By Gretchen Gibbs

Ray Rice and Janay Palmer

Ray Rice is still in the news, a court having reinstated him in the NFL. His wife, Janay Palmer, made the front page of The New York Times the other day, saying in support of her husband that anybody can make a mistake.

From the beginning of the elevator incident, commentators have cringed at Janay’s positive statements about Ray. We all think we wouldn’t stay with an abuser, but maybe we don’t know ourselves so well. Working with domestic abuse victims, I have seen a number who would never have imagined themselves staying, but who have.

Other prominent athletes who have abused their wives keep being outed. Driving home from New Jersey a few weeks ago, I heard an interview with Kristin Barnes, wife of a former NFL star, Ricky Williams. She related her experiences of abuse, and one of the questions the interviewer asked her was why she thought Janay Palmer stood by Ray Rice.

Kristen Barnes said that she also had stayed with her husband in spite of his abuse because of the other things that she loved about him. She said that if the woman chooses to stay, then she wants her partner to have a successful career. She feels that Janay does not want Ray Rice to lose his employment, because of both the financial and psychological consequences.

I began thinking more about why Janay supports her husband, and came up with some other possible answers.

— She is impressed by his fame and accomplishments, and wants to align herself with him. Not necessarily out of greed, but probably coming from a lack of self-esteem, she wants a man who can be the dominant member of the partnership. A little abuse may be a price she’s willing to pay. Successful athletes in general don’t have problems finding women.

— The Cycle of Violence. Domestic violence programs teach about the cycle of violence, that after the abuser really hurts the woman, he tends to feel guilty and showers her with love, gifts and promises that there will never be another incident. (Abusers can be women, and victims men, and there can be violence in same sex relationships; for the sake of convenience and because it fits with the Rice case, I’m identifying the man as the abuser.) Gradually, however, the honeymoon ends, and some minor “transgression” of the partner will trigger anger and escalating abuse. Many victims are persuaded by the perpetrators’ assurances that they’ll change, and the perpetrators may believe them as well. The fact that the couple went to counseling may have intensified Janay’s belief that Ray will never abuse her again.

— Janay actually played some role in her abuse. The only predictor of who is abused in a domestic relationship is past abuse. We tend to repeat our interactions with others according to what we are comfortable with, even if it’s not pleasant. Freud called it the repetition compulsion, and even though he was wrong about many things, he was right about the patterns that people get caught up in with their relationships. We all know women who only date married men, or men all of whose women are dominating like their mothers. Janay may know that she provoked Ray. Certainly she yelled something at him in the elevator right before he hit her. Was it the one thing he told her never to say? Had she provoked him in other ways? If she knows she provoked him, she may think it excuses him, even though of course it doesn’t.

— She feels sorry for him. In spite of being controlled and abused, many victims of domestic violence feel that they are the stronger member of the couple. The victim may know about her partner’s own past experiences of abuse and trauma, and believe that she can help him overcome it.

— She fears for her life. Janay need only look at what has happened to other high profile abusers and their victims. We all know about OJ, but the case of Oscar Pistorius, the South African runner with the artificial legs, is also chilling.

Pistorius shot his girlfriend to death, saying he thought she was a burglar, but neighbors had heard screaming arguments and others described earlier incidents of violence. Pistorius, like OJ, got off on the murder charge. He’s expected to serve 10 months of a five-year sentence for culpable homicide and reckless endangerment.

There are other possible explanations for why Janay stays, and there’s no way of knowing what she really feels. It’s just important for us to avoid that first reflex judgment that the only choice for any victim of domestic violence is to leave the relationship.

Gretchen Gibbs is a psychologist, teacher and writer.

By Gretchen Gibbs

The United Nations estimates that there are more than 45 million displaced persons worldwide, some still living within the borders of their own country. The Western world continues to be shocked and to feel some responsibility to provide for the needs of at least some of these refugees, like the Yazidi on the mountain in Iraq. After we’ve provided tents and drinking water in a relatively safe location, however, we tend to think we’re finished.

