May

PTSD treatment in Buffalo is readily available. Asking for a referral from a primary care physician or other health care practitioner means beginning a conversation about it. To help do that, those seeking treatment by licensed psychotherapists might check out Psychology Today’s online listing.

Fill in the zip code, click on the list of specialties, and then scroll to find “Trauma and PTSD.” That goes to a list of twenty-four local therapists who specialize in it, and a short description of their work. Then ask your own medical practitioners for recommendations.

Recently, a study has yielded information that should help PTSD sufferers understand their own reactions. It showed that they might not distinguish between a stimulus associated with disaster in the past and the same stimulus later when nothing terrible is happening. Dr. Rony Paz of the Weitzmann Institute’s Neurobiology Department says this made sense in the evolutionary past of human beings.

At BJ’s last week, I browsed through cookbooks and found that Gwyneth Paltrow’s brisket recipe isn’t all that different from mine. She and her family put their various brisket recipes side by side—from the Lipton onion soup version to the Sephardic in the process of creating one for her book.

What her recipe has in common with mine is the slow braising, a liquid that blends a bouquet garni with the natural juices of the pot roast, and the taste of home cooking. Hers uses wine and chicken broth, and mine uses a concentrated vegetable browning sauce, onions, carrots, and paprika.  Here’s the method, whichever recipe you use:

A 3-pound brisket

Two medium or one large onion, peeled and sliced in rounds

Two carrots (organic juice carrots if your supermarket carries them), in large slices

Two baking potatoes, peeled and sliced in 1-inch rounds

Boiling water

2 tbsp. Kitchen Bouquet browning sauce

2 tbsp. canola oil

Salt, pepper, paprika

In a Dutch oven or 5-quart pot, heat the oil and sauté the onion slices until transparent but not browned. Sprinkle salt and pepper onto both sides of the brisket, place it in the pot with the onions, and brown it over medium high heat on each side.

Remove from the heat and add boiling water until the water is about half-way up the side of the brisket. Add the Kitchen Bouquet and the carrots. Return the pot to the heat, cover it, and lower the heat so that the cooking liquid is at a low simmer. Check every 20 minutes or so to make sure the liquid doesn’t boil away, adding ¼ cup boiling water as necessary.

Simmer for about 1 ½ hours, until the meat is fork-tender (try a piece to check). Then place the potatoes around the brisket and sprinkle them with salt and paprika. Using baking potatoes thickens the juices slightly, and the paprika will make its way into the juices and give them additional color and flavor.

Serve with additional potatoes or broad noodles. The leftovers are even better than the first day.

Linda Chalmer Zemel, Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner and Buffalo Books Examiner. Originally published on Examiner.com

As a former cookie-baking, station wagon-driving soccer mom, sure, I get it when columnist John Rosemond wonders about the ratio of family time to kids’ activities. But his statement that activities that school kids need parents to take them to and watch them doing cause stress doesn’t provide an “aha moment.” In his column, Rosemond said:

“How about spending a disproportionate amount of family time taking children to and watching them in activities that will be completely irrelevant to anything they will be doing as adults?”

Parents on the sidelines laughingly compete with each other over the fact that they have already been to twenty-four soccer games and there is still most of the season left. But family life isn’t diminished by spending warm summer days on the sideline. Instead, time on the sidelines is part of family life and enhances it.

Relationships and reaching out to others are part of what kids should learn in their family life. Carpool moms and dads have opportunities to become long term friends attending each other’s life events with joy, compassion, or sorrow as needed. Parents don’t have to go looking for a manufactured way to teach their kids empathy and compassion when it is sitting right in the back seat.

In my family’s experience, soccer became an extension of our own neighborhood into the larger neighborhoods of our kids’ teams. Some of the moms and dads were chaperones when the teams went to Europe or Canada to play in travel-team tournaments. When a soccer mom died in an automobile accident when our sons were freshmen in college, virtually the entire high school team came home for the weekend from their various colleges to support their old teammate.

Not just for learning how a particular game is played, taking kids to and watching them in their activities provides models and experience for a family life of creative thinking, positive relationships with others, and fun as well as perseverance and cooperation. If family life if disproportionately insular, kids miss out on opportunities to see how other people live, think, and act in the world, essential to developing an internal compass for right and wrong. And they benefit from finding out on larger fields than their own families whether they shine at defense or are better placed as a striker.

Of course when kids are young, they need the generosity of others to get to their activities and someone they love and admire to enjoy their successes. But those are the templates for the feelings of happiness and success that all parents wish for their children. And the activities themselves help kids develop their ability to create their own game plans for decades to come.

