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Marilyn Armstrong — Seeking Intelligent Life on Earth

Category Archives: Holidays


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One size never fits all

After a long period of listening to endless complaints of headaches and stomach aches that I incorrectly attributed to my son’s problems with school — school phobia was the term they were using back then — one afternoon, he started seizing. Rushed to the emergency room, he continued to seize, despite intravenous anti-convulsive medications.

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Many tests later, all the doctors knew was his brain was swollen and he had a low-grade fever. There was no evidence of viral or bacterial meningitis or encephalitis to account for the swelling. There was nothing in any of the blood work to indicate an infection.

One day, I was visiting him in the hospital. By then he’d been there a few weeks and I was despairing of getting any answers. They were doing daily spinal taps on him to lower the pressure in his brain and he got hysterical every time they approached him with that needle. I could hardly blame the kid. Spinal taps are miserable and painful. One is bad. Daily is horrible.

While I was trying to think of something cheery to say, I noticed that the soles of his feet were kind of orange. So were the palms of his hands. It looked like he’d been eating cheetos or something like that with yellow dye in it. I mentioned it to the nurse. She looked at it and wrinkled her brow.

Orange peppers, photo: Marilyn Armstrong

“It looks like jaundice,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, “But only on his palms and soles. That’s a bit weird don’t you think?”

She agreed it was odd and said she’d mention it to the doctor.

The following day, the doctor rushed into the room and said, with his voice full of urgency, “Does he take vitamins?”

“Vitamins?”

“Vitamins. Regular multi vitamins.”

“Yeah, when he was home visiting his father this summer, he brought back a bottle of one-a-day multi vitamins with him. He’s been taking one a day. Nothing unusual.”

“Bring them in,” the doctor ordered. “The whole bottle, label and all.”

And I did. It turned out that my son cannot metabolize vitamin A. Instead of being processed in a normal way and passing out of his body, it accumulates and would have killed him eventually. He had more than 1 million percent more vitamin A in his system than normal and there was no quick way to detoxify him.

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Time was going to have to take care of it. Over a period of years, if he was careful to avoid vitamins and foods high in vitamin A, eventually his levels would recede to normal, but he would never be able to eat orange and red vegetables, margarine and other foods that are pumped full of Vitamin A, spinach, liver or other organ meats.

Vitamin A-osis is not unknown. Arctic explorers died of it after eating polar bear liver which contains staggeringly high levels of Vitamin A. It is also known to be a somewhat rare genetic anomaly. It happens. No reason.

When I brought my son home from the hospital as a tiny baby, I was give vitamin A & D drops to give him. He loved carrots and used to take them as snack with his lunch. He had never been given vitamin pills on any regular basis. We had an English pediatrician and unlike American doctors, most European doctors don’t recommend taking vitamins unless there’s a known vitamin deficiency of some kind.

It turns out that the official  FDA “standard dose” of 5,000 units per day of vitamin A is lethal for my son. All of that ADHD stuff was actually vitamin A poisoning from which he had been a chronic low-level sufferer for his entire life. It had left him with permanent damage. Who do you blame?

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Last March, I wound up in the hospital because my blood sodium level was so low, I was supposed to be unable to function. I felt fine, but the tests were adamant. I had a problem.

Big pumpkins in the bin, waiting to become this year's Jack O' Lantern.

They never found the cause and it was diagnosed as idiopathic, which means “Who knows?” in doctor speak. I had been suffering for most of my life from heat intolerance resulting in heat stroke, violent leg and foot cramps and other peculiar symptoms. After raising my sodium levels, all those symptoms went away.

I have apparently been suffering from not enough salt in my diet … and in my blood … my whole life, but it wasn’t bad enough to raise the alarm bells. What had changed? I started doing what I was told to do: drink more liquids. Drink more fruit juice. And my low sodium went from marginal and periodically problematic to dangerously low.

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What does my son’s near dying of Vitamin A poisoning  after he started taking multi-vitamins — and my medical crises caused by increasing my fluid intake — have in common? Both of us did what is “the common wisdom” recommended by millions of doctors, health columnists and diet gurus all across America.

And in both cases, it almost killed us.

The truth is that we are not all the same. What is “enough” or “just right” for you, might kill me. Or my son. We are not produced on production lines to a rigid specification. The reason I mention this at all was — as usual — a thing on Facebook. There’s an argument in progress about whether or not the currently trendy very low sodium diets are not necessarily such a good thing.

