Long Island

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In this season of giving, Long Islanders have opened their hearts, their wallets and their lives to others quietly, in ways large and small. 
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They've given unusual gifts that will transform lives, offer hope or make a permanent difference. 
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A young mother has turned her talent for movies into helping those with terminal illness record memories for those they will leave behind. A motorcycle club honors the memory of one of its members by carrying on the holiday toy collections he left behind. A man reunites with a childhood friend and donates a kidney that could add decades to his life. A woman offers smiles and a friendly hand to those facing hardships. 
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As families across Long Island gather to open gifts and count their blessings, these gift givers and those they help take time to reflect. Here are their stories.

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On Long Island, 'tis the season to give

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In the movie of her life, Gail Werner reminds her Aunt Diane of the time when the car got stuck in the Grand Union parking lot and they had to walk all that way home. She tells her nephews and nieces and little cousins to find jobs that make them happy. She confesses that she and her sister knew all along where their mother hid the Christmas presents . . . In the garage, where each year the girls unwrapped, inspected and rewrapped them. 
How would you tell the story of your life in video in under an hour? What would you include, and what would you leave out? It was an ambitious project and an urgent one because Werner, of Williston Park, has brain cancer. 
Enter Kerry Glass, a former Long Islander living in New Jersey, who decided a little over a year ago that she was going to make movies for the terminally ill to give as gifts to their families. 
Glass got the idea after a neighbor died. She knew little about the woman except that she was young and had two young children. They would grow up without hearing their mother's stories and without seeing her laugh and frown. The younger one might not even remember her voice. 
Glass, 37, was a mother herself with two children not yet in elementary school, a shutterbug who shot hundreds of hours of video at family vacations and birthday parties. The former art therapist bought a tripod, a microphone and some simple editing software. She hashed out a list of interview questions to ask her subjects. She incorporated as Memories Live, a nonprofit. 
Many of her clients had high medical bills, and she had no intention of charging them. Instead, she would take donations: $50, $100. One family gave her a better computer so she could edit faster. Most of these donations barely cover her travel expenses; they don't cover the six to eight hours it takes to edit and produce a movie and transfer it to DVD. But she feels like she is giving a gift. 
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No illusions 
The movie of Carol McCall's life arrived in the mail earlier this month, 3 1/2 years after she was diagnosed with advanced <a href="/topics/Ovarian_Cancer">ovarian cancer</a>. Eighty percent of people with her diagnosis die within five years, her doctor told her. 
McCall is 74, a widow, the mother of four and grandmother of 10 who teaches American history at St. John's University. Her chemotherapy regimen barely interferes with that, she said, or with her bridge or kayaking or water skiing. But the chemo is not killing her cancer, only containing it. 
"I have no illusions about this . . . I've already lived much longer than I expected to," she said one recent afternoon in the Bellmore home she shares with her daughter, Maureen, Maureen's husband and their two children. 
McCall was at first unsure about the movie, which seemed to her like a vanity project. But Maureen wanted it. "I wish we'd done one of Daddy," she said. 
Besides, there were stories McCall wanted to pass on and preparing for the shoot helped her sift them, a process she calls "uplifting." 
She wanted the grandchildren to know about the great-great-grandmother who staged a sit-in in Queens over a badly placed streetlamp. She wanted them to know about her parents, who gave her an archery set and a .22 rifle when her friends got dolls and toy kitchens, and saved to buy the lake cabin in the Berkshires that is still in the family. 
Maureen has already seen the movie; the grandkids, who range in age from 2 1/2 to 11, won't see it until after McCall's death. 
Her movie ends with a benediction. "You're good people," she says, and looks into Glass's camera. "Stay that way." 
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Better times 
Glass and Werner made Werner's movie last fall. 
It leaves out the parts about how she had to quit her job as an administrative assistant at a <a href="/topics/Mercedes-Benz">Mercedes-Benz</a> dealership and can't drive anymore. How she is 40 years old and had to move back in with her mother, who takes her for an MRI every five weeks. 
How she asked her doctor, "When am I punching out?" and he answered honestly: "It could be eight months. It could be 18 years." 
The movie is about better times. She is savoring Jack and Cokes with her Uncle Pete, remembering her high school swimming career and a <a href="/topics/Florida">Florida</a> vacation she took not too long ago, a few almost-perfect days of sand and water and a daily newspaper. 
She likes to think that the people in her life will watch this and remember her. "I hope I'll never be forgotten," she said. "I hope I put enough dents in people." 
But she hasn't yet watched her movie, and neither has her mother, Valerie Johnson, 65. It's a gift Johnson doesn't ever want to open. 
"I live every day with the hope that she is certainly going to outlive me and she's going to beat this thing," Johnson said. "I think if I watched it, that would make me feel as if I were going to lose her. I don't want to think about that." 
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Awkward before butterflies 
Werner said she was so nervous when she first met Glass that it was hard to talk - "like when an apple gets stuck in your throat," she said. Months later, though, they still keep in touch over e-mail. "I feel as if I have a new friend," Werner said. 
Glass has made seven movies so far and said she still gets "butterflies" when she goes to a client's home. "I don't know where I'm going, who the person is," she said. "I walk in as a stranger and the first few minutes are awkward for everyone. They're telling a stranger their family history, the good, bad and ugly. But I leave as a new friend - an experience for me that's incredible." 
And she is getting something too, out of this transaction. "Every time I get in my car, I'm on this high on the way home because I know I'm doing something good for these people," she said.