Linda Chalmer Zemel, Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner and Buffalo Books Examiner. Originally published on Examiner.com

John Bisognano, M.D., Ph.D, an expert when it comes to hypertension, and Kevin Woolf, M.D., a cardiology fellow at the University of Rochester Medical Center, are featured in the September issue of the Journal of Clinical Hypertension. According to URMC  materials distributed to Science Daily, they have conducted the most inclusive review of non-drug interventions for treating hypertension ever done.

Bisognano, professor of Medicine and director of Outpatient Cardiology at the URMC, said: "Right now we're seeing a cultural shift where an increasing number of people want to avoid standard pharmaceuticals….We're also seeing a growing number of patients who require a large number of drugs to control their blood pressure and are looking for something else to help manage it."

Woolf was quoted as saying: "Patients have different backgrounds and different approaches to living their lives…. "This is where the art of medicine comes in; getting to know patients and what they will and will not embrace can help physicians identify different therapies that suit their patients' habits and that will hopefully make a difference for them."

A book review:  WITCH HUNT

To my readers: This book review that follows here was written by Emily Tanner, who reviews fiction for Examiner.com/Atlanta. Witch hunts today are like the witch hunts in 1692—in more ways that you would ever want to think.

WITCH HUNT is a novel of intrigue, a psychological drama, and an investigation into a mindset we thought had been forever banished from the national dialogue.

The book begins twenty-five years from now, when three additional eight-year presidential administrations have come and gone. Lee’s story takes her grandchildren back to 2010. With some trepidation, a medical anthropologist who guests on Lee’s radio show researches the apparent intrusion of the past into the present. Together, they find a frightening way out, all the more intriguing because it is immersed in both historical fact and situations straight out of today’s headlines.

The book is fiction, but includes my bibliography of books, documents, and journals about the Salem witch trials and politics. Amazon offers a free Kindle reader download to computers and other reading devices with the purchase of the book. Go to http://www.amazon.com/Witch-Hunt-ebook/dp/B005FI4O7M for the book’s Amazon page.

Thank goodness we don’t have a caste system in the US. But we are veering toward it each time we don’t alleviate problems with individual rights to healthy, affordable food.

Here’s one way to put our difficulties with eating and affordability into perspective: a PBS television program just last evening that explored a situation that occurs in India every 48 years. At intervals, bamboo trees produce round, green, appetizing fruit that attracts rats. But the rats, which reproduce in abundance when there is a food bonus like that, also strip other plants of food sources that people depend on for their own nutrition. The result is that human parents sometimes have to walk a hundred miles to find rice or other food for their families, who are literally starving because there food sources have been depleted.

Healthy eating, including too much weight gain, is a societal issue, and so we should seek societal as well as personal answers. In Buffalo, co-ops and urban farms are in the mix. Individuals can and do speak up and raise chickens in back yards, and some grow crops on empty lots. Vegetable gardens have been planted outside a community food bank.

In 1930 and 1931, the first seven volumes of the Nancy Drew series were written by Mildred A. Wirt Benson, the first Carolyn Keene. But the series spawned more mysteries than the identities of the ghostwriters. For one, where exactly is River Heights? On a rainy day in Buffalo last month, I was at the coop building at Antiques World and bought a set of 25 vintage Nancy Drews. That was enough to start me sleuthing.

Iowa, Benson’s home state, is most often guessed by Nancy Drew aficionados on an online survey on Nancydrewsleuths.com. Some others think Ohio, Illinois, or New Jersey. Others believe that the location, like other myths, shifted to meet the requirements of each storyteller who followed the publisher’s outlines. Besides, the first 34 volumes were revised by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who with her sister, Edna, continued their father’s Nancy dynasty after his death.  

You haven’t a clue what you are getting into when you start seeing Nancy Drew books as a meta-trove of clues about River Heights. Some Nancy mysteries are solved more easily than its location. We find out pretty quickly that Ned Nickerson wasn’t in the first six Nancy Drew books because Nancy didn’t meet him until Volume seven, The Clue in the Diary, published in 1932. At first she thought he was stealing her car. But Ned was interested in solving the mystery she was involved in, and used it as a reason to drop her house. She liked him enough to ask Dad what he thought of him.

“Nice boy,” he said. Inwardly he was thinking that she seemed to be more interested in Ned than in her other dates. But as Mildred A. Wirt Benson has Nancy tell us at the Lilac Inn in 1930, “For the present, my steady partner is going to be mystery.”

And close chums Bess and George didn’t show up until Volume 5 in 1931, in The Secret at Shadow Ranch. Right in paragraph one, we find out that, although we have never heard of them before, Bess and George are her two best friends. At a time when national spirits often mimicked the Great Depression, Nancy arrived by plane in Phoenix to meet them for a dude ranch vacation far from River Heights.

Dates, chums, and economic doldrums aside, what Nancy is interested in is deductive thinking--whether or not it is because losing Mom at age three propelled her into a young adulthood of looking for her. The same deductive thinking can produce River Heights for generations of readers for whom River Heights is never definitively pinpointed.