People are getting all hot and bothered about it because salt is regarded today the way caffeine was a few years ago. It’s the evil in our food. It turns out that caffeine is pretty harmless to most people, even those with high blood pressure and it’s an important component in waking up our digestive systems so they do what the are supposed to do, especially among older people. If you’ve been in a hospital lately, they eagerly ply you with more coffee than you could possibly want (maybe it would help if the coffee weren’t so awful?) because constipation is a big problem in hospitals.

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So today, it’s salt that’s the big no-no. I remember when eggs were good for you. Then, they were bad for you. Then good for you after which I stopped following the food scare of the day on the news, so now, I have no idea how they are regarded. I just eat eggs when I feel like it. I feel I should tell you that the idea of an egg-white omelet makes me want to heave. Yuk.

I believe that fads in diets are inherently dangerous. Food fads are dangerous because they are unnatural and unbalanced. They don’t take into consideration that we are all made different, that we are each unique.

Eat. Enjoy. Don’t eat stuff that’s obviously bad for you. Nobody needs or should eat red meat every day. The current obsession with bacon is unhealthy and disgusting. Commonsense and moderation should be able to inform us when a choice is stupid, but apparently not so much.

Everyone is worried about salt while they scarf down double bacon cheeseburgers? Doesn’t that strike you as bizarre? Do you really need a nutritionist to tell you that extremely rich, fatty foods are unhealthy? Or that eating or drinking anything to excess is not a healthy longterm diet choice? Are we really that clueless?

Eat sensibly. Enjoy life. Have fun. Stop taking handfuls of vitamins you don’t need. Try to get some exercise when you can. Don’t spend all of your time at the computer or in front of the TV … unless that’s what makes you happy. In which case, have a good time!

Because that’s what life is all about. If you aren’t enjoying the life you are living, do something different.

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Mother’s Day, As It Began — Julia Ward Howe

The modern commercialized celebration of gifts, flowers and candy, bears little resemblance to Julia Ward Howe‘s original idea. Here is the Proclamation that explains, in her own powerful words, the goals of the original Mother’s Day in the United States…

English: Portrait drawing of poet, anti-slavel...

Portrait drawing of poet, antislavery activist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe.

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Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means

Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

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To all mothers and children of mothers, wishes of strength, peace and hope for this Mother’s Day.


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Prompts for the Promptless – Ep. 10 – Saudade: Remembering Mom

Saudade is a Portuguese word that describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic longing for an absent something or someone who one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing will never return.

My friends, who came as I did to live in Israel, shared the fear of receiving “the phone call” telling us a parent had passed away across an ocean and perhaps half a world. 

We were haunted children. Each Passover we gathered. Elijah’s cup stood on the table. It was my mother’s cup and though she lived, she was also a ghost because she was so far away. I looked at my son. When I am old, I wondered, will he go far away to live in a different country?

I was 31 when left the U.S. and moved to Israel. I left in a ferocious need to be. Nothing would have stopped me. My mother never tried to stop me. She told me she admired me – admired me – for having the courage to leave.

I lay in bed the morning my mother died. Images tumbled through my head. In my mind’s eye, I saw the funeral I could not attend, my brother, older, sadder. And my sister. My mother was her protector. What would Ann do now? Two birds twitter as they build a nest on my Jerusalem window ledge…

I lived most of my adult life within half an hour’s drive from my mother and never gave it a second thought. We talked by phone, saw each other now and then for a bit of shopping and a chat. Such was life in suburban New York.

Living in Israel – being so far away – taught me about family We saw each other through a time-lapse sequence. Each visit, she was visibly older, changed. A call – “Your mother is in the hospital” – brought panic. Nothing could reassure me.

Another visit to Israel. It is the year after my mother’s surgery and she looks so tired. I can see the weariness, yes, but she is still Mother. I saw her as I had always seen her: strong, an elemental force in my world. A friend commented: “What a fragile little woman your mother is!” That stopped me short. I had never seen my mother as fragile. Or little. She was as she had always been … but maybe my eyes were faulty.

My mother was with me, then had to leave and another year passed.

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It was 1983. She had come for Passover.  I was overjoyed to have my family together. We would have three uninterrupted weeks. My mother looked wonderful. Her color was back. Just before the Seder, she tells me that she is dying.

“Dying?” I was inane in my shock. “But you look so well.”

She was not well. She had cancer. It had spread to her lungs and stomach. She said she could feel herself sliding away. “I don’t want to lose you,” I cried. If I cry, Mother will fix it, it will be okay.