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Terminally ill make movies about their lives

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Thomas Berg may have looked like a big, scary biker, but his friends say he was more like Santa Claus. If Santa wore shades and black leather on his days off, that is. 
Berg, a member of the Mortal Skulls Motorcycle Club in <a href="/topics/Bohemia%2C_NY">Bohemia</a> who died in August in a motorcycle crash, spent the last several decades dressing up as Santa Claus every December. 
This <a href="/topics/Christmas">Christmas</a> season, the members of the Mortal Skulls decided to continue Berg's legacy.&nbsp; 
More: <a href="/town">Bohemia News</a> | <a href="http://www.twitter.com/LI_Now" target="_blank">Follow LI Towns on Twitter</a> 
Last Saturday night, the club held the first of what is planned to be an annual Big Tom Berg Memorial Toy Drive at their <a href="/topics/Bohemia%2C_NY">Bohemia</a> clubhouse. Another club, the Demon Knights in <a href="/topics/Bellmore%2C_NY">Bellmore</a>, also collected toys for the drive, and the Mortal Skulls have been busy the last few days delivering toys to those in need. 
"He was a gentleman biker," friend Heide Adler, 45, of Islip Terrace, said of Berg. "He was scary on the outside, but inside he had a heart of gold." 
He had a real beard, and an authentic belly. And his friends say Berg, 59, of <a href="/topics/Shirley%2C_NY">Shirley</a>, had a genuine heart - spending his own money buying presents for needy and sick children, then delivering them while riding his red <a href="/topics/Harley-Davidson%2C_Inc.">Harley-Davidson</a> Road King. 
Last week, about a half-dozen of Berg's friends and family gathered at the Mortal Skulls clubhouse that sits in an industrial section of Bohemia, their rendezvous place to meet and plan a course of action. The club was decked out for <a href="/topics/Christmas">Christmas</a>, with a Santa figurine standing next to the big-screen TV and a Christmas tree decorated with candy canes, ornaments and a large, wide-eyed skull perched at the top. 
Adler said Berg, dressed as Santa, would visit children undergoing cancer treatment and tell them they were special, just like Santa. 
"He used to take off his hat and show that he was bald. And he would put his hat back on and would say, 'Shh, don't tell anyone our secret. That's how we know we're special,' " Adler recalled. "It really made the children who had cancer, who were dealing with it at a difficult time, not having their hair, [know] that they were just as special as Santa Claus was." 
Mortal Skulls member LJ James said it was an easy decision to run the toy drive in Berg's memory. 
James said that the motorcycle club collected 50 large black bags full of toys, which they have distributed to food pantries and hospitals. The rest of the toys were given out Thursday by another motorcycle club, the Guardians of the Children, to families, hospitals and other child service agencies. 
"There are things he found important in life, so we want to help continue those things and make sure that they're not forgotten," James said.