Let’s start with “Where is Twin Elms?” More about the context for this shortly, but first clue: It is located just a couple of miles out of Cliffwood, which we can figure out was situated between River Heights and the airport. Second, we are actually told that Twin Elms was “old Colonial home” built in 1785. That’s what Helen Corning says on page 25 of The Hidden Staircase, and she has street cred: the place belongs to her great-grandmother.

The third clue that completes the triangulation: The second ghostwriter, Walter Karig, in Volume 8, Nancy’s Mysterious Letter offers a detailed narration from start to finish of a drive Nancy takes with her chums, Bess and George. They are on their way to spend a weekend with their boyfriends away at college. Karig lasted only through volumes 8, 9, and 10, and then revealed to the Library of Congress that he had written them, a no-no for Carolyn Keene ghostwriters.

We have to use deductive reasoning like Nancy’s accompanied by a little of her intuition and preparedness to find the clues. Once we have River Heights by the scruff, then we can call them “evidence.” But not before, as her criminal lawyer father might have cautioned her.

When Nancy takes Dad to the airport the morning she and her friend Helen go to Twin Elms, he says that when he returns, he will stop off at Cliffwood on his way home. He doesn’t say he will detour to get there or go out of his way to get there, or that it will be a nuisance but he will get there.

“Stopping off” has a nice, casual, unhurried, “It’s on my way, anyway” ring to it, clearly a clue that it will take place enroute to River Heights. It is entirely likely that Nancy would drive maybe three quarters of an hour from River Heights to the airport to see Dad off, and that Helen lives somewhere in between but closer the airport. Cliffwood is about three-quarters of an hour from there, in 1930 probably 20 miles going 35 miles per hour.

We know this because after Nancy sees Dad off, she drives to Helen’s house. They drive a bit while Helen tells her she had gotten engaged just the evening before. There is the obligatory stop at the curb for a hug, and then the discussion of wedding plans for the rest of the drive to Cliffwood. But they are there “before they knew it.” True, times flies when you are having fun, but “before they knew it”?  Maybe twenty minutes? A half hour?

When they get to Cliffwood, Helen tells her that Twin Oaks is about two miles out of town: “Go down Main Street and turn right at the fork.” It takes ten more minutes, the narrator says, until the girls see it from the road, with its stone wall and tall elms, oaks, and maples. So they must have had to ride down Main Street through Cliffwood for a few miles before taking the fork, at maybe 35 miles an hour on the average--no interstate with a 65-mile speed limit.

So Cliffwood might reasonably be a half-hour from the airport, on the way back to River Heights. And what is Twin Elms like? It’s an old Colonial mansion build in 1785. Out of the towns suggested on the Nancy Sleuth site, only New Jersey would satisfy the location of an old Colonial mansion built in 1785. Ohio and Iowa don’t make it for the same reason that New Jersey does: There couldn’t have been an old Colonial home in those states built in 1785.

Surveyors were sent into Ohio in 1796, according to an annotated atlas, and they had to camp along the Cuyahoga River in what now is Cleveland. So a 1785 Colonial mansion didn’t welcome them. The British had warships on Lake Erie until the War of 1812. In the 1800’s, settlers from Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky moved in to establish farms near the borders of their home states, and onto land already set aside in the Western Reserve for Connecticut settlers.

Iowa housed a major trail that ‘49er’s took west through Des Moines, spawning a wagon-train station in Council Bluffs. Settled by immigrants who moved west between 1850 and 1880, Iowa was hardly the spot where an old Colonial home would have been erected in 1785.

More corroboration: In volume 8, Nancy’s Mysterious Letter, the first one written by someone else, Nancy stops by the postal inspector’s office in River Heights to have some letters X-rayed. To a Nancy reader, this is just an ordinary sleuthing errand, but nonetheless one that can be mined for clues. It doesn’t disappoint us. Immediately afterward the efficient X-ray, on page 105, she picks up Bess and George so they can all visit their boyfriends at college for the weekend, and “they rode toward Emerson.” That’s where Ned goes to school, and we already know he belongs to a fraternity there because he was wearing his pin when Nancy met him in Volume 7.

As the girls drive along, Nancy tells them what she found out at the post office. Plump but pretty Bess spots a tearoom where they can stop for lunch and says that it has been a long time since breakfast. Now, we know that Nancy had been ready to leave the house since 8, because we are told that on page 103. How long could X-raying the letters take at the post office? Nancy asks that very question of Mr. Wernick, the postal inspector. He advises her to wait, and it takes the technician just a few minutes to get the results.

Let’s say that the post office in a town in the 1930’s might have opened at 8:30 or 9. So perhaps it’s 9 or 9:15 by the time she leaves there to get Bess and George at their houses. They load their luggage, Nancy says hi to their moms, maybe there is a five or ten minute drive from one to the other, and they are off, riding toward Emerson by 9:45 or10.

