Long Island

edlowecolumns

Peggy said she doesn't want anybody but me (and the two dozen people who already know) to learn by her full name and pedigree that she is the star of this story. 
Well, all right; small price. 
When the <a href="/topics/Thanksgiving">Thanksgiving</a> festivities had ended and all the guests had repaired to their respective domains, Peggy refrigerated the perishables, loaded the dishwasher, straightened up the kitchen and aimed her happy but weary grandmotherly self toward the bathroom, where, she schemed, she would luxuriate in a long and indulgent bubble bath. 
Alas, the door to the bathroom was locked. "I mentally ticked off the departing guests and determined that no one had stowed away," she said. Then, after permitting the entire assemblage enough time to arrive safely at home, she began making her telephone calls. Learning specifically which guest had managed the idiosyncratic latch trick did not unlock the door, of course, but Peggy took some comfort in the successful detective work - though not as much comfort as a hot bath might have provided. And, since her house came equipped with a half-bath, as well, to serve for more dire and pressing needs, she retired for the evening pleased, if not pampered. 
On Friday she struggled until she determined that the bathroom door could be opened only from the inside. Therefore, it could not be opened, since nobody was in there. She removed the entire doorknob assembly, opened the door and returned the doorknob assembly to its proper place, though amended in a misdirectional way she did not immediately notice. She did notice that the door was not locking in a consistently predictable fashion. Sometimes it locked. Sometimes it didn't. She resolved to amend her own habits to accommodate the door. 
Old habits wield more influence than new ones, though, and one morning recently Peg shut the bathroom door behind her with a thud as ominous as it was thunderous. "It was locked," she said. Also, it was assembled inside out, and she was inside. "I didn't panic for about two minutes. The only tool in the bathroom was a toothbrush. I went to the window, an Andersen, crank-out type with scissor hinges. I had no way of getting through the 12-inch opening. Now, I began to panic." 
She learned that pedestrian traffic on her street in Northport was more sparse than she ever had suspected. She waved at every car. "Since the window is in the middle of the side of the house," she said, "nobody noticed. Nor did they notice when I tried yelling, `Help!' I then put out what I must have thought was an international distress signal for Woman Locked in a Bathroom: three feet of toilet paper. It didn't work. 
It was 7:30 a.m. Peg recalled her 90-year-old neighbor brought out and installed the little metal flag to his mailbox the same time every morning, 8:30 a.m. "Apparently," she said, "many years ago, some kids ran through the neighborhood taking all the little red flags off the mailboxes, so he responded by taking his mailbox flag in every night and putting it back out every morning. He's been doing it for years." 
Finally, at 8:30, she summoned him over. At first, he responded by looking back toward his own house and telling his wife what he was doing. When he realized his wife was not calling him, he shuffled over to Peg's bathroom window, stopping along the way to police the twigs that had fallen during the night and toss them into the woods across the street, thus keeping the side yards tidy between the houses. Peggy enjoys this detail only retrospectively. At the time of occurrence, she could not detect humor in it. 
She wanted her neighbor to go to her tool shed at the back of the house and check the bottoms of all the flower pots stored there for the one flower pot to which she had taped a spare key to her house. While he was gone, presumably foraging through the shed for the right flower pot, Peggy flagged down a 12-year-old boy and asked him the same favor. Neither of them found the key, and both returned to the bathroom window to say so. There, the older man valiantly demanded three times that the younger one relinquish the key he did not have. 
Peggy remained resolutely unamused by this scene, too, until much later, after she had prevailed upon the neighbor to go home and get a cell phone, which she borrowed until she located a rescuer who drove to her house, found the key, opened the bathroom door with a simple twist - yes, while laughing - and liberated her.

