Leave the gun take the canoli

Rarely does it happen that an over-educated dilettante admits to watching hours of  mind numbing  reruns and reality t.v.   But I’m  spending my summer vacation  at the mercy of  a channel surfer, in a feeble attempt to provide 24 hour care for my  mother.  

 Since June, my mother’s physical health and memory have been declining faster than the speed of sound.   Dementia. like the mad scientist of ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000′  keeps  her riveted  to  a 42 inch  flat screen.   I’ve  been reduced to the role of the  alien robot at her side as she  spends her nights waving at toddlers and muttering  wisecracks at QVC hosts  or talk show guests.   

Considering the amount of hours I’ve clocked as a  NYCares  volunteer   you’d assume  that I’d know all the right people to dispense advice about obtaining proper home care.  But nothing could be further from the truth.  The old cliche, it’s not what you know but who you does not apply to my situation.   Searching for a punctual, qualified health-care professional is like Murphy Brown’s quest for  a permanent secretary.       

Refusing to  give up hope,  I wait in anticipation  for the Alzheimer’s equivalent of a super nanny to offer more than  4 hours of relief in the morning.    Meanwhile, my mother sits through another marathon of  ‘John and Kate Plus 8.’   Amazingly enough, she  recognises  all of the sextuplets.    Ask  her who I am  and she  sounds like a bad imitation of Faye Dunaway in ‘Chinatown’,  repeating   ”my  sister ….. my daughter” in complete confusion.    

I realize that the television remote is probably the last thing she has control over so I don’t mind her   eclectic  taste.   Her favorite Sunday night routine is to watch the Mass from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral followed by ‘Gene Simmons Family Jewels’.   During the week she sometimes lets me  watch ‘The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch’ , but only  if his guests are good looking.   Fortunately, last week I caught a segment on success in the workplace.  A sales professional was asking Mr. Deutsch’s panel for career advice while  dealing with a parent’s “end of life” issues.     

A close up of Mr. Deutsch showed sincere surprise.  A panelist spoke first, then Mr. Duetsch offered his words of wisdom.   His sage response was the opposite of  everything  I’ve ever heard a social worker, friend, colleague or someone claiming to be a relative say.  Mr.  Deutsch recommend that  the man  view his time at work as a chance to take a break from his overwhelming family responsibility.    As someone who was born with that extra caretaker chromosome, I applaud Mr. Deutsch for his genius.       I’ve used this strategy for the past three years and it really helps me to appreciate my boss and dread vacations.            

I love my job and I can’t wait to go back  to work.   In the meantime,  my friend and colleague, Lina Germosen stops by every Saturday to  give me a break.    Lina   spends a few hours watching movies with my mom so I can go into Manhattan and feed the homeless.                  

Fear of the unknown permeates the brain when you realize that a friend or family member is missing.  The greatest fear of parents is a  lost, runaway or abducted child.  Equally as devastating is  the panic of grandchildren and adults when a parent with dementia wanders off in the night.     

Taping a missing person’s poster  to the sparsely tagged  bulletin board at the last stop on the subway  I wonder why such premium advertising  space is  vacant.   As soon as the poster  is secured,  a group of teenage boys walk over  to examine it.  They stare at the picture of Enrique Picart and comment that he’s been  missing for more than a month.  As they  walk away, a  middle aged couple  stops and takes a look.  The man reads the paritculars out loud, “black mole on right cheek, short white hair wearing dark green polo shirt.”  

 I hadn’t  heard of Enrique Picart until earlier in the day.  Mr. Picart’s daughter and her friends had  been diligently searching the streets and  the bread lines looking for anyone who might  know Rick or Kique, as he’s sometimes called.  Some of my transient buddies took the liberty of volunteering my help and sent  one Ms. Picart’s friends over to my favorite soup kitchen.         

Enrique Picart is a 77 year old Korean War veteran and Alzehimer’s victim who lost his way home on June 14th.   He is 5 feet 11 inches tall.  His favorite catch phrases are “Parlez -vous Francais?” even though he doesn’t speak French, and “I was in the Army.”    If you see him please call 1-800-577-TIPS.     

 Since I believe in the kindness or strangers I’m  hoping that Mr. Picart will be found safe in a shelter or hospital.  

In this age of political correctness, it should be glaringly obvious that something is missing during the month of May.  Its a time of year  devoted to the celebration of  motherhood.  Florists and card companies increase their earnings exponentially  by  the second Sunday of the month as we  honor our mothers, step-mothers  and pregnant friends.   On the other 30 days of May  you can hear hymns echoing  in  convent  gardens  and  Catholic church yards.  Little girls dressed in blue execute  the coronation ritual by placing a flower wreath on a statue of  Our Lady.    Yet,  we simply  ingnore  the virtuous  work of the women  who fill the maternal void in the lives of orphans,  the depressed or the  dying  by acting as a spiritual mother.    

I don’t know who coined this phrase, but I’ve  heard the term used by people of many denominations to describe women who mold the moral character of   children who are not their own.