There is chatter that deserves direct quotes in the text before Bess gets hungry, so maybe there is also more small talk that didn’t make it into quotation marks. It could reasonably be a little before noon when they stopped for lunch because, as Bess says, it’s a long time since breakfast. Nancy even cautions Bess and George that they “must not spend too much time” and the narrator confirms that “They ate quickly.” (105).

The plot thickens. Still riding two hours after lunch at the tearoom, the girls see the towers of Emerson College (105). As young Nancy Drew fans find out when they are old enough to start their college tours, Emerson College is in Boston, about a four-hour ride from the New York City suburbs. Of course, in the 1930’s, Nancy and her chums would have had a longer ride because cars didn’t go as fast and speed limits were different.

If they left the tearoom around 12:30 and arrived at Emerson College at say 2:30, Ned comments that they made good time make sense (106). Then a short time later, Burt, George’s date, has to go to a rehearsal for the play he will be in that evening. An afternoon rehearsal the same day as the play might go for over two hours, perhaps a run-through with notes from a previous dress rehearsal. If it started at 3:00, the cast would have dinner at 5:30 or so and be back by 7 to dress. The play would start at 8.

There are clues to New Jersey again in Volume 10, Password to Larkspur Lane, when Ned and his two buddies just happen to be hired as camp counselors at the same time that Nancy and her two chums have made arrangements to be on the same lake solving another mystery.

On page 96, “Tons of ocean sand had been transported overland to make a beach for the camp.”  Nancy would pounce on the words “ocean” and “overland” if she were reading this book.  If she were writing this article, she would say (after offering to set the table),  ‘It is unlikely that ocean beach sand would be taken overland to a camp in the Midwest during the Great Depression. We must be somewhere in the original thirteen colonies, don’t you agree, and not far from the ocean?’  Trucking all that sand to Ohio or Iowa just defies the kind of common sense, not to mention budgetary considerations, that a summer camp owner would have had in the 1930’s, or in 1966 when this volume was revised.

Intrepid explorers will latch on immediately to a shiny clue in Volume 12, The Message in the Hollow Oak, after Benson took back the reins. Nancy has an opportunity to visit her Aunt Eloise in New York City. Of course she flies there. Bess and George arrive at noon to take her to the airport and she has reached her aunt’s apartment house by mid-afternoon. Three hours could mean there was a airport maybe a three quarter of an hour from the Drew residence in River Heights. And just suppose it was at least a half-hour cab ride from a New York City airport to Aunt Eloise’s apartment. That leaves maybe one-and-a-half to two hours for checking in and getting on the plane, the flight itself, and then reclaiming baggage and getting a cab.  New Jersey leaves Iowa, Ohio, and Illinois in the dust.

Deductive reasoning can get you far. Especially if you can unstick your partner’s foot from a rocky crag while skindiving; win a golf tournament with a bandaged hand in the afternoon after chasing a ghost down over a rickety bridge in the morning; and live to confront counterfeiters in a hidden cave because you have tallied the time between a warning bell and rushing waters that would drown anyone else.

Before “24,” McGyver, and Charlie’s Angels, there was Nancy Drew. And because she still exists, River Heights has to have a location, like Neverland does, if only we are brave and smart enough to find it.

The Buffalo Books column writes about authors, events, and books linked to the greater Buffalo area. Linda Chalmer Zemel has been a News Book Reviewer for The Buffalo News on contemporary novels. She retired from SUNY Monroe Community College as adjunct assistant professor of English. Currently she teaches writing at Medaille College, where she has also taught Adolescent Education to prospective secondary school English teachers in the Graduate School of Education. She is also the Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner for Examiner.com.

http://www.examiner.com/alternative-medicine-in-buffalo/commentary-reading-and-the-need-for-belonging-turn-out-to-be-related You haven’t got a clue: Triangulating River Heights

By Linda Chalmer Zemel

In 1930 and 1931, the first seven volumes of the Nancy Drew series were written by Mildred A. Wirt Benson, the first Carolyn Keene. But the series spawned more mysteries than the identities of the ghostwriters. For one, where exactly is River Heights? On a rainy day in Buffalo last month, I was at the coop building at Antiques World and bought a set of 25 vintage Nancy Drews. That was enough to start me sleuthing.

Iowa, Benson’s home state, is most often guessed by Nancy Drew aficionados on an online survey on Nancydrewsleuths.com. Some others think Ohio, Illinois, or New Jersey. Others believe that the location, like other myths, shifted to meet the requirements of each storyteller who followed the publisher’s outlines. Besides, the first 34 volumes were revised by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, who with her sister, Edna, continued their father’s Nancy dynasty after his death. 