lowe shut case column 1-05

An open-and-shut case

On Sunday, Sept. 9, Brian Ronan drove his family to Woodlock <a href="/topics/Springs%2C_NY">Springs</a>, Pa., to visit the retired elevator mechanic who years ago lived next door to Ronan's wife, Mary Lou, in <a href="/topics/Queens_Village%2C_NY">Queens Village</a>, where the couple grew up. 
"The guy's name is Vinnie Arlotta," Ronan said, "and he knows I'm a golfer, and he knows the kids love his house because, besides being a beautiful house, he put an elevator in it. We spent the day there. The kids saw deer. They went to a place where they have, like, a carnival, and it was just a nice day. Coming back, we're going over the <a href="/topics/Throgs_Neck%2C_NY">Throgs Neck</a> Bridge, and it was 'quiet time' because I'd had it with the noise, and all of a sudden my middle son yells out, 'Dad, I can see the Twin Towers!' 
"I said, 'Yeah, we have to go there sometime soon.' I hadn't been there with my wife for years, maybe 15 or 16 years. We were dating around the time they opened up the <a href="/topics/Vietnam">Vietnam</a> Memorial on Water Street. That was the last time." Ronan, who lives in <a href="/topics/Plainview%2C_NY">Plainview</a>, decided on the spot that the next family trip with Mary Lou and the three boys - Matthew, 8, Nicholas, 6, and Michael 3 - would be to the <a href="/topics/World_Trade_Center">World Trade Center</a>. 
Sept. 11 was Ronan's last day on patrol in the <a href="/topics/Nassau_County_Police">Nassau County Police</a> Department's Second Precinct in <a href="/topics/Woodbury%2C_NY">Woodbury</a>. The following day, he was to start a new assignment as precinct clerk. History interrupted, and, instead, the department assigned Ronan and others to work in lower Manhattan, Ronan at 6th Avenue and Houston Street, near a firehouse that had lost seven of its members the day before. With him was "another 10 or 15 guys," he said. "No traffic of any sort was permitted past us." 
A lump lodged in Ronan's throat and swelled from time to time as he watched the faces of people staring blankly at the huge plumes of smoke billowing from the wreckage in the distance. He watched a parade of citizens bringing dry socks to the firehouse, and undershirts, and flowers, and bottled drinks, and messages of love, honor and sympathy, all day long. 
"And so much food," he said, "it had to be diverted to a nearby church." On occasion, he said, "people with the saddest faces thanked us for our heroism. We were being honored for sacrifices others had made. Condolences were offered to us to extend to the firefighters. One set up a makeshift memorial from all the flowers they received. It was enough to break anyone's heart." 
Ronan left his post for an hour to escort two women to neighboring apartments within the perimeter. They wanted to try to retrieve their cats. The sky grew darker and the ash thicker as they neared the buildings. They entered the two apartments in total darkness and managed to retrieve the three cats. The one woman has since written twice to Ronan, thanking him. 
"Finding solace for even one person was an accomplishment that day," he said. "As we walked back to our bus [to <a href="/topics/Long_Island%2C_NY">Long Island</a>], we were treated like heroes from a throng of cheering onlookers. I didn't feel much like a hero, and the lump wasn't going away." 
Ronan had that Friday off. He needed to go back, and he wanted to be nearer The Pile and to do work that felt more useful. He wore boots and brought a shovel. <a href="/topics/Downtown%2C_NY">Downtown</a>, he encountered a construction worker he knew as a former resident of <a href="/topics/Plainview%2C_NY">Plainview</a>. 
"I was glad he appeared out of nowhere," Ronan said, "because as you get closer, you get more skeptical about going there. But he had worked a lot in that area, and he knew all those buildings by name. He saw them the way you see faces. He was glad to see me, too, because I could credential my way into places. We spent eight hours together, cleaning up Liberty Park, forming a chain to relocate medical supplies and finally helping clean up around The Pile. I have a close friend who is a firefighter who has since been there a lot. I don't know how he does it. I spent one day. I really feel bad for him. 
"But while I was there, something shiny caught my eye. I dug it out of the ash to see that it was a flat, round, Christmas ornament. On the front is a picture of the <a href="/topics/World_Trade_Center">World Trade Center</a> behind the Statue of Liberty. The plastic coating on the front is all broken and embedded with ash. I cleaned it off a little and stuck it in my pocket. It's now prominently displayed on my Christmas tree. When I look at it, I wonder who it belonged to, on whose tree it hung. The lump still forms in my throat when I read the inscription on the other side. It reads: 'World Trade Center, <a href="/topics/New_York%2C_NY">New York</a>, Peace on Earth.'"

News

LILOWE04

Glimmer of Hope In WTC Rubble

CHRISTMAS shopping in the city seemed like a more exciting idea, somehow, than trudging about the local mall, so Jean Ann Gottsch recruited her friend, Clarice Doernte, and the two West Islip women headed for the garment district. 
Mrs. Doernte brought along her 4-year-old son, Walther, who, considering his immeasurable unconcern about the relative excellence of particular fabrics, colors, cuts, styles or prices, exhibited exemplary behavior throughout the busy morning. To reward Walther for patience and fortitude above and beyond the call of pre-schooler duty, the women swallowed their culinary prejudices and chose a metropolitan eatery on what they assumed to be a 4-year-old boy's criteria. They would lunch at a <a href="/topics/McDonald%27s">McDonald's</a> restaurant. 
After the women had purchased their preheated packages of burgers and fries, and slid into one of the brightly colored booths, they were startled by an oddly dressed old woman, who asked bluntly if she could sit down with them. Instinctively, the two women nodded that, yes, she certainly could, though Mrs. Gottsch anxiously glanced around to determine if other booths were available. They were, which made Mrs. Gottsch nervous. 
The old woman's appearance made Mrs. Gottsch more nervous. She wore a brown leather jacket, brown slacks cut for a man (and a large man, at that) and brown men's shoes. She carried three large, wrinkled shopping bags. She seemed to be in her late 60s, and she seemed impoverished, except for her hair. Bleached an incongruously bright blonde, her hair had obviously been professionally coiffed, and recently. Also, several of the old woman's teeth were capped with gold. 
The old woman's hands, Mrs. Gottsch said, were grotesque, terribly deformed, gnarled and crippled. Seated across from the old woman, Mrs.Doernte said later that from the moment the old woman sat down, all she could smell was soap. 
The old woman never looked directly into the eyes of either of the West Islip women, but she waited no more than a minute to address Walther directly. Reaching into one of her shopping bags, she asked the boy what he knew about Santa Claus. "See, I'm a woman Santa," she said softly. "I wear my costume inside. Inside. Here, I have something for you." 
Mrs. Gottsch and Mrs. Doernte looked at each other. Mrs. Gottsch said later that would not have blamed Mrs. Doernte for leaving that very moment, or, for that matter, any other moment. But they stayed. 
Groping in apparent pain, the old woman extracted from the shopping bag a small, clear plastic, sandwich bag filled with dollar bills and coins; maybe $10 worth, Mrs. Gotsch guessed. The old woman opened it slowly, all the while excusing herself and begging pardon for her awful hands. "I know they're deformed," she said to the boy. "But don't look at them. You look at my money, and you choose a dollar for yourself. You'll probably like the coins better. You want four quarters?" Walther indicated that he did. "See, this is all a part of the spirit of giving," she told Walther. "Santa comes alive during the last part of the year. Only then. The rest of the time, he sleeps, him and his reindeer." 
Carefully, Walther chose his four quarters. The old woman then asked him to help put the rest back. "See, my fingers are deformed and I can't open the bag so well," she said. She made a strange analogy between herself and President Reagan. "See, I'm a lady Santa Claus. I'm like the President. He used to be a cowboy, but now, he's president. So, you have to be liberal in your thinking. Do you know what `liberal' means?" 
"No," Walther said. 
"Well, neither do I. But it sounds all right, doesn't it. Are you sure you want the coins and not the dollar bill?" 
Walther was sure. 
"I have something else for you," she said, as Walther's mother and her friend watched, silently. "It's a treasure chest. But you have to use your imagination. If you just look at it, it's a soap dish, but it doesn't have to be." 
She took out a yellow, plastic soap dish wrapped in clear plastic. She asked Walther to open it. He did; the dish was empty. "You can put cotton in it and pretend it's anything you want it to be," she said. Walther said, "Thank you." 
"Thank you," the old woman answered. "Thank you very much. I love you." 
Then she got up and left.

