Monthly Archives: February 2011

Early Morning

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Without question early morning is my favorite time of day. Has been for years, certainly since I moved out of New York City in 1987 and took a job working on an upstate New York horse farm, a job that had me at the farm at five o’clock in the morning.

Now, there are those of us who are at ease with getting out of bed, blazing through their morning tasks and flying out the door in a dazzlingly brief period of time. Not me. I find the notion of having to leave home unsettling in the first place. Having to leave in a rush is unbearable. The farm was a 30-minute drive from where I lived so I’d get up at three a.m., plenty of time to have coffee, read, write, hang out with Bubba, the Siberian Husky who’d helped me reclaim my ability to leave the house after I was shot and held up again at gun point months later.

Ever since those first days out of the city early mornings have become a sanctuary of peace, healing, free thought, the intoxicating ineffable wonder of a new day emerging, adventure and, in a very real way for me, safety. Why the latter is true I’ve yet to discover, but it is.

Now early morning into mid-morning is dominated by writing. But there is a ritual. I set up the coffee machine the night before so, when I wake, I come into the nest (my writing room), click on a heater and turn on the PC. Then I go downstairs,push the button on the coffee machine and return to the nest. If my New York Rangers played the night before I check to see how they did. I then glance through email, do some chess problems, look at the homepages of NY Times and NPR, and during all this I may listen to Imus in the Morning. I then go downstairs, pour the first coffee of the day, return to the nest, have my morning coffee with Christine by phone or Skype or in person when she is here, and then hunker down to the day’s writing.

After my day’s writing is complete, I go downstairs, start up the fire in the wood stove and, once the fire is going, read.

Early morning, now and forever, my favorite time.

NY State DOH: Anything but Open

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If change under new Governor Andrew Cuomo includes a new spirit of ethics and openness, the message has yet to reach the state’s department of health.

As this blog noted in a January 11 post, the DOH’s response to a FOIL (freedom of information law) request for any and all DOH policies and procedures and emails regarding Medicaid Fair Hearings resulted in their sending only a slim training binder for fair hearing officers. If this is an honest and comprehensive response, it means the DOH has no fair hearing polices and procedures and no DOH employee has ever ever ever sent email discussing referencing fair hearings in any way. So, are we looking at incompetence, dishonesty, or a healthy dose of both?

Now, today, I received a letter from Robert “Jake” LoCicero, an attorney in the state’s Records Access Office. I’d sent in a FOIL request seeking the following linked to DOH officials Mary Ann Anglin and Maribeth Gnozzio.

– Any and all emails or other written forms of communication authored by Maribeth Gnozzio to any and all RRDCs in the state from January 2009 to the date of this request.
– Any and all emails or other written forms of communication authored by Mary Ann Anglin that were sent to or copied to Maribeth Gnozzio.

In today’s letter LoCicero let me know efforts are underway to gather the information but  they may want to charge me “an amount equal to the hourly salary attributed to the lowest paid agency employee who has the necessary skill required to prepare a copy of the requested record.” I already called the NY State Committee on Open Government. Over the years I’ve filed dozens of FOIL requests and the law says you can be charged no more than 25 cents a page.

Anyway, nice to know our department of health has thus far, despite our new governor, found a way to continue its secretive, insular, non-cooperative patterns of behavior.

Saving My Sister

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I love my sister. Nothing that has happened and nothing that will happen will ever change that. If she keeps drinking, she will die; from the sounds of it she may not have long.

Our father died on August 16, 1969. I was 15 and my sister (how I love the words, my sister) was 10 when, 16 weeks after he died, my mother placed me in reform school on a PINS (Person in Need of Supervision) Petition and subsequently disowned me. In those days a PINS often meant a family saying to the court, I don’t want him, you take him. While I lost my father and  family in a 16-week span, my sister lost her father and brother, a brutal event for any 10-year-old.