One need we tend to ignore is the mental health problems of the displaced. We have no figures on the percentages of refugees with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following rape, viewing murder and maiming of one’s near and dear, and the hardships of flight.

PTSD is only one of the possible outcomes – there are many forms of depression, anxiety and substance abuse. Lest my concern be dismissed as that of a soft-hearted psychologist, let me note that the World Bank estimates that mental health costs are of enormous importance to the world’s economy. They look at how many days of productive work are lost to the world each year through illness of all kinds, and estimate that mental illness accounts for over 8 percent of those days, more than is caused by either cancer or heart disease.

Thinking about these issues made me remember my own extremely minor experience of being displaced. I did not have to flee and neither I nor anyone in the family was ever in any kind of danger. However, in World War II, my father joined the Navy, knowing he would be drafted soon if he did not. (He was posted to Hawaii in officer’s training, a very easy war.) I, a little over 2, had been his darling draft exemption. Daddy was the affectionate parent, and I was always in his arms.

Mother and I, at that time the only child, went to live at her parents’ house, in another state. I certainly wasn’t neglected. Grandma was the most nurturing woman I’ve ever known, and I will always cherish her memory. Grandpa read me Uncle Wiggly stories from the newspaper every night, making up his own ending about how Uncle Wiggly, a rabbit, was eaten by the fox. I was enthralled.

There were some down sides. All kinds of food – sugar, butter, meat, canned fruits and vegetables – were rationed. I developed my lifetime habits of eating cereal without sugar, bread without butter and salad, when we had it, without dressing. We used margarine that came white as lard in a plastic sack with a capsule of yellow food coloring, which we had to work through the fat so that it didn’t look so disgusting.

One night I was eating my snack of graham crackers and milk, and I couldn’t finish it. Rather than simply leaving it, I was so ashamed of wasting food that I hid the bowl under the table in an orange crate we used as a stool.

With the war coming after the Depression and its impact, there was a deprivation theme to our lives. Mother’s favorite joke was this one from Sam Levenson: “We had unexpected company one day, and Ma drew each of us kids aside and told us, ‘Don’t eat any of the pork chops, as there aren’t enough to go around.’ We did as we were told, because we knew there was a delicious blueberry pie for dessert. At the end of the meal, as Ma was clearing the plates, she said, ‘Those children who didn’t eat their dinner don’t get dessert.’ ”

My aunt did a little still life water color of my toys. They were: a stuffed horse that Grandma made for me, some wooden beads on a string, and those colored wooden doughnut shapes that you fit over a stick to make a tower. She had to add some things from my cousin to have enough for the painting. Ten years later, my new brother and sister needed a chest to hold all their toys. During the war they didn’t make many toys.

I don’t think the minor deprivations affected me emotionally. It was the loss of my father that hurt. When he returned I was almost 5, a young girl who had been to kindergarten, who could read and write. I was a stranger to him, and he, in his uniform, 40 pounds heavier, was a stranger to me. We eventually reconnected, but it was never the same. It set me up for a life where I was sensitized to abandonment, and I perhaps made some bad decisions about men.

I think about all those children with the big eyes in the wan faces, living in tents, having fled gunfire, having not enough to eat, shivering at night, and having lost forever people they’ve loved.

By Gretchen Gibbs

Roger Angell, the writer who constructed such great pieces for the New Yorker, was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame a couple weeks ago. He could make baseball come alive even for those who consider it boring. One of his statements, paraphrased, was that baseball is a metaphor for life, that we struggle through it, only to arrive finally at home, where we started.

Remembering this philosophical nugget, I began to think about my ex-mother in law.

I was never close to Catherine, who was too self-centered and childish to be a good mother to my former spouse, or to hold a real conversation with me. She was only appealing to certain men, who were charmed by her beauty and child-like enthusiasm for pretty things and good food. In her seventies, demented with Alzheimer’s, or something like it, she still had a boyfriend who adored her.

