor).

• Craft distorted three-dimensional papier-mâché self-portraits.

• Create your own code (digital or spy) or language.

• Delete the hundreds of emails you’ve been meaning to.

• Dine with a homeless guest or two at a fast-food joint.

• Do a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle or build your own Sudoku.

• Dumpster dive (just be sure there’s a nearby hot shower handy). 

• Explore your ancestors and your partner’s online.

• Fashion puppets out of socks and put on a show for each other about your childhoods.

• Figure out the perfect mental murders of those people you’d like see disappear (personal or political foes or just people you’ve never forgiven for real or imagined hurts or misdeeds). Extra points for never-before-tried methods.

• Give in to your inner children and build a fort out of the excess throw pillows you have lying around on beds and couches and overstuffed chairs or squashed into closets. 

• Listen to a podcast about a new government crisis.

• Make a list of all the things you can postpone doing.

• Put together a time capsule for the two of you to open in five years or 10, or never.

• Purposefully get lost.

• Select one item each from your bucket lists and do them.

• Write a letter to a vet in a war zone.

• Taste every free sample at a farmer’s market.

• Turn on your sprinklers and run through the waters (bathing suits required unless you have a tall, tall privacy fence).

• Watch cute-animal YouTube videos with a grandkid.

Or, if you have too much time on your hands, take the first of 365 consecutive daily photos of your pet.

 

This excerpt is from MysteryDates‘ tenth chapter. Quirky is its title.

From Burning Man to beer-bathing 

Finding matchless experiences or places is easy: Simply make the internet your perma-accomplice.

Day trips to unrivaled places can be magical or intriguing even if you must surrender most of your personal space to a crowd that’s bigger than you’d normally like. One example is northern Nevada’s annual Burning Man festival (which draws 70,000 people to the Black Rock Desert each year just prior to Labor Day).

Nance and I inadvertently attended its predecessor at Baker Beach in San Francisco in the mid-‘80s — a vastly tinier artistic incarnation of the 40-foot bonfire event. Our MysteryDate had been scheduled only as a casual walk on the sand, but when we stumbled onto the about-to-be blaze, we lingered — long enough, at least, to acquire a mild heat rash and a major anecdote. The “real thing,” of course, now features nudity and revelry, absurd dress and behavior, visionary artwork and mutant vehicles (otherwise known as “art cars”), and music, music, music (domestic, foreign and otherworldly). Plus lots of drugs, pharmaceutical and illicit.

Extreme weather changes are common, with dust-storms and thundershowers being the norm. Temperatures at night go below freezing; during the day, 100-degree plus is not unknown. So, I recommend participants bring everything needed to survive — food, layered clothing, shelter, tools, water. And earplugs. 

If that outdoor ritual’s too out-there for you, simply seek a level of uniqueness elsewhere. A few ideas:

• Bathe in barrel-shaped tubs filled with dark beer, a trendy restorative cure (it supposedly rejuvenates skin and nerves). If that’s not accessible down the street from you, you’ll be able to find it at spas and other health facilities in the Czech Republic.
• Watch a duel, which is still legal in Paraguay (and on stage in Hamilton). 
• Catch young girls in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania stuffing their faces because husbands rate potential brides on a scale of how chunky they are. Once they’re married, the obesity obsession continues: Appetite-enhancing drugs and wife-fattening farms are encouraged.
• The world’s largest collection of gnomes and pixie — more than 2,000 of them — is now housed at the Merry Harriers, a business at Woolfardisworthy, Bedeford, United Kingdom, a bedding plant/perennials business that contains polytunnels that cover more than 14,000 square feet. 

Don’t want to travel across a sea for an oddball MysteryDate? 

Why not create your own, then, by sitting in court at a murder trial; trying on “new vintage” items, whatever that truly is, in a vintage shop; touring, on a dark and stormy night, a lighthouse (either in search of history or light); ogling delicately at a nudie camp or beach; or finding work as extras in a movie or TV film being shot around the corner. 

Or, if you know where any eccentrics live, consider chatting with a local one.

 

This excerpt is the beginning of Romance, intimacy, sex — the second chapter of MysteryDates. 