lowe column claus 1-05

A shopping bag Santa Claus

The car directly in front of Charles Beyer's white van stopped at the red light at a Long Beach intersection; so, naturally, Beyer stopped behind it. He glanced into the side-mounted, rear view mirror and saw a Buick barreling straight for him, clearly unable to avoid slamming into the back of the van. Beyer pressed his right foot down hard on the brake pedal, braced himself and winced when he felt the impact. 
He composed himself, looked around, determined himself intact and got out to see how the driver of the Buick had fared. Just then, another car screeched to a halt. Its enraged operator jumped out of the car, ran for the Buick, reached in and extracted the ignition keys. A police officer arrived next. The man who ripped the car keys out of the Buick explained to Beyer that the Buick had first smashed into his car, then swerved into a woman pedestrian who was apparently killed on impact, then continued down the road to the rear of Beyer's van. The man with the keys had commandeered another car to chase the Buick. 
Meanwhile, as Beyer listened, the Buick driver, whose head had slammed into the Buick's windshield, stumbled around the street, bellowing to the police officer that Beyer had stopped short in front of him without affording the warning customarily provided by working brake lights. On examination, however, and despite the van's extensive damages, the brake lights worked. The police officer arrested the Buick driver, initially charging him with leaving the scene of an accident, and, according to the accident reports filed later that day, took him to a local hospital for observation, treatment and a Breathalyzer test. 
Two weeks later, Beyer returned home from work, switched on his answering machine and heard the recorded voice of his insurance agent convey the abrupt message: "Nice accident. Call me in three years." Beyer telephoned the agent and deduced after a bizarre conversation that when police personnel fed the accident report information into the state's computer system, someone had switched the names of the Buick operator and the van operator. Though the other driver was charged in the death of the woman, Beyer was now listed as having been involved in three accidents on the same day, including one that resulted in a pedestrian death; as having left the scene of two of the accidents; and as having driven a motor vehicle while measurably intoxicated. He had also inherited warrants for arrest for failure to respond to a series of traffic summonses. 
Beyer called his father, Stanley, a Manhattan lawyer. Stanley listened to the story, mulled over its vast, bureaucratic implications and then told his son that he was - in one monosyllabic, herein-unprintable, Anglo-Saxon euphemism - headed for discomfort, inconvenience and frustration. The father mapped out a tedious but unavoidable strategy for the son to follow. 
First, Beyer drove to the precinct to obtain a copy of the police report. It was no longer at the precinct but had been entered into the computer at police headquarters. He drove to Mineola, where he learned that he could not obtain a copy, though he could read a microfilmed version on screen. For a printed copy, he had to drive to an- other building in Mineola and pay $5. He did. Sure enough, the police report showed that he was at fault in three, nearly simultaneous accidents, drunk, and responsible for a pedestrian death. He was also listed as having not responded to a summons for driving at 70 miles per hour in a 45-m.p.h. zone, answerable, now, in Hauppauge. He drove to Hauppauge and stood on line until a clerk told him that he could only plead guilty at that office and pay a fine. If he wanted to plead not guilty, he would have to appear in Queens, where the summons had been issued. He drove to Lefrak City and after filling out three not-guilty forms for three separate violations and standing on three lines and waiting in court for more than an hour, he appeared before Administrative Law Judge <a href="/topics/Richard_Kramer">Richard Kramer</a>, whom Beyer described as the "nicest man in the world." <a href="/topics/Richard_Kramer">Kramer</a> laughed through Beyer's tale and then stamped every item "Dismissed." Next, Beyer drove to the City of Long Beach to clear up another moving violation, which a sympathetic Judge Jack Mackston dismissed, "in the interests of justice." 
Finally, having cleared up all the violations mistakenly attributed to his driving record, Beyer drove to the Motor Vehicle Department office in Westbury to present the evidence that would permit the department to amend its computer entries filed under Beyer's name. He stood on line and eventually appeared before an examiner who searched the mind of the computer and discovered that Charles Beyer was no longer listed in the State of New York as possessing or having ever possessed a license. Beyer then produced his driver's license as proof of its, and his, existence. "I'm sorry," the clerk said. "I know it's bureaucracy in motion, but you'll have to reapply and retake the written test and the road test, too."