Every May I make a concerted effort to  keep in touch with my  former teacher and friend Sr. Camille D’Arienzo by attending “An Evening of Mercy” at the Yale Club.       This event is one of the few award benefit/fundraisers that actually inspires humble humanitarian service.   The room is always filled with people who are quietly changing the world through outreach to the  poor and disenfranchised.

This year, Sr. Karen Schneider was honored for her work with children around the world.  Sr. Schneider is a pediatrician from John Hopkins University  who  travels to the poorest  countries to  care for orphans with malaria and fix  cleft palates.   

Sr. Camille is an advocate for social justice.  She’s been changing lives for  generations by showing compassion to everyone, including death row prisoners.          

The hallmark of   Roxie Salamon-Abrams photographs is her ability to elevate her subjects from the ordinary without pretension or cliche.   

During her  senior year at Stuyvesant High School in 2007,  Roxie  accompanied her  father on a buisness  a trip  to India.  The images she captured are a stunning synthesis of insight and inquiry.  Women deep in thought as they go through the paces of their daily chores seem oblivious to Roxie’s lens.    Rather than focusing on the poverty of the rural areas she visited,  her portfolio focuses on the teamwork and pride found in building a community.  Even her shots of smiling children are candid and unaffected.  

Currently a freshman at Tufts University, Roxie’s  work provides  the back drop for  “The Village Temple Indian Connection”  a special Shabbat celebration on the main floor of the temple that hosts NYC’s best  soup kitchen.   

Roxie is the daughter of William Abrams,  the president of Trickle Up, www.trickleup.org a non-profit that offers grants and micro-enterprise development in the most impoverished areas of the world.    

Its amazing how quickly adolescents grasp the concept of social justice.  While contemplating their  place in the world and defining their own  value system teenagers cultivate compassion  for the outcast and disenfranchized.  

Recently, 12 year old  Bea Genco and I  had a very erudite dicussion about the lack of clean drinking water in Africa and the number of starving children throughout the world.  She posed some very sophisticated questions regarding humanitaran aid  and government involvement in feeding the poor.    She wondered how  individuals with limited resources could  make a difference in  the world.  So, I showed her two of my favorite web sites;  Charity: water (http://www.charitywater.org) and FreeRice (http://freerice.com).

Charity: water sells bottled  water for $20 and 100%  of the proceeds go toward digging wells in  Africa.  FreeRice is an English vocabulary building site that   helps to fight hunger through the UN Food Program by donating 20 grains of rice for every word the user  gets right.   This site is sponsored by advertising revenue.  FreeRice is fun and I  spend a few hours on it whenever my insomnia kicks in.

I challenged Bea to go to FreeRice and try to learn 100 new words.  I told her if she could donate 500 grains of rice in 10 days I would buy a bottle of water for her from Charity: water.     Bea had so much fun playing around on FreeRice that she donated 13,820 grains in 7 days.        

The thick white layer of snow that covered NYC on Friday was a filthy, slippery, slushy mess by Saturday morning. Flurries continued  after dawn  and the mercury refused to budge past 33 degrees.    I wondered how many  of my  volunteers would make it out  to deliver hot  meals this weekend.

My cell phone was ringing as I exited the 8th Street stop on the R train.  Volunteers experiencing transportation delays had been calling or leaving text messages all morning.  A new recruit was lost somewhere on MacDougal Street.  I was headed for an  an anxiety attack until I read Carol’s e-mail.  She volunteered for the long and winding Bank Street route.                 

Inside the Caring Community building, on Washington Square North, a modest amount of volunteers  waited for the caterer to arrive.     Tom and I tried to figure out how to readjust the routes for our limited number of delivery persons.    Suddenly, a  stream of  people flowed through the door.   Like wet  Gremlins,  my labor force had miraculously multiplied.   All 20 of my NYCares volunteers  were present and accounted for.  Firefighters, Zac  and Gordon, from Post 6008 brought a dozen  teenagers from the FDNY Explores Program.   Raquel of AmeriCorps provided  another 9 young adults who joined a team of students   from NYU.  

By  11;30 the sun had pushed away the clouds.  The ice patches on the sidewalk were  melting and our volunteers had visited  150 lonely New Yorkers.                     

The weekend after Valentine’s Day is even more melancholy for those isolated by illness or advanced age.    Sunday’s movie night at Rivington House started off rather low key.    My  NYCares crew,  Jeff, Marissa and Stephanie arrived at 6:20 to help me serve chocolate cake and snacks as we watched a documentary on John Coltrane with the residents.    

At 7 the movie started.  It  featured  Coltrane playing “My Favorite Things” at every milestone in his career.  The tranquility of the music  was wasted on me as the caffine from my  afternoon cappachino started to kick in.   When  I’d heard the first few notes of “My Favorite Things” for the third time my mind flipped to the  Blues Brothers movie and  the song “Rawhide.”     