‘Ordinary’ but memorable

I vividly remember spinning to a big band with Nancy decades ago, when time stood still for an instant and created an illusion that we were the only couple on the dance floor yet, somehow, had simultaneously left the earthly plane.

That, arguably, may have been the zenith of our 65-year romance. But we’ve had scads of other striking and tender memories. One of the simplest and best — especially since we not infrequently go big, bigger, and overboard — was a standard-issue, “ordinary” MysteryDate that I’d carefully crafted for one of my wife’s “no-big-number, no-big-deal” birthdays. 

Basically, I stuck to basics.

But I did set our dining room table with fancier dishes than we normally use (plus real-silver utensils and candles — items we hadn’t de-cobwebbed, washed, or polished in ages). And I yanked from the microwave, seconds before they burned, several of Nance’s favorite foods that I’d bought at a local supermarket. Then I dimmed the lights and made sure soft dinner-jazz streamed into the room, topping it all off with daisies plucked from our yard. Along with incense from a local boutique. 

The chow-down-at-home MysteryDate was especially delicious because I normally don’t cook and my wife had expected she’d have to do it all that night as usual — or, only slightly better, that we’d end up going to a familiar local eatery.

My brainchild certainly was better received — despite not deviating that far from our customary home dining — than if I’d muttered, “Feel like doing anything special tonight, babe?”  

The following four chapters are extracted from my VitalityPress book, The Roving I. They represent essay-columns I published under that title over an 11-year period.

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Parkinson’s can’t shake un-still photographer’s grit

It’s a paradox: Alan Babbitt doesn’t see well. But his vision is sharper than most.

The 61-year-old is succinct: “I was born with a whole bunch of eye problems, so I was wearing thick glasses from the age of 2 or 3. There’s no question — without contacts, I’d be legally blind.”

He refused to let the impairment get in his way, however. It certainly didn’t block his becoming a successful film and video producer, webmaster and award-winning photographer.

Alan’s online site clearly shows his skill. One portfolio spotlights the Santa Cruz boardwalk on a winter’s day. Another contains dramatic, artsy New York City street scenes. A third focuses on playful images. Showcased are unusual angles and perspectives, brilliant colors and poignant black-and-white shots.

His originality makes the scenically difficult look easy to capture. And he loves peppering his explanatory text with dubious puns and any remnants of humor that happen to be lying around. For example, he confesses that he once “joined a therapy group for photo addicts based on the ‘12-Stop program.’”

Unfortunately, Parkinson’s disease invaded his life five years ago “like a loud, uninvited house guest who won’t ever leave.” The physical shaking made him totally reexamine his life — and shelf his camera for a while.

Now, my friend and I sit in a quiet Thai restaurant enjoying the sunshine streaming through the windows. He beams, almost mischievously, like a kid about to let me in on a gigantic secret. “Parkinson’s adds to my vision,” he says. “Recognizing I could use the tremor freed me up like nothing else.”

I need no follow-up question; he’s on a roll.

“The disease is about losing control. Finding I could use it was empowering.

“When you first learn photography, they tell you over and over about crispness, about keeping the camera steady with a tripod. One evening in Las Vegas, where I was alone with a digital camera, I just started shooting. I was able to see right away what I got. Blurs. Streaks. And then people started reacting to it, liking it. That’s my style now — tremor-enhanced photography.”

His website contains portfolios dedicated to his innovative technique, “Movement Disorder” and “Shake Me Out to the Ball Game.”

He beams again as he chats about “crossing the border” and journeying to metaphoric “other lands” through his camera lens — speeding past his disability: “The tremor is only one kind of movement. I can shoot from a moving car and move the camera around as well. It’s sort of what I call ‘un-still photography.’”

He, too, is un-still.

Alan’s taught at the de Young Museum Art School in San Francisco, exhibited at galleries and studios, held shows at libraries here and there in California and Washington state. He’s planning an April exhibit of his photos at the public library in his hometown, Fairfax — to mark National Parkinson’s Month.

He’s also contacted the Michael J. Fox Foundation to see if they can work together. He’s donated prints to a Parkinson’s group in New York, his birth state, to be auctioned off, and to another foundation. And he recently participated in an Art for Recovery program in San Francisco featuring readings from letters exchanged by patients and medical students.