After she began thinking there were men living in the back room of Southbury, her retirement village condo, men who were stealing things from her, she had to go to the Home, a comfortable nursing home with remarkably caring nurses. She would forget where she was and say in a matter-of-fact way, “It’s time to go home to Southbury now.” She spoke of the retirement village as though she still lived there, reminding herself, regardless of the season, that it was time to put out the green and white striped awnings, or that she needed to go through her papers. When we had brought her to the Home, we discovered that the Southbury condo was full of papers, unpaid bills mixed in with junk mail and old letters, and shopping lists, most of them stuffed into the washing machine.

A year passed. We visited regularly, and often Catherine would say, “It’s time to go home to Floral Park now. I want to sit on the screened porch.” The house in Floral Park, set next to the vast extension of the Belmont Racetrack, was where she and her husband had brought up their children through adolescence, and on hot summer evenings the screened-in porch was a soft green delight.

Another year. Catherine still seemed happy at the Home, but she spoke of needing to go home to Woodside, the apartment house in Queens where she lived when first married. She wanted to visit Aunt Anna who lived in the apartment upstairs, and to have the whole family over for Anna’s gingery sauerbraten and crisp potato pancakes. But Anna was no longer alive.

Finally, Catherine had to go to a hospital, where she died, unable to recognize us, wandering in her mind through her childhood home in Hastings, Pennsylvania, speaking to her dead mother and sisters, re-grieving the deaths of her brothers, one on an embankment and the other drunk on the railroad track.

Roger Angell was right, but he left out that at some point in our lives we begin going backwards around the bases, revisiting in our minds all our homes until we arrive at last at the beginning.

 By Gretchen Gibbs

Mario and Andrew Cuomo

 The news that Andrew Cuomo blocked the work of his own investigation committee made me long for Mario, and wonder what their relationship is like. Looks like Andrew learned the political savvy and the ambition without the integrity. Not a new perception on my part, but this latest revelation sharpens it.

It made me ponder the relationship between my own father and my grandfather. My father learned many things from his father, like gentleness with children and the love of clocks, but a lot of his personality was formed in reaction to his father, who was blind.

Daddy was a visual type who loved to read and knew the world through his mind. His father, as a young man, loved to read as well, but while in law school he developed cataracts. A quack of a doctor removed them too early, and left him blind for life.

Grandpa liked to place me on his lap, facing away from him, and I would demand to play horsey. Horsey involved him jouncing me up and down while he recited:

“When I was a little boy, I lived by myself. All the bread and cheese I had I kept upon the shelf. The rats and the mice, they led me such a life, I had to go to Londontown to buy me a wife. The streets were so broad and the lanes were so narrow, I had to bring my wife home in the wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow broke (here I go slipping through Grandpa’s knees), my wife had a fall (I slip through again) and down went the wheelbarrow, wife and all. ” (Here I am on the floor, laughing in delight.)

Every night Grandpa wound the clock, the one on my mantle now. It’s not valuable, purchased from Sears, I think, but I always regarded it with a kind of reverence because he did. I have two of my father’s clocks as well

Grandpa’s was a 24-hour clock, and every evening around six, he would approach the mantle, feel for it, feel for the latch that opened it, feel for the keys kept inside it, and then wind both the time-keeping apparatus and the chimes. All day, he counted the chimes so that he knew the time.

I asked Daddy about his father’s blindness several times and he couldn’t talk about it. I overheard a conversation between him and my mother, and the word he used was “shame.” To be sure, Grandpa had to give up law, and go into piano tuning, one of the few kinds of work that didn’t require vision.

Once, when I asked him about his childhood, Daddy said, “We were poor,” as though that said it all. Daddy had to put himself through college and graduate school with scholarships and work, while he and Mother raised us children. I was in third grade by the time Daddy got his Ph.D. He had considered law school, but decided he would do better teaching political science, which he did for most of his life at Boston University. He was ambitious and competitive, and his memoir is mostly full of details about his work successes. He became a dean and led a faction in opposition to the president of the university, John Silber.