We would run into each other from time to time over the years. When my mother and I began to reconcile in the late 1970s, it was because I’d begun to visit my sister who shared a split-level home her. We came together for a short time when our mother committed suicide in August 1992.

My sister has three children, one boy and two girls. The boy is the oldest and at age 35 is a remarkable young man. Recently he reached out to me to let me know my sister is in bad shape. She can’t (won’t) stop drinking. Her body is breaking down (she’s 52), she has a hard time opening her hands and refuses help of any kind, including medical help.

I am a recovering alcoholic and know damned well you can’t make another person get sober or make someone choose life. I also know I can’t make someone discover their value and worth even though it’s there.  At  the center of who my sister is, behind the horror and dysfunction and pain, is a gloriously wonderful person.

She used to enjoy telling the following story about us. I’d been out of the family for a couple of years. She was 12 or 13. I was staying not far from where she lived with my mother and grandparents. One day not far from her house she was  being harassed and threatened by three boys when, as she describes it, “My brother came flying out of car, challenged them all to a fight, and they ran.”

I’ll try to save you again my precious sister, but I can’t do it without you.

Choosing Change

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There is nothing unique in saying change can be scary. It often is. Even when you choose it as I did recently when I resigned from the New York State Council on Independent Living, as remarkable a group of people as I’ve ever worked with.

The heartfelt commitment I witnessed in council members to the rights of people with disabilities to live independently, which means as equal citizens, is breathtaking. I hesitate to mention certain members because all deserve to be mentioned, but I’m going to do so anyway. The two who dazzled me most were and are Bruce Darling and Brad Williams, the former being the head of the remarkable Center for Disability Rights  and the latter being the executive director of NYSILC.

I resigned from the council for three reasons: it is time to focus on my writing, my stamina level is not what it once was, and, at age 57, I don’t know how many years I have left. There are books I am writing and want to write along with short stories, blog essays, and, well, anything else that strikes my fancy. I need to finish a memoir, I task I’ve let lag far too along with two novels and a non-fiction work about working in the field of disability, brain injury specifically, a book I’m calling It’s All About Respect.

Do I find the change I’ve chosen scary? You betcha. But there is an expression about fear I wrote some years back that I love: It’s okay to be afraid, don’t let it scare you. If we wait until the fear leaves before we make the changes we want, they’ll never get made.

Henry David Thoreau’s line was a great help to me in summoning the moxie to make this change. “Go confidently in the directions of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.” This goes for you too.

Me’n Theo

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As many of you know, it’s not easy to find a good roommate or housemate. Get stuck with the wrong one and the experience can be downright miserable. I got lucky with Theo.

Theo was already living here when I moved in. He lives upstairs from me.  Actually, he lives right over my writing room. We’re both possessed of private natures and keep to ourselves. For the most part he is an easy housemate to get along with. He does not play loud music. He does not have loud parties. I don’t think he’s had a visitor since I moved in some 12 weeks ago.

There are other pluses to Theo. He doesn’t mess with my food and I don’t mess with his. And while we don’t hang out or go for walks together, he loves the outdoors as much as I do. Sometimes I see him outside and he has remarkable energy. The cold never seems to bother him  probably because he’s an exercise nut. He runs everywhere! I don’t know where he gets the energy and stamina.

We’re both early risers. I like my early hours in my writing room, the nest, as I call it. It was during my first days here that I learned Theo does not like being bossed. I’d be in my writing room early in the morning trying to write or read and sure enough, Theo would wake up and start walking around non-stop right above me. Being sound-sensitive to begin with, listening to my housemate walking around non-stop in the morning right over my nest drove me nuts. He does not intimidate either. Yelling at him to shut up or pounding on the walls and ceiling to get him to quiet down had no effect whatsoever.

Curiously, I’ve come to enjoy hearing him in the morning. I admire his independent spirit, his penchant for privacy, and his industrious early morning routines. And, I’m proud to say, I’ve finally accepted that he does not like to be bossed. After all, I’ve never met a squirrel that does.