lowe comp crash column 1-05

Victim of a computer crash

Last autumn, the tiny neighborhood behind Greta Engstrom's two-car garage gave way to suburban renewal and disappeared entirely. Developers who bought the land evicted the inhabitants and demolished their dilapidated homes. A steakhouse and an office building rose on the former site of the local candy store and barbershop. 
Engstrom, whose property falls within the boundaries of the incorporated Village of Thomaston, in the <a href="/topics/Great_Neck%2C_NY">Great Neck</a> school and park districts, had lived in her Valley View Road house for 15 years when the neighborhood behind her garage disappeared. In all that time, and certainly since her husband died, she had never painted the back of her two-car garage, which faced the homes of the poor people and which, in the absence of those homes, was suddenly exposed to view from Northern Boulevard. 
"Before they pushed these people out," Engstrom said, "I was the best house in the worst neighborhood. Now, suddenly, I'm the worst house in the best neighborhood. My property is on the borderline between <a href="/topics/Great_Neck%2C_NY">Great Neck</a> and <a href="/topics/Manhasset%2C_NY">Manhasset</a>. Once, I looked at the map, and the borderline seemed to me to be drawn around the homes of white people and black people. I've always felt that if I were black, my house would be in <a href="/topics/Manhasset%2C_NY">Manhasset</a>. 
"Anyway, after they knocked down the neighborhood and exposed my garage, I felt obligated to do something. From the road, my garage looked like a slum. Also, I got angry whenever I looked out and saw what they did to these people's lives. I sat thinking and thinking to figure how I could fix up the garage and say something, too." 
The unusually complicated thinking process Engstrom employed in answering the ordinarily ordinary question of how, exactly, to paint the backside of a garage stemmed from her age, background and education. She is 38, a child of the turbulent 1960s. She grew up in the <a href="/topics/The_Bronx%2C_NY">Bronx</a>, declined a college education, moved to <a href="/topics/Long_Island%2C_NY">Long Island</a> and married a man five years her senior who owned a burglar alarm business. Engstrom assumed she would settle into a typical, suburban, family lifestyle, but her husband died of cancer five years ago, leaving her with an 8-year-old daughter and no guarantees for the future. 
Engstrom entered the job market and soon learned that employers tended to shy away from widowed mothers of small children, partly because of natural inclination to choose, when their loyalties were tested, to tend to their children's needs before the employer's. 
"I tried domestic work for a while," Engstrom said, "but I felt I wasn't going to go anywhere without an education. So, when I became eligible for Social Security, I decided to go to school, with the idea of getting a good job at the end of my studies. Well, I fell into the study of philosophy. I fell in love with it, with, for instance, Plato's dedication to education. I stuck with it and after five years, I graduated with honors, got the highest academic achievement in my class, and became just as eligible to tend bar or drive a cab as I was before." 
Engstrom saw painting the garage as her first job as a philosopher. "We've lost a lot of our idealism," she said. "I really wanted to say something on the back of that garage. With the `Hands Across America' campaign and the coming celebration of Lady Liberty, I wanted to make the point that if we stick together as Americans, we can accomplish anything." Engstrom decided that she would paint a mural: red and white vertical stripes under white stars on a blue field, stars whose extended arms touched symbolically. In the center, she would show the face of the Statue of Liberty behind bars, a tear running down her cheek, and she would paint a message graffiti-style, over the stripes: "Save Liberty - Feed Americans." 
"When I first started," Engstrom recalled, "my neighbors were so happy I was painting the garage they were smiling and greeting me all the time. Every day, they saw me painting and painting, and people started beeping the horn to say hello, until they saw the red and white stripes. Eventually they stopped and asked me what I was doing, and I got very favorable replies. The whole job took me 42 hours over six months. 
"It was important to me that the stars touch `hands,' because that was the statement I wanted to make. I was originally going to do it freehand and just make them touch, but I had all my friends over, insisting that the angle of a true star's arms were something like 76 degrees and trying to figure out how to make perfect stars and still make them touch. They made protractors, and we went up and down the ladder again and again, making the arms higher, lower, higher, lower; and each time it came out wrong. They were so tied up in the mechanics, they couldn't understand the concept. These points had to touch. 
"Finally, we threw down the protractors and went to freehand. They're not true stars now; the arms are lower. They're not all perfect; they're not exactly right. But it's the idea behind it. The Lady Liberty face I took off a Grand Union shopping bag and a friend helped me draw it. Everyone liked it until I put the graffiti on it. Neighbors at first hated it, and then came by and said, `Well, I guess I see what you mean,' but they couldn't undertand why I didn't paint the letters neatly. I said, `Well, then maybe you wouldn't have read it." 
Recently, an inspector for the Village of Thomaston asked Engstrom to repaint the back of the garage, because, he said, residents had complained about it. "I told him, `You can't even see it from Thomaston,' " she said. ` "You have to stand in Manhasset to see it. If people in Manhasset have a problem with it, then let the officials from Manhasset complain about it.' "