In the conversation I overheard, Mother protested, “There was nothing to be ashamed of. It wasn’t his fault.” My father stated that in those days blindness was shameful. He could never bring anybody home from school. His mother never had friends over. They didn’t go out.

I wonder how Grandpa thought of his life, whether it felt shameful to him. I had a psychology professor who spoke of vision as the last of our senses to develop, and thought our other senses were more basic. Animals tend to have poorer vision as compared to ours, and to rely more on smell and hearing. Grandpa was forced into a more primitive kind of life. As I get older, have retired, and spend a lot of time alone, I can perhaps understand what it was like. I still use my eyes a great deal, but I find the simple pleasures of a summer breeze, the taste of ice cream, and my cat’s soft fur move me more than they used to. Grandpa loved his classical records, the radio, his root beer floats, playing with his grandchildren, his clock, and his pipe. His wife was always young and beautiful in his mind.

There’s really not much connection between the Cuomos, father and son, and my father and grandfather. My father reacted to his father’s inability to make money by trying hard for success. Andrew seems to have reacted to his father’s integrity by becoming self-serving. In my family, my grandfather was blind, my father ambitious. In the Cuomos, Andrew is the one who is blind, with ambition.

By Gretchen Gibbs

A brutal civil war is being fought in Ukraine.

The Ukraine people look haunted in the newspaper photos. Some want to stay with their country, some want to separate and join Russia. We tend to think of them as non-overlapping groups. My experience this past weekend on a trip to Washington, D.C., led me to think about the matter differently.

Our own Civil War divided our country in ways hard to fathom. I know little about the Civil War beyond the Ken Burns series and what I gleaned in high school and college. I have heard that books about Lincoln sell better than anything else, and given that, I am hesitant to put forward any views at all to readers who may be much more knowledgeable than I. But there must be some who don’t know all the things I learned this weekend.

First, I went to hear a concert at the Church of the Epiphany in downtown Washington. An attractive church with great stained glass and excellent acoustics, it is pre-Civil War and housed wounded Union soldiers during the fighting. According to the historical poster outside, Washington as a whole was essentially a southern, secessionist city, and that was especially true for the area of the city around the church. Most of the members were for secession. Jefferson Davis was a member with his own pew until conflict with the minister, who was strongly pro-Union, led to his departure. The poster mentioned that Mary Todd Lincoln had a brother and three half-brothers who fought for the Confederacy. Two of them were killed and one was wounded.

The next day we (I, my brother and sister-in-law) went to Arlington National Cemetery. I’d been before, but the lines after lines of white gravestones, stretching off in all directions, still made me gasp. These dead are from all our wars, of course, not just the Civil War, but there were three quarters of a million deaths in that war, the most costly of our history.

We climbed a steep hill to the former home of Robert E. Lee. Arlington Cemetery was built on his property just over the line in Virginia. It was  confiscated by the Union early in the war as a sort of statement: “See what you’ve done.” When you look out from the front porch, you see a bridge crossing the Potomac and right at the end of the bridge, the Lincoln Memorial. The two men seem enmeshed, or at least their differences bridged. I knew from Ken Burns that Lincoln had asked Lee to head the Union Army, and with great difficulty Lee had refused.

I didn’t know that Lee had released all his own slaves five years before the Emancipation Proclamation. I didn’t know that his wife returned to the house after the war ended and died five days later, apparently of a heart attack brought on by the level of destruction. Few of the articles in the house today are original, except for furniture or dishes or pictures that have been returned by some descendant of a Union soldier who stole them. Now the site is a National Monument, and rightly so, for Lee was a remarkable man. After the war, he became president of Washington and Lee College, and tried to help heal the divisions in the country.

Another thing I learned, not this weekend but when doing research on the 1692 witch trials for The Book of Maggie Bradstreet, was that my ancestors in Massachusetts had slaves. They were called servants, but they were slaves. Tituba, who set off the whole Salem witch hysteria, was a slave from the West Indies. Northerners didn’t need slave labor the way the plantations needed it, but that didn’t prevent them from using it when they could.