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Biker/Santa inspires club to hold toy drive

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Rachel Rodriguez knows what it's like to feel alone in an impersonal world. 
About 20 years ago, she and her three children left everything they knew in the Bronx to move to Bay Shore - a place that might as well have been Mars to her kids. 
She decided to begin volunteering in her spare time, and that's when she found Pronto of Long Island, a nonprofit social service agency. 
More: <a href="../../../../town">Bay Shore News</a> | <a href="http://www.twitter.com/LI_Now" target="_blank">Follow LI Towns on Twitter</a> 
"We learned that when you live in a community, you give back as best as you can," she said. 
Twenty years later, Rodriguez is still volunteering, spending hours each day at Pronto welcoming new clients and listening to their stories of hardship. 
Her gift to them is her friendly face and smiles and her own stories about raising children and taking on challenges. 
"Some people come here at the bottom of their lives, and we try to send them away with a little hope," she said. "When they sit in that chair, I know some of them have tragedies in their lives. But we try to comfort them and try to be patient and be compassionate, because like I said, there by the grace of God go I." 
Nina Fenton, development director of Pronto, said Rodriguez was one of the agency's most devoted volunteers. 
"She's very upbeat, very spiritual, and really can take people that are feeling very low and turn them around," Fenton said. 
Over the years, Rodriguez estimates she's helped thousands of people, and has seen many able to better their lives through her help as a member of the group. 
"It could be one word you say that could change a person's life," she said.

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Trying to 'send them away with a little hope'

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This time last year, Roger Ferrara of Queens was measuring his life not in the decades that lay ahead, but in the few years he had left. 
On dialysis, the retired postal worker, 53, was certain he would die waiting for a kidney. Medicine's enduring mismatch between the number of kidneys available for transplant and the number of people in need had worsened in the past year. 
Yet 30 miles away in Seaford, Thomas Lambert was wondering how his childhood friend was faring. They hadn't seen each other in a quarter-century, and Lambert, 52, was determined to reconnect with his pal. An Internet search he undertook would do much more. 
Not only did he rekindle their friendship, but through a kidney donation gave him the ultimate gift: a chance for renewed life. 
"There are no words for this kind of a gift," Ferrara said, still stunned how good luck and good friendship can miraculously coalesce to outwit fate. 
The two friends, on the mend since their Nov. 18 surgeries, reunited last weekend for the first time since leaving NewYork-Presbyterian / Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan. 
Their meeting was a time to celebrate, recall the past and ponder with deeper understanding the season's themes of giving and receiving. 
"We were very close when we were 12, 13 years old, just before high school," said Lambert, co-owner of an Irish food company. As kids growing up 40 years ago in <a href="/topics/Glendale%2C_NY">Glendale</a>, Queens, he said the pair loved hockey and baseball. 
"I wound up getting married and moved out here to <a href="/topics/Long_Island%2C_NY">Long Island</a>," said Lambert, whose wife, Debbie, also grew up in <a href="/topics/Glendale%2C_NY">Glendale</a>. They raised three children and lost touch with old friends. 
Lambert's Internet search in the spring revealed Ferrara hadn't moved far from their childhood neighborhood. 
"When I called him, I said, 'Hey, Rog, this is Tommy,' " Lambert recalled, noting that when he heard his friend's voice, suddenly, it was 1970, not 2010. 
Yet when the two met at a barbecue this summer and Ferrara told Lambert about his plight, their sunny recollections soon turned to the dim realities of kidney failure and dwindling days. 
"I thought maybe there was a possibility I could help him out," Lambert said. "I said, 'Hey, what's your blood type?' He said, 'O.' I said, 'I'm an O, too.' " 
Ferrara said, "I thought about it and said, 'No. He's got a wife. He's got kids.' But when he said, 'I'm serious and I want to do it before the holidays, I really had to think about it." 
From infancy, Ferrara had been bothered by a kidney cyst. That, and later <a href="/topics/High_Blood_Pressure">hypertension</a>, conspired to steal his organs' function. He had been on dialysis since February 2009. Kidney failure forced him to retire, sapped his strength and limited his life. Lambert's offer was a chance to reverse the inevitable. 
Dr. Sandip Kapur, chief of transplant surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian, said medical advances have made living donations a route to renewed life for those too low on the list for a cadaver kidney. Kapur said in the past year, there were only 2,000 kidneys available for transplant, while the number of people awaiting the organs had grown to more than 200,000. 
After the operation, Ferrara said he felt young again. Lambert reported fatigue, but now says he feels 99 percent better. 
Kapur estimates the transplant added at least a quarter-century to Ferrara's life. 
Their celebratory dinner was a toast to friendship. Many more years, they said, lie ahead.

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'No words' for pal's kidney donation

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