You haven’t a clue what you are getting into when you start seeing Nancy Drew books as a meta-trove of clues about River Heights. Some Nancy mysteries are solved more easily than its location. We find out pretty quickly that Ned Nickerson wasn’t in the first six Nancy Drew books because Nancy didn’t meet him until Volume seven, The Clue in the Diary, published in 1932. At first she thought he was stealing her car. But Ned was interested in solving the mystery she was involved in, and used it as a reason to drop her house. She liked him enough to ask Dad what he thought of him.

“Nice boy,” he said. Inwardly he was thinking that she seemed to be more interested in Ned than in her other dates. But as Mildred A. Wirt Benson has Nancy tell us at the Lilac Inn in 1930, “For the present, my steady partner is going to be mystery.”

And close chums Bess and George didn’t show up until Volume 5 in 1931, in The Secret at Shadow Ranch. Right in paragraph one, we find out that, although we have never heard of them before, Bess and George are her two best friends. At a time when national spirits often mimicked the Great Depression, Nancy arrived by plane in Phoenix to meet them for a dude ranch vacation far from River Heights.

Dates, chums, and economic doldrums aside, what Nancy is interested in is deductive thinking--whether or not it is because losing Mom at age three propelled her into a young adulthood of looking for her. The same deductive thinking can produce River Heights for generations of readers for whom River Heights is never definitively pinpointed.

Let’s start with “Where is Twin Elms?” More about the context for this shortly, but first clue: It is located just a couple of miles out of Cliffwood, which we can figure out was situated between River Heights and the airport. Second, we are actually told that Twin Elms was “old Colonial home” built in 1785. That’s what Helen Corning says on page 25 of The Hidden Staircase, and she has street cred: the place belongs to her great-grandmother.

The third clue that completes the triangulation: The second ghostwriter, Walter Karig, in Volume 8, Nancy’s Mysterious Letter offers a detailed narration from start to finish of a drive Nancy takes with her chums, Bess and George. They are on their way to spend a weekend with their boyfriends away at college. Karig lasted only through volumes 8, 9, and 10, and then revealed to the Library of Congress that he had written them, a no-no for Carolyn Keene ghostwriters.

We have to use deductive reasoning like Nancy’s accompanied by a little of her intuition and preparedness to find the clues. Once we have River Heights by the scruff, then we can call them “evidence.” But not before, as her criminal lawyer father might have cautioned her.

When Nancy takes Dad to the airport the morning she and her friend Helen go to Twin Elms, he says that when he returns, he will stop off at Cliffwood on his way home. He doesn’t say he will detour to get there or go out of his way to get there, or that it will be a nuisance but he will get there.

“Stopping off” has a nice, casual, unhurried, “It’s on my way, anyway” ring to it, clearly a clue that it will take place enroute to River Heights. It is entirely likely that Nancy would drive maybe three quarters of an hour from River Heights to the airport to see Dad off, and that Helen lives somewhere in between but closer the airport. Cliffwood is about three-quarters of an hour from there, in 1930 probably 20 miles going 35 miles per hour.

We know this because after Nancy sees Dad off, she drives to Helen’s house. They drive a bit while Helen tells her she had gotten engaged just the evening before. There is the obligatory stop at the curb for a hug, and then the discussion of wedding plans for the rest of the drive to Cliffwood. But they are there “before they knew it.” True, times flies when you are having fun, but “before they knew it”?  Maybe twenty minutes? A half hour?

When they get to Cliffwood, Helen tells her that Twin Oaks is about two miles out of town: “Go down Main Street and turn right at the fork.” It takes ten more minutes, the narrator says, until the girls see it from the road, with its stone wall and tall elms, oaks, and maples. So they must have had to ride down Main Street through Cliffwood for a few miles before taking the fork, at maybe 35 miles an hour on the average--no interstate with a 65-mile speed limit.

So Cliffwood might reasonably be a half-hour from the airport, on the way back to River Heights. And what is Twin Elms like? It’s an old Colonial mansion build in 1785. Out of the towns suggested on the Nancy Sleuth site, only New Jersey would satisfy the location of an old Colonial mansion built in 1785. Ohio and Iowa don’t make it for the same reason that New Jersey does: There couldn’t have been an old Colonial home in those states built in 1785.

Surveyors were sent into Ohio in 1796, according to an annotated atlas, and they had to camp along the Cuyahoga River in what now is Cleveland. So a 1785 Colonial mansion didn’t welcome them. The British had warships on Lake Erie until the War of 1812. In the 1800’s, settlers from Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky moved in to establish farms near the borders of their home states, and onto land already set aside in the Western Reserve for Connecticut settlers.

Iowa housed a major trail that ‘49er’s took west through Des Moines, spawning a wagon-train station in Council Bluffs. Settled by immigrants who moved west between 1850 and 1880, Iowa was hardly the spot where an old Colonial home would have been erected in 1785.