It’s a kind of cliché, “brother against brother,” but the ways the Union and Confederacy were linked and divided were so complicated, they can’t possibly be reduced to “good vs. bad” or “right vs. wrong,” the way we learn in high school to think about it.

When we see the division in Ukraine, or in Syria, or earlier, in North and South Korea, and North and South Vietnam, we could reflect more on our own experience. People suffer, for such a long time and in such complicated ways, from a Civil War.

By Gretchen Gibbs

Well, the baseball season has opened, and already on Thursday the Mets (the team I root for) were behind by two games in the NL East standings. The Yankees were playing .500 ball and were tied for first place in the AL East with Tampa Bay and Toronto. It seems a good time to reflect on my recent baseball experience.

I’ve always wanted to attend spring training, but this was the first year I managed it. I would have gone to Port St. Lucie, where the Mets train, but I have a sister in the Clearwater/Tampa/St. Pete area, and I wanted to see her, too. My sister’s condo turned out to be five minutes from the Phillies training site in Clearwater, and I saw two games there, one against the Braves and one with the Yankees. I also drove five miles to Dunedin to see the Toronto Blue Jays camp, and watched them play the Tampa Bay Rays.

The thing I realized about spring training is that it doesn’t matter who wins.

Nobody really cares. Not the players, not the managers, not even the spectators. Tie games are usually ended after nine innings. And when you take away the tension about who’s ahead, something else emerges. It’s a relaxed camaraderie in the stands. More attention is paid to the sparkling plays – the incredible catches against the wall, the diving catches in the infield, the home run hit over the wall and onto the berm where young children are picnicking with their parents.

There is the smell of buttered popcorn and beer and hotdogs. There is a certain background crowd noise at a baseball stadium that I haven’t heard elsewhere. It’s kind of a steady hum, a soothing “white noise.” And the vast stretches of green, now Astro Turf even in Florida, and speaking, “summer, summer, summer.” It was March but in Florida it was already summer. Spring training is quintessential summer.

I saw a few things I’d never seen before. For example, just as at big league ballparks, the walls of the stadium are padded panels that players can bang against without hurting themselves too much. In one game, a batter hit the ball sharply to the wall, and it disappeared. Nobody could figure out what happened. The two closest fielders were scratching their heads and there was muttering in the stands. It turned out the ball found a path between the panels, never to be recovered. They played it as a ground-rule double.

I loved the Phillie Phanatic and wished the Mets had a decent mascot. The Fanatic goes around the field and stirs up the fans with his dancing and good-natured taunting of the opposition players. Mets fans and Phillies fans generally don’t like each other, and it was instructive to sit with a bunch of folks from Philadelphia and see how their feelings about baseball were just like mine.

I liked the experience of seeing a game with a Canadian team in Florida. At the stadium in Dunedin, they sang “O Canada” at the start of the game. The vendors ply you with Labatt instead of Bud. The crowds were full of folks from Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver, all willing to tell you their winter stories.

I would happily replace the regular season with six months of spring training. Nobody talked about drugs or salaries or trades or whether the franchise will survive.

It was just a game. As Roger Angell said, “The Summer Game.”

By Gretchen Gibbs

Ralph Kiner

In the last few days, the Times has announced the deaths of two of my favorite public figures, Ralph Kiner, the baseball legend and long-time announcer for the New York Mets, and Maxine Kumin, Pulitzer Prize winner for her wonderful poems and the equivalent of poet laureate before we had an official designation. If you think this an odd conjunction of public figures for me to be mourning, keep in mind that Kumin was an ardent Red Sox fan, and Kiner had a relationship with Janet Leigh. People resist pigeon holing.

