Pulmonary Fibrosis Awareness

September 22nd through the 29th is National Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis Awareness Week. Pulmonary Fibrosis is a debilitating disease marked by progressive scarring of the lungs that gradually interferes with a person's ability to breathe. There is no cure, and currently there is NO FDA approved treatment. The disease is fatal, within 5 to 7 years of diagnosis. Approximately 128,000 people in the United States have IPF, and an estimated 48,000 new cases develop each year. You can learn more about PF at The Coalition for Pulmonary Fibrosis' website.

The Coalition for PF takes donations via check, credit card, even PayPal. You can donate by clicking the link below:

It's Not That I'm Not Flattered, Amazon

You know, those folks at Amazon.com are incredibly fond of me, but there are limits. I like that they always have recommendations for me. I like that they try to be waiting with a list of interesting items. It's a bit like having a cocker spaniel with an incredible library and Olympic medal fetching skills.

Much as I enjoy the admiration, however, there are limits. I'm just a woman, guys...

I mean, really...



much as I find your suggestion flattering...



I'm JUST A WOMAN. No need to worship me. No, I am not... you know.

Remember...

I think this is a day we all face with melancholy. I know I worry about Ahmed on 9/11. He volunteered, and it was the last time he would place himself in the thick of a terrible emergency. He'd been to Jalalabad after the earthquakes, Oklahoma City after the bombing. After 9/11, early in our relationship, I begged him to stop placing himself in harms way. It was the ultimate expression of selfishness.

Selfishness is rare for me. I don't generally put myself before others, and I am a strong believer in giving as much of yourself as you can. There's a song children always include in their school concerts, "Love is Something if You Give it Away." Simple, but true. Generosity, one of its softer facets, only works as an outgoing expression.

Yet I did ask him to stop giving of himself. I did ask him to keep himself safe for me. The losses people faced in the aftermath of 9/11 terrify me. I can't imagine that kind of strength. I can't imagine the kind of fortitude one finds to go on when the love of your life is gone. Where do you even find it?

A lot of people have ruminated about the value of continuing to remember the anniversary of our nation's darkest day. We used that phrase, "never forget" frivolously in the beginning. We had fewer doubts when the wound was fresh. We are a young nation, and too often forget lessons before the shadow of their teaching has faded in a new dawn.

Not this time. I will mark this day every year for the rest of my life. I don't need to wallow, or open the old wound. But I need to be grateful I didn't lose what so many did. I need to value the blessing of each new day. I need to remember being awoken by my mother, in a panic, and the tremor in my voice as I called Ahmed. Our love was new then. I need to remember the complete calm in his voice, the patience as he explained the following day that he'd been asked to help, and would do so. I need to remember the fear so I appreciate the security, the incredible sense of peace and gratitude I feel in every corner of myself when I hear his footsteps in the hall, hear his wonderfully gruff voice call out for his Badjia.

Never forget. Remember for the right reasons. Be thankful.

Back to School

I love this time of year. Always have, strangely enough, though I didn't always love school. It's strange that the thing I despised most as a child became a source of great joy and hope for me in adulthood. Funny how it often seems to be that way.

School was a nightmare for me as a young girl. I had a high IQ and was dysgraphic. I devoured books and filled journals like they were some kind of drug. I liked to sketch, come home to my horse and daydream in the tall grass. I spent hours upon hours wandering the woods around my Green Harbor home, examining every living thing that creeped between the mossy cracks of the stone walls that meandered along the country side, boundaries older than time that kept nothing in or out. They seemed to serve no purpose other than creating a jagged decoration on the landscape that said "others were here before you and left this place wild." I loved tottering along the stones, plucking berries and flowers and salamanders from between them.

School more or less interrupted these more valuable explorations with useless (so I thought) exercises in "stuff I'd never use." And by the time I was old enough to realize I might use some of that "stuff" I had convinced myself nobody was teaching it to me in a way that would prove valuable, or have any lasting force. I was, you understand, a child genius in a world of adults who neither understood me nor knew as much, instinctively, about the world that mattered. Why bother with math when the astonishing properties of ribwort-- which was all over every lawn, for crying out loud-- could be discovered while resting on one's belly in the sunshine?

Is there any creature alive more fortified with disdain than a smart, but stubborn child? If there is I hope it becomes extinct soon. Surely it should go the way of the Dodo.

Later, as a teacher, I was always drawn to those little snot-nosed twerps who knew everything (according to them), and had little need of my tutelage, thanyouverrymuch. I sensed, in them, the mirror that our Creator is so fond of holding up with a smirk. They were like me. I had the benefit of time, patience, and first hand experience with this species of brat, and retain to this day a surpassing fondness for them.

But you know, even when I hated school, I loved the back-to-school season. I'd always wanted to be a writer. September was, granted, the time of prison's return and the revolution of my torture seemed unending, circling back to mock me as each summer died. But it brought with it renewed friendships, books, notebooks, pens, pencils, sharpeners that made sharp smelling coils of wood, apples strewn about the paddock where my chestnut mare munched them happily in spite of their pocks and mushiness. And in spite of the evils of math, there were always kind teachers who were "not so bad after all," who seemed to the child I was to indulge me. I believe the adult I am is correct in realizing, all these years later, that it was not indulgence but fondness I saw there.

The leaves change and summer goes, but we mark its end with new clothes, unbreached bindings on books with crisp white pages, and notebooks with spiral bindings still pristinely coiled around sheaves yet to be filled. Children return to their classrooms each September hoping it will be over soon. Teachers return each year, in spite of lousy salaries, belligerent parents, and snarky students, just hoping. What better way to approach the harvest season, when summer dies, than to begin something perfect and new?