lowe column brush law 1-05

An artistic brush with the law

A little more than two years ago, Todd Sickler, then 29, became extremely ill, practically overnight. A former boatyard laborerturned cabdriver, he suffered sudden and violent intestinal problems that during the course of an evening resulted in his hemorrhaging, as well. Barbara Bartels, the woman with whom Sickler was sharing a <a href="/topics/Ronkonkoma%2C_NY">Ronkonkoma</a> apartment, took him to a doctor who recommended that he be immediately admitted to the emergency ward of St. John's Hospital in <a href="/topics/Smithtown%2C_NY">Smithtown</a>. 
There, doctors put Sickler on intravenous feeding, tested him for various possible illnesses, prescribed different medications and eventually diagnosed him as having severe ulcerated colitis. After two months in the hospital and no discernible improvement, doctors recommended that Sickler be transferred to <a href="/topics/Mount_Sinai%2C_NY">Mount Sinai</a> Hospital in <a href="/topics/New_York%2C_NY">New York</a>, for major surgery. 
It looked to Barbara Bartels as if Sickler might die. "In fact, the doctors pretty much told me that he was just about dead," she said. 
Bartels had known Sickler since 1973, when she was 14 years old and he was 16. She and her friends from <a href="/topics/Ronkonkoma%2C_NY">Ronkonkoma</a> met him and other <a href="/topics/Centereach%2C_NY">Centereach</a> teens in the Smith Haven Mall. They dated on and off for 10 years, then moved in together. In 1984, a fire gutted their apartment and destroyed everything they owned; and between then and the day Sickler took ill, Sickler worked doubly hard to earn the money for replacement furniture and clothing for both of them. 
Fearing that Sickler might not survive the surgery at <a href="/topics/Mount_Sinai%2C_NY">Mount Sinai</a>, the couple were married in a special ceremony in his room at St. John's Hospital just before he was to be transferred. In May, surgeons at Mount Sinai performed a total ileostomy on Sickler, removing his rectum, his colon and his large intestine. He spent another two months in Mount Sinai before being discharged. His wife stayed in the room with him 24 hours a day for the entire period. 
"After that, he was bedridden for a couple of months," said Barbara Sickler, "but that operation in Mount Sinai saved his life. I had to teach him how to talk again, and how to eat and how to cope with his appliance. He was still only ninety-nine pounds, and he's six feet tall. I built him back up slowly. When he first got out of bed, he took two steps a day for a while, and then four, and then he began to build himself back up. In October, 1985, we had a wedding ceremony in a church in <a href="/topics/Central_Islip%2C_NY">Central Islip</a>, St. John of God. Things looked like they might be getting better." 
Nearly a year later, in September, 1986, Sickler had to return to Mount Sinai for what his wife described as "cleanup" surgery. "His rectal cavity had never completely healed and had in fact become infected," she said. "The morning of the operation, which was scheduled for noon, he was in Mount Sinai being readied for the operation, and my parents were driving me into the city, when a van jumped the median on Veterans Highway and crossed in front of us. We hit right into it. My mother, Marie Bartels, was hurt pretty bad, and so was my mother-in-law, Roberta Sickler. I was admitted a few days later and spent about ten days in traction. I still wear a back brace and a neck brace. 
"Meanwhile, there was a problem with my husband's surgery. The doctors said they severed his urethra and part of his prostate. It was an accident, or a mistake, whatever. They couldn't see well because the whole area was infected tissues. Everything is an emergency with him. He was just back in the emergency ward of St. John's last week, hemorrhaging again. I used to take care of him, but now, there's a lot I can't do. And now, we're at the point where his body is failing, and his urethra is not healing," said Barbara Sickler. "We called the Mayo clinic, and they said they never heard of a case like this. The doctors at Mount Sinai said they've only seen three cases, but those cases didn't have the added complications." 
Sickler's urologist, Dr. Herbert Weber, of Manhattan, who came into the case after the last operation at Mount Sinai, told the Sicklers that if anyone could help him at all, it would be Dr. Charles J. Devine Jr., chairman of the Department of Urology at the Eastern <a href="/topics/Virginia">Virginia</a> Medical School in Norfolk, Va., a renowned specialist in urethroplasty, or reconstruction of the urethra through plastic surgery. Devine's secretary yesterday confirmed that he had corre- sponded at length with Dr. Weber regarding Sickler's case, and that Sickler has an appointment to see Devine on Aug. 28. 
The Sicklers plan to fly to Norfolk on Aug. 27, having used credit cards to buy tickets they don't know that they will ever be able to afford. Barbara Sickler, a former dental assistant, receives $120 a month in disability payments as a result of the automobile accident, and her medical bills are covered. Sickler gets $390 a month in Social Security Disability, and much of his medical costs are not covered. 
"We have a lot of medical bills outstanding," she said, "and we just can't pay them. We're starting to get collection agency notices now. We don't know where we're going to stay in Norfolk, or how we're going to pay for any of it, but it's our only hope for him to ever get fixed. It's our only hope."