“One of the gratifying things is that people have seen the work and been inspired by what I’m doing,” he tells me. “It feels good getting those e-mails and letters. Some of them have been from photographers. And a 12-year-old girl wrote me the other day and asked to use me as the basis of a school report. That’s the kind of thing that inspires me to do more.”

Still, it can feel pretty heavy — until you fully grasp the positive attitude that gushes from the bearded, gray-haired guy with brown eyes.

There’s no doubt Alan cultivates his tendency to be upbeat, his affinity for the amusing, readily admitting he wants viewers to relish their “titters, snickers and snorts.”

“Soon after I got the diagnosis,” he recalls, “I thought of occupations that would be possible by using tremors: egg-scrambler, paint can-shaker, human vibrator. Sure, having Parkinson’s can be depressing, but humor can help fight that.”

His occasionally dark humor is quickly evident online, sprinkled between his straightforward photos and experimental tremor-shots that highlight bright streaks and patches, rings and blotches of light, geometric shapes. 

Spoofing a Viagra ad, he warns that “if feelings of giddiness…persist for more than four hours, just turn on the news for a few minutes.”

Do-Nothing Day — a full-fledged fiasco

My entire life, even as a tot, I’ve felt a compulsive need to be productive. But now, with my gray hair turning white, I’ve wanted to slow up.

Apparently, I haven’t learned how.

Years ago, my wife and I vacationed in Mexico. We arrived at our beachside hotel, unpacked, and I immediately started looking for recreational activities.

“See that thing,” she said. “It’s a hammock. Lie in it!”

I did — following her direction because I long ago discovered the key to a happy marriage is a submissive “Yes, dear.”

“What now?” I asked, squirming only slightly.

“Now you lie there and stare at the ocean or the clouds in the sky. That’s it.”

“Yes, dear.”

Within four minutes, I was uptight, upright, and looking for active recreational activities.

I evidently don’t do passive very well.

To overcome my innate obsessive-compulsiveness, a condition amplified by being a Jew trapped in a Calvinist work ethic, I resolved to pause — for 24 hours.

I therefore designated a recent Saturday as Do-Nothing Day, planning to completely veg out. I blueprinted it: Count tiny bumps in the ceiling while resting in bed. Listen to hours of soft, melodic, classic jazz. Watch lowbrow TV shows instead of anything on PBS. Eat gobs of comfort food instead of low-fat this and extra-lite that.

I intended to travel a familiar road, the one paved with good intentions: No exercise. No errands. No phone calls.  

But I failed. Utterly. Miserably. Swiftly.

Within four minutes of awakening, I was checking 13 bookmarked online news sites. Next up, stretching exercises, then the treadmill and recumbent bike. What followed — within half an hour — was making a phone call related to my chairmanship of the Quality of Life Committee in San Anselmo, California; cell-phoning my daughter in New York; calling a friend to wish her a happy birthday; walking Kismet, our dog, and picking up his poop; helping my wife unclog a filing cabinet drawer; hauling a box filled with heavy paper to our storage shed; writing a cover letter to a literary agent; and crafting this column. 

The rest of my day followed in kind, imitating most other days — crammed with limitless tasks with meaning for me even if nobody else gives a flying fig.

But come to a full stop? Impossible.

In fact, my Do-Nothing Day included some “deferred maintenance,” scrutinizing some 723 Post-its on my desk.

Years ago, I sold my Palm Pilot. I’ve never considered buying a Blackberry. Dinosaur-like stickies are what I stick to. My desk, my pockets, my mind — each is cluttered with them.

What do I scribble? Snippets of tidbits I’ve overhead. And sometimes my mind decides to become a giant sieve, with the best place for its drippings being those little yellow pieces of paper. 

Eventually, I do examine the squiggles, often actually able to decipher my handwriting. 