More corroboration: In volume 8, Nancy’s Mysterious Letter, the first one written by someone else, Nancy stops by the postal inspector’s office in River Heights to have some letters X-rayed. To a Nancy reader, this is just an ordinary sleuthing errand, but nonetheless one that can be mined for clues. It doesn’t disappoint us. Immediately afterward the efficient X-ray, on page 105, she picks up Bess and George so they can all visit their boyfriends at college for the weekend, and “they rode toward Emerson.” That’s where Ned goes to school, and we already know he belongs to a fraternity there because he was wearing his pin when Nancy met him in Volume 7.

As the girls drive along, Nancy tells them what she found out at the post office. Plump but pretty Bess spots a tearoom where they can stop for lunch and says that it has been a long time since breakfast. Now, we know that Nancy had been ready to leave the house since 8, because we are told that on page 103. How long could X-raying the letters take at the post office? Nancy asks that very question of Mr. Wernick, the postal inspector. He advises her to wait, and it takes the technician just a few minutes to get the results.

Let’s say that the post office in a town in the 1930’s might have opened at 8:30 or 9. So perhaps it’s 9 or 9:15 by the time she leaves there to get Bess and George at their houses. They load their luggage, Nancy says hi to their moms, maybe there is a five or ten minute drive from one to the other, and they are off, riding toward Emerson by 9:45 or10.

There is chatter that deserves direct quotes in the text before Bess gets hungry, so maybe there is also more small talk that didn’t make it into quotation marks. It could reasonably be a little before noon when they stopped for lunch because, as Bess says, it’s a long time since breakfast. Nancy even cautions Bess and George that they “must not spend too much time” and the narrator confirms that “They ate quickly.” (105).

The plot thickens. Still riding two hours after lunch at the tearoom, the girls see the towers of Emerson College (105). As young Nancy Drew fans find out when they are old enough to start their college tours, Emerson College is in Boston, about a four-hour ride from the New York City suburbs. Of course, in the 1930’s, Nancy and her chums would have had a longer ride because cars didn’t go as fast and speed limits were different.

If they left the tearoom around 12:30 and arrived at Emerson College at say 2:30, Ned comments that they made good time make sense (106). Then a short time later, Burt, George’s date, has to go to a rehearsal for the play he will be in that evening. An afternoon rehearsal the same day as the play might go for over two hours, perhaps a run-through with notes from a previous dress rehearsal. If it started at 3:00, the cast would have dinner at 5:30 or so and be back by 7 to dress. The play would start at 8.

There are clues to New Jersey again in Volume 10, Password to Larkspur Lane, when Ned and his two buddies just happen to be hired as camp counselors at the same time that Nancy and her two chums have made arrangements to be on the same lake solving another mystery.

On page 96, “Tons of ocean sand had been transported overland to make a beach for the camp.”  Nancy would pounce on the words “ocean” and “overland” if she were reading this book.  If she were writing this article, she would say (after offering to set the table),  ‘It is unlikely that ocean beach sand would be taken overland to a camp in the Midwest during the Great Depression. We must be somewhere in the original thirteen colonies, don’t you agree, and not far from the ocean?’  Trucking all that sand to Ohio or Iowa just defies the kind of common sense, not to mention budgetary considerations, that a summer camp owner would have had in the 1930’s, or in 1966 when this volume was revised.

Intrepid explorers will latch on immediately to a shiny clue in Volume 12, The Message in the Hollow Oak, after Benson took back the reins. Nancy has an opportunity to visit her Aunt Eloise in New York City. Of course she flies there. Bess and George arrive at noon to take her to the airport and she has reached her aunt’s apartment house by mid-afternoon. Three hours could mean there was a airport maybe a three quarter of an hour from the Drew residence in River Heights. And just suppose it was at least a half-hour cab ride from a New York City airport to Aunt Eloise’s apartment. That leaves maybe one-and-a-half to two hours for checking in and getting on the plane, the flight itself, and then reclaiming baggage and getting a cab.  New Jersey leaves Iowa, Ohio, and Illinois in the dust.

Deductive reasoning can get you far. Especially if you can unstick your partner’s foot from a rocky crag while skindiving; win a golf tournament with a bandaged hand in the afternoon after chasing a ghost down over a rickety bridge in the morning; and live to confront counterfeiters in a hidden cave because you have tallied the time between a warning bell and rushing waters that would drown anyone else.

Before “24,” McGyver, and Charlie’s Angels, there was Nancy Drew. And because she still exists, River Heights has to have a location, like Neverland does, if only we are brave and smart enough to find it.