Did they have anything in common? For all their fame, both Kiner and Kumin received less acclaim than they deserved. Kiner was described in the Times as “vastly undersung.” He had one of the most impressive home run records in the history of the sport, but because he played for the Pittsburgh Pirates, perpetually at the bottom of the standings, he wasn’t much noticed. He became an announcer for the Mets from the beginning of their franchise in 1962, because, as quoted in the Times obit, he “had a lot of experience with losing.”

In 1972, I was ill for an entire summer, not in pain, but with nothing to do but lie in bed and watch television. Daytime television in that era was six or seven channels of soap operas, with a little baseball thrown in. In those days there were many more afternoon games than there are today, and I became a Mets fan. Ralph Kiner, with Bob Murphy, and Lindsey Nelson of the florid sports coats educated me and turned me on to the glories of the sport.

Kiner, in spite of a speech problem brought on by Bell’s palsy, still announced once in a while this last season, and his comments were always intelligent and generous. I never heard him make a mean remark about anyone, regardless of their team.

Maxine Kumin certainly achieved fame as a poet, but she always existed in the shadow of her friend, Anne Sexton. Even the obituary in the Times devotes several paragraphs to Sexton. She was a gifted poet who, like Sylvia Plath, committed suicide after years of struggling with the impulse.

Maxine Kumin

The two friends had an open phone line between their houses. Sexton is described, by her daughter and many others, as self-centered, narcissistic and demanding. I can’t imagine a more difficult friend.

I discovered Kumin’s poems in the New Yorker in the 70s, and was pleased to find a great poet of the everyday, who was not suicidal or difficult. “I was not influenced by women writing poetry,” Kumin is quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle. “There weren’t any women to admire.” She herself became the model for many women, including me, who aspired to write.

What is to be concluded? There should be bridges to rename, but that will not happen. I’m sure that some portion of CitiField will be named Kiner’s Korner, and I’m sure there will be a Maxine Kumin prize in the literary world. Let us just remember that success does not always come with a lot of hoopla.

By Gretchen Gibbs

Governor Christie got himself in trouble over the traffic jam his aides created at the George Washington Bridge partly because emergency vehicles could not get through and because there was the possibility that one 90-year old woman might have died because she did not get to the hospital in time.

We take death seriously in this country. Or do we? I recently finished reading The Healing of America by H.R. Reid, which I highly recommend. I have been avoiding the debate about Obamacare because it is so complicated and so partisan. But Reid, a long-time correspondent for The Washington Post, both explains the Affordable Care Act and presents health care in a straightforward way. He went from country to country with his bad shoulder to see what different health systems would prescribe and charge. In the U.S., doctors recommended a total shoulder replacement, a procedure with many potential side effects and a cost of about $10,000. In India, however, Reid stayed at a clinic for $42 a night, including food and treatments, and found the massage and herbal remedies reduced the pain and increased the mobility of his shoulder.

Reid’s central point is that health care is a moral issue. We are the only industrialized country that does not provide universal health care and which apparently does not believe that health care is a basic human right to which all are entitled. Our constitution says that all of us have a right to life, but apparently we don’t really believe that. When people do not have health care, they can die.

Reid cites a study done in 2000 about the number of preventable deaths that occurred each year because 30 million people did not have health care. The number was 18,314. A similar study, done in 2009 when there were more than 45 million uninsured people, estimated the number to be 44,789.

To be conservative, let us use the smaller number, and let us remember it: 18,314. How should we react when we hear that 18,314 of our citizens die needlessly every year? When approximately 3,000 people were killed at Pearl Harbor, we entered World War II, with an enormous cost of money and lives. When about an equal number were killed on 9/11, we started another costly war.

So when do we begin the war on insurance companies? Our health care plans are not really so different from those in other countries, like Germany and Japan, which also have insurance companies. But rates for procedures are set by the governments of those countries. Only in America do insurance companies make profits, and of course the incentive when you are trying to maximize profits is to charge a lot for everything and to deny care rather than to offer it. Incidentally, this also makes our health care the most expensive of any developed nation as well as about the least effective. We spend 16.5 percent of our GDP on health care (vs. 8.1 percent in Japan), while, according to the World Health Organization, we rank 37th in quality and fairness of the system, behind Costa Rica. We rank 24th in the world in average life expectancy.