Here are some recent notations:

• Damn! Can’t lose weight. Why? With apologies to Will Rogers, I’ve never met a carb I didn’t like. 
• Little dark-haired girl about three in local park, obviously fighting off potential identity crisis: “I am not a sandcastle. I am not a sandcastle.”
• Don’t know why but the phrase “having some wiggle room” always makes me giggle.
• Woman overheard in front of a nearby musical hotspot while rubbing her wedding ring: “I fight with myself; why wouldn’t I fight with my partner?”
• Clean your desk!
• Most ill-defined, overused word of the decade — “organic.”
• Guy talking to two others in front of a market a couple of towns away: “He’s so dumb, he couldn’t fix a one-horse race.”
• “Hot news” a couple of months back — ‘Tanning salons cause cancer.’ Duh!
• Cull the Post-its on desk! Today!
• Would anybody define “voyeur” as “having a peek experience”? 
• The Art Deco interiors of my favorite local movie emporium still give me a kick each time I watch a film there.
• I’m such an optimist I think a bad start almost inevitably leads to a good finish.
• Decked out female with blonde bangs at a supermarket in town, talking about husband’s previous spouse: “He did that in another wifetime.”
• Would-be political candidate talking to would-be voter, sez, “I don’t have a ‘for sale’ sign on my back.”
• Handful of environmental purists irk me by acting as if they’re greener than thou.

But by far the most significant Post-it, which instantly got me to stop whipping myself for my Do-Nothing Day fiasco, was: Overheard on Town Hall lawn — “I took a lot of baby steps this week, most of them forward.” 

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‘Miracle baby’ walks, talks, inspires euphoria

The “miracle baby” turns one on March 9.

Abigail Sander’s first birthday will be a celebration of life — and scientific marvels.

Her family will also pay homage to those who survived the Holocaust, and those who didn’t.

Festivities will effervesce at a party in Brooklyn, where Abi lives with her mom and dad, Heidi and Jeremy, and laughs liberally. 

Later she’ll be the focus of another bash — in Marin County, California, where she lived nine months in utero, in the bulging surrogate belly of Heidi’s older sister, Alaina Yoakum.

How do I fit in? The sisters insist my wife and I, friends but unrelated, are part of their extended family. So, I’ll hoist the kid onto my lap at that shindig and, for the fourth time since her birth, revel in her smiles. 

“I can lose myself in just staring at her,” Heidi said recently.

I can, too. 

I know what it took for Abi to get here.

Antecedents include Heidi’s cervical cancer four years ago at age 28, a hysterectomy, freezing her eggs after Jeremy fertilized them, psychological screenings and lab tests, a costly surrogacy and expensive legal paperwork. 

For Alaina, past-40 co-owner with husband Charles of Marin Running Company in my adopted home town, San Anselmo, it wasn’t an easy pregnancy. 

Shots to prevent premature birth. Copious mood swings. Headaches. Elevated blood pressure. 

Earlier, fear for Heidi’s life hounded her parents.

Because Ivan Silverberg, the sisters’ dad, is an oncologist, and their mom, Rita Rosenbaum, an oncology nurse, they agonized during the cancer treatments. The Mill Valley duo imagined everything that could go wrong.

Thankfully, nothing did.

Rita now reminisces about “how strong Heidi was, how resilient she was, how she handled it all.”

She lauds, too, Alaina’s lovingkindness, Jeremy’s attentiveness and Charles’ support (including, for months, giving Alaina daily injections of progesterone). 

Ivan echoes that, but grumbles about being “a two-coast family” and not seeing “Abi enough, even though Heidi’s gone out of her way to get here.”  

The Brooklynites actually expect to juggle jobs, friends and calendars to bring Abigail to Marin every other month.

That’ll help the family concentrate on what’s good — and mollify Rita’s dark memories.  

Her father was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust; her mother’s family was likewise decimated.

How many died? “Too many to count,” she tells me, explaining that for her, a child of survivors, the residue was “distrust — of the world, the government, the police, neighbors and friends. I knew no matter how good everything looked today, it could be taken away tomorrow.”

But the presence of Abigail, named after two Abrahams, Rita’s and Ivan’s dads, helps her relax — as do the Yoakum daughters, Sophie and Olivia.

That pair bolstered the cheerfulness in San Francisco’s Kaiser Permanente when Abi emerged after the C-section. 

“They were so much a part of this,” recalls Rita. “They laughed, quietly, with sheer delight.”

Delight also was the operative word when Alaina, who’s “always had this incredible bond” with Heidi despite their 10-year age difference and who chats “with her almost daily by phone and online,” asked to stand in. 