lowe adversity hope 1-05

Lives of adversity and hope

THE PRINCIPALS in this tale wish to keep their names out of the public eye for fear of further damage to their child's emotional well-being. The perpetrators - if they are that - would claim, if they were not denying every accusation, that they were protecting their child's physical well-being. Ancillary characters range from righteous bureaucrats to ignorant humans. 
There is no proving either side of the story; no evidence exists save testimony in dispute. I happen to believe the one side, but I have only my instinct to offer as weight. 
All the names have been changed by me. 
Ann and Gene, who grew up in <a href="/topics/Babylon%2C_NY">Babylon</a> Town, in <a href="/topics/Suffolk_County%2C_NY">Suffolk</a> County, now live in <a href="/topics/Nassau_County%2C_NY">Nassau</a> County. Last year they sent their then-3-year-old son, Patrick, to a private nursery school in a community adjacent to their own. They learned of the nursery school through Ann's friend and neighbor, Elizabeth, whose mother works at the nursery school. Elizabeth's son, Carl, regularly plays with Patrick. 
Last year, Elizabeth's mother helped Ann register Patrick at the school and offered Ann invaluable advice about its personnel. The two boys would have been in the same nursery school class last year, but Patrick, who has a speech impediment, was seeing a therapist in the mornings, so his mother enrolled him in the school's afternoon session. Carl attended school in the mornings. Ann had hoped that beginning last month, Patrick would attend the morning session with Carl. 
In February, just after the beginning of Patrick's second semester at the nursery school, Ann and Gene received the disturbing news that Gene's brother, Robert, who had been living near Washington, D. C., had tested positive for the HIV virus. No warnings or warning signs heralded the shocking news. Robert suddenly was in the intensive-care unit of a hospital. He had contracted a virulent strain of pneumonia common to AIDS patients and was diagnosed as having AIDS. 
Ann and Gene had to fly to the Washington / <a href="/topics/Maryland">Maryland</a> area to visit Robert. Ann told Elizabeth where they were going and why. "Nobody down there believes that Robert is going to live," Ann said to her close friend, whose next question haunted Ann for weeks and puzzled her. "Then why are you going?" Elizabeth had asked. 
Miraculously, Robert survived the pneumonia, but he was too weak to work or otherwise to support himself. So, with the help of his family, Robert moved back to <a href="/topics/Long_Island%2C_NY">Long Island</a>, to live with his parents in <a href="/topics/Babylon%2C_NY">Babylon</a>. 
Worried about Robert's mental and emotional well-being as well as his physical health, and struggling with the prototypical, child-care dilemma common to working parents of young children, Ann and Gene asked Robert if he would babysit for them. They needed him particularly during weekday mornings, when Gene was working and Ann, a night-shift nurse, most required uninterrupted rest. Robert was happy to take the job. 
Having confided in Elizabeth when Robert first was diagnosed, Ann now asked Elizabeth - more or less as a pro forma courtesy - if she and her husband would mind if the boys continued to play together every day, as they had done all year. 
"That marked the beginning of the end of our relationship," Ann recalled. Ann said that Elizabeth said she would check first with her pediatrician. The pediatrician then told Elizabeth, she phoned Ann to say, that if other children were to play with Patrick, they would be putting themselves at risk of contracting the AIDS virus. 
"The fact that my son didn't have AIDS seemed to have nothing at all to do with it," Ann said. 
To Ann's further surprise, Elizabeth, who did not like the idea of Robert's babysitting in the first place, now said she was no longer sure that the boys should play together in the afternoons. Ann then said she would fire her husband's brother as a babysitter to accommodate Elizabeth's trepidations regarding Robert's having the AIDS virus. 
Elizabeth said, "Well, you're still going to see him, right?" 
"See him?" asked Ann. "Of course we're going to see him. He's Gene's brother." 
"Obviously," Elizabeth said, "I couldn't ask you to not do that." 
"In other words," ventured Ann, "you're ending our friendship." 
"Well, I couldn't ask you to not do that." 
Ann said, "Goodbye" and hung up the phone. 
"These were friends, people we went away on vacation with," she said angrily. 
Next, Ann received a call from the director of the nursery school, who said she would like to meet with Ann and Gene. Ann said, "I'm sure I know what this is about, and there's nothing to discuss." 
The director insisted, and they met. The director suggested strongly that Ann and Gene were irresponsible as parents to allow contact between Patrick and his uncle. They were putting their child at risk to contract AIDS. Ann and Gene were appalled and said so. In a subsequent conversation, the director suggested that " . . . it would be best if we found another school for our son," Ann said. 
Ann called a lawyer. The lawyer wrote a strongly worded letter warning the director against discrimination. The director called the lawyer and said that of course Patrick could attend school. No one ever had said he could not. No one ever had said a word about a family member's HIV status. 
It later turned out, after several guarded exchanges, that there simply was no room available for Patrick in the morning session. He could attend the afternoon session, as he had the year before. Ann and Gene felt they had gotten the message. They found another nursery school for Patrick.

lowe friendship AIDS 1-05

A friendship fractured by AIDS

SUSAN ALREADY had seen <a href="/topics/Billy_Joel">Billy Joel</a>'s concert at Madison Square Garden, but from a vantage point better suited for inspecting ceiling stains, so when her friend Gail mentioned she had access to <a href="/topics/Nassau_Coliseum">Nassau Coliseum</a> concert tickets where, Gail said, ". . . we'll pretty much be in <a href="/topics/Billy_Joel">Billy Joel</a>'s face," Susan said, "Count me in." 
They met in <a href="/topics/East_Meadow%2C_NY">East Meadow</a> on a wintry Saturday night. The party consisted of eight Long Islanders, the youngest from the (<a href="/topics/Lynbrook%2C_NY">Lynbrook</a>) high school graduating class of 1963. Among them were a lawyer, a psychologist, a physician, a school nurse, an operating room nurse and a few teachers. Armed with their $75 tickets, they took seats three rows from the railing and behind the only immediately visible piano. "It appeared that Billy Joel and the band would have their backs to us," recalled Susan. "But having been to the Garden, I know that he works with two pianos. A second piano comes up through the floor, so that sometimes he's maybe ten feet away from us. There's a catwalk in back of the piano, and when he leaves the piano he walks the catwalk, talks to the people and is just, like, right there. In the Garden, all I could see was this little guy in a black suit banging on the piano. So I am really ready for this. I'm gonna love this. 
"In the row in front of us is this guy in his twenties, clean-cut guy, with his girlfriend, who is sitting in front of Gail. This girl is getting ready for the time of her life. She's whooping and hollering, waving her arms. Nothing is even happening yet, and she is gettin' ready, revvin' her engines. The row directly in front of them is the first row, with the railing next. And those people also are sort of neatly dressed, sort of preppy-looking people, ready to enjoy themselves. This is a Billy Joel crowd. This is not like a heavy-metal crowd, where the people in the parking lot scare the hell out of you. Directly in front of this whooping, hollering girl and her boyfriend is this quiet, sort of stout guy, a little corpulent, nice face, nicely dressed, kind of leaning back in his chair, getting comfortable, settling in for the performance. The lights go out. Everything goes black. All of sudden, there he is, and the place goes wild. It was the best. The people are between ten and seventy, different people enjoying it different ways. Some jump up and down and know the words to every song. Others just sit there and enjoy the musicianship and not carry on, and some enjoy watching the other people enjoy the concert. I noticed also that the corpulent, neatly dressed gentleman was enjoying the concert the same way I was, even more so, almost as if he were a musician himself. He never got up, never got enthusiastic the way other people were, but he had a grin from ear to ear. 
"But all of a sudden, at one point, he turns around, over his right shoulder, to the girl in front of Gail, the one who was whooping and hollering, and he has ahold of her left arm, and he's pulling her toward him and yelling something at her. Gail heard it. He said, `If you scream in my ear like that one more time, I'm gonna take you and throw you right over this railing!' Well, now the boyfriend is up and in the guy's face. The language is from the street, bleeping this and bleeping that, and the girl is the leader of the bleeps. She's, like, 'You fat bleep! I'll bleeping scream as bleeping loud as I bleeping want, you bleep! You bleeping keep your bleeping hands to your bleeping self! Don't you bleeping put your bleeping hands on me again!' 
"The boyfriend is screaming the same way. Meanwhile, Billy Joel has finished the song and is now sitting down and calmly talking to the audience, while this madness is going on fifteen feet behind him. He's talking about growing up on the Island, dating girls on the South Shore and the North Shore, doing his first recording session around the corner in <a href="/topics/East_Meadow%2C_NY">East Meadow</a>, while this thing, and this screaming is happening right behind him, and in front of us. I, of course, am convinced that any second now, Billy Joel is going to stop talking, turn around, look directly at me and say, `Yo, Susan, what's the problem? Can't you shut these people up?' 
"Next, a security guard in a yellow shirt comes with a security guard in a blue shirt, and they ask the big guy to come with them, and they take him and talk to him. The girl is piping mad. She and the boyfriend recount the entire incident, again and again, with the bleeps. `You bleeping believe that bleeping guy? He bleeping grabbed my bleeping arm! Bleep, bleep bleep.' 
"The big guy comes back. The concert continues. She's whooping and hollering and carrying on. The boyfriend lights up a cigarette and is now on red alert. Every time she screams, he glares at the big guy in front. The whole rest of the concert, he watches this big guy; the big guy just watches Billy Joel. She goes to the ladies room; the boyfriend watches the big guy. The boyfriend is not at the concert any more. He's on Big Guy watch. 
"Toward the end of the concert, the band is having a great time. Everybody's enjoying themselves. The drummer starts tossing drumsticks into the crowd. People are going nuts. I'm daydreaming about catching one of these things and bringing it home to my kids, who would have to cut it in four pieces, when the drummer turns around and flips a stick toward us. All hands go up. The whooping-bleeping girl is, like, leaning over the big guy, reaching, and the big guy's hand goes up, and guess who catches the stick? Him. And I can see his expression. He's just on the verge of turning around and handing the stick to the girl, when the girl turns to the boyfriend and says, "You bleeping believe that? The fat guy got it!' 
"And the big guy turns back around, closes his eyes, hangs on to the stick and grins."