I have learned more about Obamacare, and I can see there are good and bad features. Some constraints on insurance companies (good), some burdens on some individuals who will see their payments increase and who have to negotiate a lot of red tape (bad). For me, the biggest plus is that by 2019, 32 million more people will have health insurance, both through Medicaid and through private insurers. Of course, the estimate is that 23 million will be uninsured. There still will be needless deaths of Americans running into the thousands, but we should be cutting down that 18,314 number.

So when are we going to be a real democracy with equal rights for all, with a moral regard for our fellow citizens, and eliminate all those deaths?

By Gretchen Gibbs

What to make of the failure of our New Year’s and other resolutions? I would argue that when we resolve to change our behavior there is a basic paradox that makes it difficult. The harder we try to make ourselves conform to a goal we desire, the less successful we are likely to be. This is particularly true when the body is involved. That is, you may succeed in a resolution to stop seeing someone in an unhealthy relationship, but it’s unlikely that you could successfully resolve not to be attracted to that person.

Most resolutions, especially the ones that fail, tend to involve making a change in our bodies. The most common are to eat less, exercise more, or give up smoking or drinking. I would love to resolve not to be afraid of mice any longer. I can tell myself 20 reasons why mice cannot hurt me, but I know the instant I see one of those skinny tails a shriek will break through my throat. Think of how hard it is to make one’s self fall asleep, and on the other hand, how hard it is to stay awake when one is on the verge of sleep. The body has a mind of its own, so to speak. The more we try to diet, the more appealing that chocolate chip cookie is. It seems as though intentionality brings up the mind-body problem, and the body always wins.

This summer I took a 10-year old girl for a banana split. I began to think about how many banana splits I’d had in my own long life, and concluded it was about three. I made a resolution that I wanted to eat more ice cream. Now there’s an easy resolution, you are thinking. Well, I did get to the Bellvale Creamery in Warwick a few times, and my refrigerator contains a pint of my favorite Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, but in fact I didn’t overdo the ice cream. Something about making ice cream a “good” thing rather than a fatty, sugary weight gainer did the trick, and the body didn’t want it any more than a nice helping of broccoli. Now if I had resolved to give up ice cream, I would probably have eaten quarts more.

Psychologists define will power as the ability to give up the short-term goal for a more desirable long- term goal. In other words, with will power, one can eschew the chocolate chip cookie for the long-term loss of 10 pounds. Studies on will power began with children who were offered a small candy bar the day of the study versus a larger bar the next day. One thing this finding illustrates is that you need to have a really big goal to motivate the resolution. I might well take the small candy bar because I could stop at the store on the way home and buy as big a candy bar as I liked. A big goal for weight loss for many people, especially women, is a wedding. Women seem to find it easy to lose 10 pounds before a wedding even though the weight goes right back on afterwards. Looking svelte at a wedding is apparently an important long-term goal, and people can give up the small candy bar and the cookies for it. Similarly, many (though not all) people can give up smoking if they find out they will otherwise drastically shorten their lives.

If you are going to make resolutions, here are some pointers that you probably don’t want.

–Be sure you have a long-term goal you really care about. Otherwise, you won’t give up the cookies.

–Try to be specific. Don’t resolve to get more exercise; resolve to walk a mile a day.

–Break the resolution down into small steps. Try to find a way to measure it. A chart, perhaps.

–Make it as enjoyable as you can. What you really want is for the activity itself to become rewarding, so you don’t have to keep thinking about the long-term goal. When I want to lose weight, I don’t give up foods, I try to eat five or more fruits and vegetables a day. I like fruits and vegetables, and eating more is a pleasure, not a hardship. If you are going to walk, be sure you have a route you enjoy, and think ahead of time about how you will handle bad weather. Don’t say you’ll walk regardless if you know you won’t.