Amazingly, Charles dreamt her surrogacy the night before (though his subconscious got the kid’s gender wrong).

Only one egg had to be implanted. That leaves about a dozen should Heidi someday decide she fancies a gigantic family.

For now, she has her hands full with Abi, who already has a love-filled history that, for me, began with welcome-to-the-world merrymaking at Rita and Ivan’s place in Mill Valley (where Heidi, Alaina and their brother Michael grew up).

My eyes misted while cradling her.

At the baby-naming ritual at Congregation Kol Shofar, a morning of wonder and tenderness as mother and surrogate chanted together, my tear ducts leaked freely. 

Then, when Abi hit three months, I held her for 40 straight, glorious minutes. She cooed and clutched my finger. 

I cooed back.

In October, at the Yoakums place, I again held her. She grabbed my finger as if remembering the first time.

I kvelled. 

That’s a Yiddish word that means being elated. Euphoric.

What will Abigail call Alaina? “Neither mommy nor auntie are quite right. We’ve agreed to wait and see what nickname she comes up with,” explains Heidi.

Alaina concurs. 

Abi walks now, warbles a few words, and gets ecstatic playing peek-a-boo. “She also giggles at other babies,” Heidi reports, “and she likes to look at pictures of herself in my cellphone.”  

None of that’s unusual. But some still think everything concerning the “miracle baby” is unique. 

Heidi views it differently: “Abigail is certainly a miracle for us but we feel a little uncomfortable calling her that because any baby could be given that label.”

True, but I still see Heidi being played by Natalie Portman in a short black wig, Alaina by a brunette Scarlett Johansson.

Abi, I figure, will star as the miracle kid.

---

Cambodian refugee works her dream after surviving slave labor camp

Sophie Lim almost starved to death as a teenager in a slave labor camp — every day for four years in the late 1970s.

She was fed only bits of watery rice under the yoke of the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Her weight plunged to 70 pounds. 

“I was all bones and skin,” she remembers.

After being hospitalized four months, then forced to return to toiling 10 to 14 hours daily seven days a week in mud-filled rice paddies, Sophie escaped “with a delivery guy who had two oxen pulling a wagon.” 

Sighing, she tells me, “I’m lucky I survived. About 1.7 million died” — from starvation and the infamous genocidal killing fields.

We’re sitting at a table in an upscale shopping center in San Anselmo, California, soaking up sun near Sophie’s Nail Spa, a salon she owns. The Cambodian native also owns her home across the bridge in Richmond; another house in the city of Elk Grove, close to Sacramento; and two rental structures in nearby Oakland.

Regardless, the 57-year-old immigrant whose ambition, energy and hard work helped her achieve the American Dream feels compelled to work 10 to 12 hours a day. 

But that’s a long way from being awakened at 3 a.m. and made “to walk a mile or two, sometimes more” to the work fields in a country where she’d been torn from her mother and sister (her father died when she was six).

It’s also a long way from being obliged to listen nightly at 7 “to a brainwashing meeting.”

Her captors, she says, “were killing people, making them disappear, but they made it sound like they were doing good things. We knew better.”

The Khmer Rouge, Communist offshoot of the Vietnam People’s Army from North Vietnam, had galvanized a system of torture and executions that melded with widespread famine stemming from its failed attempts at agricultural reform.

The nightmare will always haunt her.

“Hundreds slept together, with only room for you and your mosquito net. You made friends with people you worked with, but mostly you didn’t trust anybody.” 

If you got sick, you first were sent to “a clinic where there was no doctor. They just gave you an IV, putting young coconut juice into your veins.”

Nowadays Sophie tries not thinking about everyone stealing food to survive — even though “if you stole and they found out, they killed you.”

Nor does she often ponder doing without: “No shoes, no toothbrush, nothing.”

But the memories spur her to give back by donating money to help Cambodia’s poor.

Often.

Sophie initially returned to Cambodia in 1999 and has visited half a dozen times since.

“I helped build a Buddhist temple, after collecting money from the Cambodian community and adding some of my own,” she tells me.

She also raised funds “to dig wells for two villages.”

Not all memories of her native land are negative. One bright spot was meeting her husband “in the street” shortly after her escape.  