lowe talk drumstick 1-05

Talk softly or carry a drumstick

Dilg (rhymes with bilge) blew in and out of town this week, arriving from <a href="/topics/Montana">Montana</a> and departing today for St. Croix. I am recovering from the experience. 
Ron Dilg and I began our commiserative acquaintanceship many years ago, when he worked with self-tortured reluctance as an artist in the newspaper's promotion department, whose corporate atmosphere appealed to his passion for liberty the way I imagine a child's jar delights a firefly trapped inside it. 
In those years, I served as coffee-machine confessor, hearing his daily agonies and even understanding them, probably because the minor stockholders of my brain had campaigned at every annual meditation to wrest me from my respectable responsibilities and drop me at a hidden studio-loft, there to restart life without health insurance coverage or a retirement plan. I never acquiesced. 
To assuage my temptations and still keep my collars buttoned-down and my children in electronic toys, I visited with a liturgical regularity local jazz clubs, acoustical bistros and artists' hideouts, always keeping in loose touch with the itinerant talents whose sole concession to my world was to keep in their possession one necktie and a sport jacket, for funerals. Over the years, I have offered respect and great affection to a circle of societal outsiders that has included musicians of every stripe (some giants of jazz), a former priest, horse-trading marine mechanics, minor criminals, clam poachers, an old printmaker who probably is dead, a leather-crafter who despite notices might not be, and Dilg. 
A sketch artist, a watercolorist, lately a sculptor in bronze, and a guitar-mandolin-accordion-playing, bluegrass singer, Dilg tried to influence the voting in my head and periodically sent me symbolic messages, like a 60-million-year-old, fossilized, hard-shell clam he found in a <a href="/topics/Montana">Montana</a> valley that evidently once hosted ocean life, and hand-captioned sketches from St. Croix, in the <a href="/topics/Virgin_Islands">Virgin Islands</a>, where he spent last winter playing music, designing a villa for an architect, of all people, and marveling at a tide that never rose or fell, because of its location in the middle of the gravitational bathtub. 
He gets me every time with stories. Sunday night I took notes on a napkin at a place called Someplace Else in Farmingdale; Tuesday night, at Tupelo Honey in Sea Cliff. The notes I can read tell how Dilg and his sons, Casey, then 19, and Jamie, then 8, were driving from Jackson, Wyo., to Cook City, Mont., last summer for a bluegrass gig at the Miner's Saloon, when Jamie began to suffer what his father called a "Cookie Monster Attack." Dilg pulled the arthritic old <a href="/topics/Subaru">Subaru</a> off to the "shoulder" of a dirt road. He got out, rummaged through the duct-taped-constructed luggage for a package of cookies and soothed the growling stomach of his boy. 
When he arrived at the venue, Dilg discovered that his 1957 Gibson F-5 mandolin was not in the back of the car, where it was supposed to be. Responding to Dilg's initial spasms of indignation and horror, the good citizens of Cook City lit out en masse in search of the purloined mandolin and the presumed thief, while Dilg telephoned (Dobro) Dick Diloff, a colleague minstrel who had not yet left their home camp in Livingston. Diloff brought the "other" mandolin, a 1917 Gibson F-2 model. As the evening wore on, and Dilg began to replay the events of the day on the road, he realized that the F-5 mandolin might have jumped out of the back of the <a href="/topics/Subaru">Subaru</a> and set itself down on the side of the dirt road, to better allow Dilg to rummage for cookies. Dilg locked onto the memory of the spot in the valley where he had stopped but declined the opportunity to call off any Cook City citizens' search. He was not going to reveal that he might have just left the $3,000 instrument along the vast roadside of the American West. 
He drove back to the valley site two days later. The Gibson was gone. "Hard moment," he said. "It was like, `You blew it, pal. Bye-bye.' I was to the point where I could go into an emotional conundrum about it or just let her go. I remembered an old cowboy who had found his wife with another man. He shook his head and looked at me and said, `I'm sending her down the road like an old cow, Ron.' So, I'd just lost my beautiful mandolin. Down the road, like an old cow. Let's move on." 
Six months later, Dilg was visiting Dobro Dick in Livingston, when his brother, Peter Dilg, called from Baldwin. "Ronnie," Peter said, "are you missing something?" 
A woman from <a href="/topics/Illinois">Illinois</a> had found the thing and eventually brought it to a National Park Ranger who had rifled through the notes in the case and found the address of Peter's business, The Baldwin Antiques Centre. "I knew instantly what he was talking about," said Ron, brandishing the instrument. "This old cow had a nose of its own; got back here through one of those great connective tissues that you find in life. I have since visited the park ranger, and I'm sending a cassette tape to the <a href="/topics/Illinois">Illinois</a> lady, so she can hear what this thing sounds like."