I sat next to Baby Girl, one the youngest residents.  She had a million questions   ranging from who did the research for this documentary to where I bought  my boots.     ”My Favorite Things” started up again and I took it as a cue to launch into one of my favorite things.   I signaled to Jeff, pointing to the chair on the other side of Baby Girl, made a brief introduction and circulated around the room.    A few seconds later the rest of us were whispering and giggling with several  of the residents. 

The energy level in the room spiked.  My buddies were smiling and so were my volunteers.     

 A little flirting does wonders for the immune system.          

January is a cold, cruel month.  The philanthropic spirit of the holidays vaporises around the time that Christmas trees become mulch.  The midnight oil burns in board rooms of non-profits as exec’s brainstorm ways to find donors and fill seats at their spring fundraisers.   This is the month when the dilettantes sleep in on Saturdays,  leaving   preeminent volunteers from Caring Community and New York Cares  to brave the weather and visit the shut-ins of Manhattan.

This week my NYCares crew and  a dozen members  from  Kingston  Church in Michigan joined my fantastic five,   Lauren and Marciano Estigarriba, Tom Vilar,  Ginger (Wild Hearts) and Joel Mejia (Things Are Changing),  as they helped alleviate hunger and loneliness in Greenwich Village.             

 The fantastic five  use their time  and talents to spread compassion, social  justice and benevolence around the city.   Like any true super hero, their cool, yet mild mannered exteriors  offers no clue to their powerful  commitment to  making the world better for the next generation.

Lauren  and Marciano assist an organizations that serves teenagers.  Tom is devoted to helping  disabled and autistic youth.  Joel empowers kids by teaching with technology.  He teaches them the photography and video skills they need to create multi-media projects.  Ginger is  the creative consultant of my inner circle,  offering marketing tips and   brilliant strategies for promoting  worthy causes.                         

The best gift you can give anyone is your undivided attention.  Five minutes of your time is  precious  to someone isolated by illness, dementia or loneliness.     On Christmas Day, 86 exceptionally generous New Yorkers, my favorite couple from the U.K.  and my three new Australian friends gave their time and energy to the  clients of Caring Community.

 Co-ordinating volunteers for Christmas Day was  like assembling an all white jigsaw puzzle.  Tom Marrone organized the delivery routes  to accommodate my penchant for overbooking volunteers.   A normal delivery route has 7 to 10 clients.  But for Christmas he divided each route so that the volunteers could  spend a few minutes engaging every  client in a conversation. 

Tom had asked for 40 people and was expecting a mere 31, but I  can’t say “no” to someone  who wants to do a good deed.  So, by 10 a.m. we had  a crowd of   smiling faces  eager to cheer up the   shut-ins of Greenwich Village with a hot meal and a small, brightly wrapped gift.

My best regulars, Lauren and Marciano Estigarribia, Charity Diaz and Fredrick helped me organize my New York Cares team and  the City Meal On Wheels crew.   New recruits, Joel Mejia from Things Are Changing , Dara Shinler and  Amanda, Anita and Barney  were quickly teamed up with someone who could show them the ropes and sent out to spread good cheer.            

 By noon all of our jovial  volunteers had returned.  Many of them had anecdotes about our colorful clients. 

 Amanda, Anita, Barney and   I  went over  to Our Lady of Pompeii Church on  Carmine Street to serve at Caring Community’s Christmas Diner.   Every year the basement of the church is transformed to look like a restaurant with large round tables  that seat eight.           

We joined  Ginger, from the Wildhearts, and Jane Graley  who were already  hard at work waiting on tables.      I made my way around the room talking to each guest as I served the salad.    The faces were familiar and I was happy to spend yet another holiday with my extended Caring Community family.

As a New York Cares team leader, I got to take the bow for the 300+ clients we fed and greeted on Christmas.  But my friends, and fellow volunteers from City Meals On Wheels and New York Cares deserve a standing ovation for helping to allievate lonliness in NYC.       

 Organizing all of my holiday projects this year would not have been possible without the help of my good friend Barbara Genco and her daughter Bea.  They worked behind the scenes, entertaining my home-bound mother so I could wrap gifts, collect coats and run food drives.   Bea Genco  stops by after school every week to have tea with my mom.  The entire Genco family, Barbara’s  husband Mike,  son Micheal and even her brother Greg Johnson rallied together to help get my mom out to a party at their home on Christmas Eve.     

The congregation of Village Temple is made up of wonderful people eager to preform a mitzvah when needed.   Twice a year they clean out their closets  so the clients at the soup kitchen can ”shop” for a new wardrobe.  The clothes are given away free to anyone who needs them, but the foyer of the temple is transformed to look like a store.

  On Saturday, my NY-Cares crew,  Linda, Mary Beth, Lindsay and  Neil  sorted through mountains of clothes,  matching up sizes and colors like professional stylists out to please the most discerning customer.      Determined that no one would go away empty handed,  they exhausted themselves combing the racks to find exactly  the right coats, jackets. suits,  and scarves to make our  clients   feel pampered and special.

At the end of the day we had helped dress 250   homeless and fixed income seniors.