A year later, they wed. 

A year after that, they came to Oakland despite neither speaking a word of English. “We learned by watching a lot of ‘Sesame Street.’” 

In 1983, at age 24, she found an assembly line job she kept for a year — until the company went bankrupt.

Three years later, she gave birth to her second son (she also has a daughter) and started cleaning houses. She did that for a decade.

Sophie and her husband had also adopted a Cambodian orphan, bringing him with them when they emigrated. 

Eventually she bought what’s now Sophie’s Nail Spa — 19 years ago.

Her life wasn’t trouble-free during that tenure, however.

Her daughter, now living in housing under the auspices of a mental-health program, was “diagnosed at age 18 with schizophrenia” in 2002. Sophie’s carpenter husband “quit his job to take care of her.” 

But he died seven years later from liver cancer — after a $300,000 transplant. Sophie carried his ashes back to Cambodia, where she built a shrine.

Today she loves it here, living and working her dream. “I’m happy a lot, laughing all the time. I’m not a grumpy person no matter what happens.”

When I ask about the government’s current anti-refugee stances, she replies, “I don’t like [it]. People should be able to come here and help people back home. There’s no place like America.”

She says it’s crucial to give refugees hope — something she’d lost repeatedly in the slave labor camp.

Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates

Chapter One

Once upon a fantasy, three years ago when they were only 5, Penny became Lily’s best friend.

That was right after Lily moved from San Francisco, California, to Penny’s home-town of Fairyville in the state of Fairyzona, where she came to live with her grandpa.

Now they’re 8, and both have learned how to flutter their fairy wings fast enough so the girls don’t crash. They’ve also learned how to cast spells the right way (most of the time anyway).

One recent, bright spring day, the two girls were sitting on a park bench in their neighborhood listening to a jazz band.

“This music is sooooo good,” Lily said, “that I can see each note bouncing in the air.” She giggled, her wide grin revealing her shiny new silver braces.

Penny laughed aloud as she said, “I can see them all too.”

Just then, Lily’s grandfather, a 78-year-old gray-haired, gray-bearded sorcerer dude, walked by. He was wearing what he always wore no matter how the weather was behaving: a high, pointed light-blue hat and a long black cloak. The hat and cloak each had dozens of gold stars painted on it.

“Oh, my,” said Grandpa Graybeard, stopping in his tracks. “Did you girls cast a spell? I’m asking because I can see a whole bunch of colorful notes bouncing in the middle of the air.”

Both Lily and Penny giggled.

One second later, though, as if they had only one voice, the two friends sputtered, “S-s-sorry.”

That was because Grampy made them feel a little guilty about enjoying the notes that Lily had created by reminding them that the musical images might be blocking the scenery for those passing by.

So Lily quickly did an “undo spell,” and the girls watched the notes float way, way up into the sky.

After a few seconds, Lily asked, “Grampy, did you come looking for us so you could take me back to visit San Francisco like you promised?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” he replied. “There were two airplane seats open when I got near the ticket window yesterday, but the lady in front of me bought one of them so there was only a single left for me. Now, sad to say, I must travel alone.”

“Oh, what a shame,” said Lily, “I really wanted to go. I was hoping to see Emma, my cousin, the one who suffers from hay fever so bad she sneezes all the time.”

“Maybe next time,” Grampy said.

He paused a minute, then continued, smiling.

“I’ll be staying for only a week, but soon after I come back here, I’ll need to go again. I’ll make sure the airline is not sold out that time so I can get two tickets. If you would like, I’ll even go to the ticket office later today and purchase…”

Before he could finish that last sentence, though, a clucking mama hen distracted Grandpa Graybeard as she strolled right past him

Five baby chicks named Crystal, Sienna, Kyle, Mia and Henry followed her. All six were skipping instead of waddling. Each chick was singing jazz rather than cheeping.

They seemed so happy that the good feelings quickly spread to Grampy, Lily and Penny, and the three of them started singing along in harmony.

Only Melody, the mommy hen, wasn’t singing. That was because she had a sore throat from clucking at her chicks all day to be less noisy and to stay in line.

Daddy Rooster hadn’t been able to help her because he’d been tied up teaching young roosters to crow better.