lowe tune column 1-05

Following one's own tune

THE LEADING characters herein do not want to be identified. 
Their names are replacement names. 
When Amy was 16, and living in a fairly exclusive North Shore community, her parents sent her to a summer camp to work as a junior counselor without revealing that her 61-year-old father had been diagnosed with a fatal disease and was dying. 
Later in the summer, when she learned that her father would not be coming on visiting day, Amy strode off into the woods and, using a pen knife, angrily carved an "X" into her left forearm. She does not remember why, but she bears the scar. 
Amy's father died that summer. 
The following winter, in 1976, Amy became pregnant. She and Adam, the father of her child, determined that they would keep the baby and endure whatever the difficulty. Adam drove her to the hospital in late July. She delivered a boy she named David. 
"We thought I was going home," Amy said. "But they put me out with <a href="/topics/Valium">Valium</a> and Demerol. While I was unconscious, my mother and the adoption agency she had contacted came to the hospital and took my baby. The hospital was aware. They let it happen. 
"When I woke up and learned what happened, I went to the agency. They said it was too late. The baby already was adopted. The birth father never signed any papers, and neither did I. From what I learned years later, even if you're 16 years old, you still have to sign some kind of paper. I was 17. But, we didn't know. We lived in a town where nobody even talked about divorce, let alone anybody's teenage kid having a child out of wedlock. Even if it happened, it didn't happen, if you know what I mean. They just wanted me to disappear. When I came home, my mother said to me, 'It's over. It's done. Now you can forget about it.' 
"I walked out of the house," Amy said, "and I started drinking. My mother had stolen my life. She stole my heart, and she stole my life. I bottomed out for years after that. Adam couldn't stand what was happening to me. We split up. He's around. I tried finding him once. "But in the meantime, I went from the typical suburban teen to the typical-what-I went the low road. I worked in topless bars. I was drinking all the time. I had four suicide attempts. I can clearly remember the last one: In 1988, I slit my wrists and wound up in Mather Memorial Hospital. They sent me to a staff psychiatrist there. Before, everyone I had ever told about my baby told me to forget about him. This one said to me, 'If you continue to self-destruct like this, you'll make sure you'll never find your son or meet him again.' I can't explain why-it seems so simple and common knowledge now-but it had never occurred to me that I might be able to search and find my son. With one statement, one sentence, this staff psychiatrist gave me hope. 
"I straightened out, although it took some time. I didn't tell my husband about my son until this past September. I have other children. We've been married 18 years. I met him in one of the bars I worked in. He's an auto-body man. He was always the one who found me and took me to the hospital. He took me to Mather. I was afraid of what he would think of me. After I finally told him, I found out that all the times I went into depression over this, he thought he was the cause. He would walk in the house and say, 'What's the matter?' and I would say, 'Nothing,' and walk away. He was blaming himself. When I told him about my son, he was relieved. He said, 'Now, I understand what you've been going through.' 
"Once I straightened out, I guess out of a sense of obligation, I began seeing my mother. I never had met my grandmother, and I wanted my kids to know theirs, no matter what my feelings were. But my mother had never understood me. Three years ago, she finally did, and our relationship totally changed. Before that, she was trying to fit me into her mold, and it just wasn't happening. 
She died in February. 
"From the time I actually started searching, it took me four years to find my son. I tried the legitimate ways and the private investigators, but I found him through a group of searchers on the Net who help each other. I found him Sept. 2, 1999. It was a telephone call. He had been working and going to SUNY Albany. I thought it was going to go horribly, because when I called and told him who I was, he said, 'That's interesting news.' But, he was at work. He called me back later, and he was just wonderful. We clicked. It was like talking to myself, the way we think, the way we are. 
"We exchanged e-mails. I wrote him in late October and said I would back off if he didn't want to meet me, but he wrote back, and we made plans. My husband and I drove up there November 17th and checked into a hotel. At 11 a.m., I walked down to the lobby, and when I saw him and hugged him, everything else in the room disappeared. There was just a magical connection, and it was immediate. 
"New Year's Eve, I was with him, just hanging out. He told me that when he was 16, his parents sent him away to summer camp to work as a junior counselor. As it turned out, his father was dying. The father was 61, he said. I got chills. He kept talking. He told me that he got into an altercation with the kitchen help at the camp. He was scratching his arm with a knife, and one of them said something like, 'What, you think you're bad?' His response was to cut himself, to show them. He says to me, 'Look what I did to myself.' And on his upper left forearm is a scar in the shape of an X. 
"I got so scared, I ran out of the room. He came after me to finish the story, and I rolled up my sleeve. Same scar, same place, same age, same everything. It was too scary for me."

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