–Social support. Resolve to walk a mile a day with your friend Caroline – it always helps to have companionship and somebody else who knows it’s hard. Studies find just communicating one’s progress to somebody else increases the likelihood that you’ll carry out the resolution.

–Give yourself some rewards between short-term and long-term. It’s hard to walk a mile a day with a vague goal of better health and some weight loss coming in a year. I was inspired to write this about resolutions after reading Jeff Page’s Zest piece two weeks ago, in which among other resolutions he formed was the intention to give up Spider Solitaire. As a Spider Solitaire addict myself, I wouldn’t dream of trying to give it up. It’s too much fun. Instead, I try to use it as a reward. So, I might play Spider for the amount of time it takes me to walk a mile.

–Recent findings show that will power is strengthened by ingesting small amounts of glucose! So treats are good rewards for carrying out resolutions.

–Forgive yourself your lapses. If you fail, just start again. Everybody fails; that’s the paradox. No point in beating yourself up as well as having failed to complete the resolution. Studies show that we have a limited amount of will power and it runs out.

–Also believing in the power of one’s will helps it work. You can change your behavior and even your whole life if you want to, and avoid falling into the paradox of trying to rule your body with your mind.

adult mosquito

By Gretchen Gibbs

One of the things I liked to do best as a young girl was to lie in the tall grass. I liked staring up at the clouds. I liked the sweet taste of the grasses when you pulled the grain awn out of its socket and sucked on the white stem. I liked to eat the buttercups and sorrel as well. The smell of red clover today is enough to make me gasp in remembrance of things past. There was the hum of insects, the song of birds in the distance, and the sense of escape from the world.

I liked lying in the grass as an adolescent as well. My boyfriend and I “didn’t have no place to go,” as Joni Mitchell put it. We went on endless walks through the local fields and forests. We tried various locales, but tall grasses were the best for keeping us hidden. The worst thing that ever happened to us was a bad case of poison ivy, which we had to keep secret from our parents because of the body parts involved. 

Nowadays I would no more dream of lying in the tall grass, especially without my clothes, than of entering a lion’s den. Ticks are everywhere, and even when I take precautions on a walk, I may find several on me when I return. My cat brings them into the house, so even there I am not completely safe. In addition to Lyme disease, there are now three or four additional kinds of illness carried by the deer tick, as well as others carried by the larger dog tick.

Both The New Yorker and The New York Times have recently published articles on chronic Lyme disease, and the difficulties in treating it. I have several friends who have had Lyme four or five times, and one friend who has the chronic variety, which she is treating with Chinese herbs. I had a patient who was referred for depression, and who turned out to have chronic Lyme, with any depression secondary to the illness.

Then of course there are mosquitoes, and what they carry: malaria, dengue fever, encephalitis, yellow fever, and other viruses, with West Nile being the most recent scare. The ubiquitous flea, with which my cat is covered despite how much toxic chemical from the vet I spread on him, also transmits many viruses dangerous to humans. These include, of course, plague, an outbreak of which occurred not long ago in the southwest.  

This year we have the 17-year cicada hordes, not disease causing, but certainly a nuisance. How about the current curse of bedbugs, such that many people are afraid to travel because they will have to open their suitcases in that hotel room frequented by who knows whom. Even libraries are having to take precautions against bedbugs. Some schools are reporting an epidemic of lice. On the other hand, our insect friends the fireflies, Monarch butterflies, and bees are on the decline.

What I am saying is that our relationship to nature has changed, and I think it is largely because of insects. It may be that we simply know more about insects – in the Middle Ages, nobody knew what caused the Black Plague. But I think it is the bugs themselves. They have existed for millions of years, adapting to whatever environment presented itself, and they seem to have got the hang of twenty first century civilization. (I am not even mentioning the insects of the Third World.) Insects have conquered us. They win. I have to stop writing now so I can put on long socks, covered by long pants, with rubber bands around the ankles, and a long sleeved shirt. I have to mow the lawn. Got to keep those grasses down.