The chicks paid zero attention to Lily, Penny and Grampy, whom they thought of as a funny-looking trio, and just kept skipping toward the forest, where they lived in a hollow tree stump.

But one of them, Baby Henry, wandered off down the street.

The mother didn’t notice he was gone until the others had been tucked safely into their nests. When she did discover the baby chick was missing, she started to freak out and right away went off to find him.

She left Daddy Rooster in charge.

While searching for Henry, she decided she could use all the support she could get. So she went back to the bench Lily and Penny were resting on again, this time with Grandpa Graybeard sitting right next to them, and pleaded for assistance.

“Sure,” said all three without thinking twice.

As soon as the search party stepped through a crack in the low, wooden fence by the sidewalk, they ran across a white and blue magic pony named Fifi. “Did you see a baby chick pass by?” Penny inquired.

“I did see one that looked like a yellow puffball,” the pony replied. “It went toward Main Street and turned the corner onto Nut Boulevard. He kept on going until I couldn’t see him anymore.”“We had better follow that trail,” Penny said to the others.

“Okay,” everyone said at once.

But when they got to Nut Boulevard, they found it was empty. Lily started to cry because she was worried the chick was really lost and might never be found.

Her tears made Mama Melody weep too.

Just then, Henry, having heard his mom’s sobs, peeked out from behind a fat log where he had been hiding.  The mother hen stopped crying.

Lily stopped too.

Melody clutched her chick by the leg and whispered to him, “You really scared me. Don’t ever wander off alone again. Please.”

“I guess we can go play now without worrying,” Lily said to Penny. “Grampy, do you want to come and play Legos with the two of us at Penny’s house?”

“You bet,” said her grandfather.

So off they went.

Only a few minutes later, Lily, Penny and Grandpa Graybeard were having fun in Penny’s playroom, where the wallpaper was tinted copper, which by chance happened to be the color of a penny.

Lily, with no reason other than she wanted to, broke into their playtime by asking Penny if she wanted to hear a joke.

“Sure,” said Penny.

“Knock, knock,” said Lily.

Penny responded with the “Who’s there?” Lily wanted to hear.

“Boo,” said Lily.

“Boo who?” asked Penny.

“Don’t cry,” Lily said, “it is just a joke.”

They both giggled.

Then they went back to playing with Grandpa Graybeard and the Legos, all three of them working together to build a beach house filled with people of different skin colors but heads and bodies shaped exactly the same.

The pretend people resembled the three playmates in that some had white skin like Lily and Grampy and some were brown, like Penny.

They played for a whole two hours without a break. Afterward, they started watching an old DVD titled “Escape from Moonlit Island.”

The story in the movie was make-believe even though it took place on a real island about five miles from their Fairyville homes. Lily and Penny found it scary, partly because the characters in the film were so different from them.

They were robots.

The girl robots wore identical skirts and blouses, and the boy robots wore matching short pants and T-shirts. Each piece of their clothing, which contained every color of the rainbow plus black and white and gray and brown, was quite different from what Lily and Penny wore most of the time.

Lily often preferred red shirts and blue jeans, and Penny liked long gold and silver skirts, as well as jeans.

None of the robot faces were happy like Lily’s and Penny’s. Instead, they were scary — because you could see the inner parts of each robot right through his or her thin skin.

As the girls watched the horror film, both male and female robots frightened them even more when they growled and spit out a whole bunch of poisonous tarantulas and ugly, yucky giant black widow spiders.

The insects went wild, crawling in every direction.

The movie was so upsetting, in fact, that Lily and Penny both said to Grampy, “We don’t want to watch any more of this. As of right now!”

Grandpa Graybeard said, “Okay, but I’ll tell you what. I will cast a spell and make the robots look more human. And I’ll change the tarantulas and black widows into robin’s-egg blue and orange butterflies. That way you won’t be scared if you decide to ever watch it again.”

Without waiting for a response, he waved his magic wand and, hocus pocus, the changes happened.

“Now,” he said, “we can go out and find something good to eat. It’s time for dinner anyway.”

So off they hurried to a restaurant called Tiny’s Pizza, where both girls overstuffed themselves so much they had to use magic to make their stomachs feel good.