“I don’t want to lose me either,” she said, and laughed.

“How can you laugh?” I said.

“What else is there to do?” she replied.

Fears and prayers and hopes. Relentlessly, she told me what I need to know about the will,my brother and sister. I am the first to be told.

We took a two-day trip to the Galilee. The wildflowers were blooming. They were scarlet and blue, white and pink, yellow and purple. The Galil was ablaze and we saw it together. I remember. The Hermon, still crowned with snow. The Kinneret, mist-covered.

My mother always talked to me. I was little, very little. I sat next to her while she ironed and she talked about life, her thoughts, her dreams. Was she lonely? Did she miss her own mother who had passed away?

The final summer of her life, I went to the United States to be with her. She still looked well. How could she be so ill? Yet the signs were there. Her will sustained her. She wanted me to remember the Mother I knew, and not as she would be in weeks to follow.

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She let me take care of her, and that spoke volumes. We talked, talked, talked. I tried to tell her all the things I’d never gotten around to saying, never found the right words.

I just let the words fall out. I wanted her to know that all the little hurts … they were nothing. Forgive me Mother … I forgive you, too.

I am my mother. I am the cycle, the pattern. I sit by a pool and watch my granddaughter play in the water, and I am my mother, and I am in the pool. I am the one, mother who is and will be.

My mother gave me a diamond that was her mother’s and perhaps, though no one can remember so far back, her grandmother’s. It was the one thing that had been passed down the generations. All else was lost, long ago, left behind in another old … older … country.

I have become the woman my mother raised me to be. As she molded me, I am – for good and ill. I am my mother’s daughter.

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What happened to Boston?

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Our president was in Boston today, giving a pep talk. He was here for the remembering. Something happened here and it wasn’t a small thing.

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“Massachusetts invented America,” Governor Deval Patrick said at Thursday morning’s interfaith service honoring the victims of the Marathon bombing. President Obama in the speech that followed, noted that all Americans were thinking about the city. “Every one of us has been touched by this attack on your beloved city,” he said. “Every one of us stands with you.” The marathon attacks were personal, he said.

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There are voices to which we should listen. We need to pay attention to positive voices so the psychopaths and sociopaths, terrorists and bad guys with guns, bombs and a determination to reduce us to shivering in our locked houses don’t get to do a victory lap.

We really must not allow that.

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From Stephen Colbert watch, smile and ponder (video).

What happened to Boston could (and has) happened in other places here and overseas. Open societies are inherently vulnerable. To terror, to deluded groups and individuals who murder people to make a point. No matter how news-weary we are, pep talks are important.

They remind us to not let the bad guys win. We all need to remember bad stuff can happen anywhere and sometimes it happens to us or those we love. There’s nowhere far enough off the grid that those people can’t find us.

Read “To Boston With Love,” a particularly apt and touching op-ed piece from the Washington Post by former local writer E.J. Dionne. It’s especially meaningful if you’ve ever lived in or near Boston.

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A couple of hours ago, it was all over the news. The FBI has pictures of two out of who-knows-how-many people involved in the bombings at the Marathon on Patriot’s Day. I’m waiting to hear what the point of the bombing was supposed to be. Did the voices in someone’s head tell them to do it? Or what? Why?

What if there was no reason at all? What if this horror was perpetrated by a bunch of local sociopaths having their version of a good time? That would be the weirdest, creepiest answer of all.

One way or the other, I would like to know what happened, if there is a semblance of a reason. I hope answers are coming.

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Neighborly

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I was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Holliswood, Queens. For those unfamiliar with New York, it is divided into 5 boroughs, each of which has its own character and history. Most people, when they think of New York, think of Manhattan. This is the island on which you will find Wall Street, the Empire State Building and other signature buildings that symbolize the city of New York.

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Most of New York is not Manhattan, and even Manhattan isn’t just skyscrapers and Fifth Avenue. It too has its neighborhoods where people make homes. Greenwich Village, at the lower end of the island, is nothing like Wall Street. Harlem bears little resemblance to Park Avenue which has a character utterly different than the Lower East Side. Fort Tryon Park — home of the Cloisters — is a different world from Broadway. Manhattan is small, but there’s a lot of stuff going on. From the carousel in the park to the open air markets near Rivington Street, to Tiffany and the canyons of the financial district, there’s something to fascinate everyone, all crammed into a very small space.

Which is how come most people don’t live in Manhattan. Real estate prices are out of sight, so most of the life of the city happens in the other four boroughs.