Linda Chalmer Zemel, Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner and Buffalo Books Examiner. Originally published on Examiner.com

Westminster Presbyterian Church, the Islamic Society of the Niagara Frontier, and Temple Beth Zion are working together on Sunday, May 22, 2011 in their annual project called Mitzvah Day. Congregants will go out together in teams of from five to twenty people to twenty-six social service sites, some of which are perfect for families working together.

Captains for each site come from all three congregations, and have worked together to create opportunities for service and benefits that will last all year. They will be gardening at several locations, including the Martin Luther King Park, Benedict House, Conner’s Children’s Center, Compass House, Gilda’s Club, Tifft Nature Preserve; learning to build with Habitat for Humanity; cleaning and cooking at Friends of the Night People and Ronald McDonald House; sewing and knitting to benefit Haven House and The Community Afghan Project; building playground sandboxes at the Jewish Community Center, hosting a party for chronically ill children at Women and Children’s Hospital, just to name a few.

A new way of viewing dreams? Scientists say that the brain processes our experiences to consolidate memory. What dreams do is tell us that this is taking place. That means that they not only help us learn various tasks, but also help us apply information

The April 22, 2010, online issue of Current Biiology carries the study done at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The senior author was Robert Stickgold, PhD, Director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at BIDMC and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

He was quoted on Science Daily http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100422153753.htm as saying that "What's got us really excited, is that after nearly 100 years of debate about the function of dreams, this study tells us that dreams are the brain's way of processing, integrating and really understanding new information." He also said that this consolidation of memory may be one of the reasons that evolution produced sleep.

Of the 99 study participants who received training in learning a virtual maze, some were told to nap for 90 minutes afterward and others not to nap. The nappers who dreamed showed ten times more improvement on the maze tasks afterward than the nappers who didn’t dream about the maze. Not only that, people who stay awake following the first test perform worse on the next one, even if they think about the maze between tests.

The first author, Erin Wamsley, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at BIDMC and Harvard Medical School, was quotes as saying,” "These dreamers described various scenarios -- seeing people at checkpoints in a maze, being lost in a bat cave, or even just hearing the background music from the computer game."

She also said that "Our [nonconscious] brain works on the things that it deems are most important…Every day, we are gathering and encountering tremendous amounts of information and new experiences…It would seem that our dreams are asking the question, 'How do I use this information to inform my life?'"

The study was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health. It can be accessed at Wamsley et al. Dreaming of a Learning Task Is Associated with Enhanced Sleep-Dependent Memory Consolidation. Current Biology, 2010; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.03.027

An invitation

This spring, Linda will again be facilitating a five-week dream circle. Dream circles are small groups who are interested in keeping track of their dreams and gaining insights through discussing them. The five sessions will take place over five weeks. At the end of five weeks, those who want to sign up for another five weeks can do so, and new participants can join. There is a fee. For more information and to register, email Linda at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Linda is the author of Dreaming Your Dharma: Beyond Intuition (Catchfire Press, March, 2000).

Linda Chalmer Zemel, Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner and Buffalo Books Examiner. Originally published on Examiner.com

An invitation to the new National Institute for Civil Discourse: Come to Buffalo!

The National Institute for Civil Discourse that the University of Arizona is establishing has an admirable aim: to create an atmosphere and a vehicle in which compromise can take place for political parties and views.  First of all, its goals recognize that differences not only exist, but that differences have legitimacy. Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush will be honorary chairmen.

Dr. Brint Milward, director of the University of Arizona School of Government and Public Policy, was quoted this morning as saying that political disagreements include those from the grass roots on up to the top. The institute will focus on these.

In Buffalo as in other cities where policies that are political in nature sometimes result in harassment, this model for resolution is a welcome addition to the toolbox. Harassment has significant negative effects, and it comes from an equally significant group of traits characteristic of those who promote it as a method of chilling reasonable discourse.

Chocolate is a hot topic in medical circles. Several substances found in chocolate may contribute to the chocolate-induced feeling of well-being. According to chocolate.org, they include:

• Small quantities of cannabis

• Small quantities of caffeine

• Tryptophan, which helps in the production of serotonin

• Phenylethylamine, which already exists in the brain and peaks during orgasm.

Regions of the country always have their own chocolate candy favorites. Locally, sponge candy is what spongecandy.com calls one of those “Buffalo-centric” foods, making Buffalo even, they say, “the center of the sponge candy universe.” On behalf of their roadfood.com adventures, travel-and-food-writers Jane and Michael Stern came to Buffalo. They broadcast lush descriptions of numerous local candy stores and their sponge candy varieties during their spot on public radio’s “The Splendid Table.”

Granted, sponge candy is not the recommended plain dark chocolate with its benefits per cacao bean. The Cleveland Clinic says that dark chocolate appears to retain the highest level of flavonoids during processing. Flavonoids, their research says:

• Are thought to help reduce platelet activation

• May affect the relaxation capabilities of blood vessels

• May positively affect the balance of certain hormone-like compounds called eicosanoids, which are thought to play a role in cardiovascular health.