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Brooklyn and Queens are where most people live, in the many neighborhoods. I grew up in Queens in Holliswood. It was big old houses, woods and fields when I lived there, though I suppose that has changed. Despite being less than a mile from major subway lines and downtown Jamaica , we were surrounded by small truck  farms. People raised garden crops, even corn. There were ducks, geese and chickens. Donkeys, too. The city had grown around Holliswood, but had not yet consumed it.

Brooklyn went through similar changes, although Brooklyn was, until recently, more populous and urban than Queens. The biggest changes in my lifetime have taken place as rundown areas gentrified and became “classy” and expensive. I understand Staten Island is no longer the suburban-exurban area it was, but I haven’t been there in a long time so all I can do is pass on rumors. The same is true of the Bronx. I never really spent any time in the Bronx, but I hear that it’s beginning to pull out of its many decades long slump.

Gentrification is changing the face of cities all across the U.S. People are coming back to the cities.

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I needed to provide this background because when I say I grew up in New York City,  people get the wrong idea. I really didn’t grow up on the mean streets. I grew up in a rambling old house surrounded by trees, not unlike where I live now … except I took a subway to school and had access to all the stuff that New York offers. It was, from a teenager’s point of view, about as good as it gets. Life in a country setting with cheap, easy access to the city of New York.

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The first time I really lived in a city was Jerusalem. Although Jerusalem is definitely urban, it’s not urban like Chicago, Los Angeles or Boston. It’s unique. Special and very ancient. It is full of ghosts and thousands of years of history hang heavy on its stone walls. Definitely not your average urban area. After I moved back to the U.S., I settled in Boston, which was my first American urban living experience. I liked it. Mostly, I liked the restaurants.

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I didn’t like the dirt, the parking problems, the traffic, the noise, or the constant construction and gridlock. Not to mention the petty crime that’s an inescapable part of city life and from which no neighborhood is exempt. It doesn’t matter where you live or how much you pay. People will break into your car, burglarize your house if they can and sometimes, hold you up to take anything you’ve got worth taking. I never got mugged, but an awful lot of people I knew did. I had a couple of cars stolen and vandalized. That must count for something.

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And then … after ten years in Roxbury, which was, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, a wonderful neighborhood, we got out of  Boston and moved to … where did you say? Uxbridge? Where is Uxbridge? No, not Oxford. South central Massachusetts down by the Rhode Island border. Due south of Worcester. The Blackstone Valley. Yes, that’s in Massachusetts. It’s off the Mass Pike.

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We settled into living in a very small town with few changes to our life style. It turned out neighbors are neighbors. They were friendlier in Roxbury and certainly nosier, probably because we lived so tightly packed together … but rumors fly thick and fast in the country, too.

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I have lived, as you can tell, in many places and I have found many things are universally true wherever you live. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a big city or a tiny village, everyone knows your business. You don’t have to tell them. They hear it through the walls, they pick it up in the grocery store, in church, from your kids and friends and family.

People talk. If you are doing anything interesting, they will talk about you. Even if you aren’t doing anything interesting, they will talk about you because people talk about each other. It’s a people thing.

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Uxbridge is not exactly exciting. There isn’t much crime and not many organized activities, though the churches do their best to fill the gap. No public transportation, so teenagers have a hard time until they can get a license to drive. Mostly, life is people spending time with people. Hanging out with friends. Watching a movie together. Shopping in a group. Celebrating holidays and birthdays. Barbeques in the back yard in the summer. Trick or treating on Halloween.

If Uxbridge had coffee houses, lots of  shops and museums, how often would we go there? How often did we go to such places when we lived near them? I lived in Boston for 15 years and I only went to the Museum of Science after moving to Uxbridge because I wanted my granddaughter to see it.

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I grew up in New York and never visited the Statue of Liberty. I did spend time in museums while I was growing up, but my family didn’t take me there. I was interested in history, so I took myself. Famous sights? The Empire State Building? Never been to the top. Never visited the World Trade Center. Never walked across the Brooklyn Bridge or visited Ellis Island. This is true of most New Yorkers. Tourists go those places. New Yorkers only go if they are entertaining out-of-town guests or work in the building.

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No matter where you live, life is about people and relationships, not places. City and country are not all that different except for scenery. People are people. Suburb, city, or middle of nowhere, it’s your friends and family who are your world, not your town, city, or state. Where you live is a state of mind, not of the union.

 

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Passover, On the News Now!

If the media were covering the Exodus today, this is what we might expect to see:

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