They also say that more research is needed to determine just how much chocolate consumption will bring about cardioprotective benefits.

Chances are that humans will always be seeking ways to enhance sexual feelings. On February 8, the Washington Post even talked about it, but in terms of testosterone, not cacao beans. Rosemary Basson, interviewed for the article, is the director of the Sexual Medicine Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. According to the article, she has interviewed 6,000 women throughout the course of her 22-year career in sexual medicine.

She “agreed that a neurochemical drug has the potential to help boost arousal in a small percentage of women, but overall she sounded skeptical. "Look," she explained, "if there was a drug that was so potent that it could overcome all misgivings we have about ourselves, our sexual image, our uncertainty about our sexual partners, the kids banging at our bedroom door, you could not make it legal. It would be slipped into drinks. What are people looking for?"

Maybe chocolate?

Linda Chalmer Zemel, Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner and Buffalo Books Examiner. Originally published on Examiner.com

Some years ago, I took a series of pottery classes in Rochester. The studio was on Monroe Avenue in an old remodeled firehouse that also offered a co-op grocery and a handcrafted bookbindery. Classes met for over three hours at a clip, so there was time to complete one part of a project each session. Conversations while we were working on projects were spontaneous and meaningful.

The studio was staffed by an excellent craftsman who happened also to teach well, and the students were mostly adults who were beginners like me. There were several pottery wheels, so each student had one to use for the entire time, and the fee included the clay and the instruction as well as the use of the studio. It was a non-credit class, and so of course, there were no grades--just what you made, and you took that home. Wow. What freedom.

The tools were interesting, the projects were highly individualized, and the atmosphere was clearly that of a workroom with varied people busy on intriguing projects. But something else—well, a few things-- about that experience remained with me long after the series was over.

Looking for a high?

Walk into any bookstore this holiday season, and the aisles are filled with people looking for just the right book for giving. The rustle of new paper and the click of an electronic reader are a treat. Then add “Helper’s High” to that feeling.

Research with over 3000 volunteers showed that in directly helping someone else (www.allanluks.com), Helper’s High happens. Similar to runner’s high, the release of endorphins gives the helper “elation followed by calm.”

What’s more, Helper’s High lasts. Just remembering the experience of helping brings the feeling back.

The Johns Hopkins Civility Project website reminds us that especially when helping isn’t an obligation, hormones and neurotransmitters are released that strengthen the immune system. Allan Luks’ research showed that people who volunteer regularly are ten times more likely to be in good health than people who don’t.

And so, back to reading: The simple fact of being able to read is not just a simple fact. Kids and grandkids go through developmental stages that we all recognize on their way to being able to read. They point to pictures as we say the words. They say the words with us. They say the words as we point to the pictures. They decode a few simple words. And when they are “getting it,” reading is more than just being able to read while sitting next to you with a favorite book. It is being able to read anything, forever.

Chances are if you are reading this, you already know that. You have most likely participated in helping your own child or grandchild or someone else’s child or grandchild read-- just by providing a book and your own enjoyment of it.
But according to statistics from Literacy Volunteers of Buffalo & Erie County (www.literacybuffalo.org), there is also a different picture to consider in Western New York. Among others, these are some of their literacy FAQ’s:

• 1 in 5 residents of Erie County is functionally illiterate.
• 1 in 3 residents of the City of Buffalo is functionally illiterate.
• On a national level, for every $1 spent by Literacy Volunteers to tutor adults, $33 in economic benefit is returned to the overall economy. (Economic Impact Analysis conducted by AT Kearney, 1999)
• Parents who can’t read are likely to have children who can’t read well.
• 61% of low-income homes have no books in them.
• Between 41-44% of adults with the lowest literacy skills live in poverty. (Based on federal poverty guidelines)
• 85% of juvenile offenders have reading problems.
• 76% of adults on public assistance are illiterate or unable to read more than the simplest of texts.

And there are success stories. Among them, in 2009-2010 alone, for students active in their programs:

• 6 obtained a job
• 15 retained their current job
• 19 improved their current job
• 1 earned their GED
• 5 entered other education or training
• 3 reduced their public assistance
• 18 attained consumer skills
• 14 increased involvement in their children’s education
• 12 increased involvement in community activities
• 1 registered to vote
• 3 obtained US citizenship
• 6 met a work-based goal

Read to Succeed, another local agency, has gathered numbers that show that when children start behind, they stay behind. Pre-kindergarten reading readiness is essential so that they don’t fall behind at that point. Why? Because they are more likely to stay behind even at that stage, and the difficulty in catching up doesn’t go away.

Their programs have shown that:

“In the first six months of the program, RTSB closed the gap by a year for both three- and four-year old children. The majority of the 200 children in the program are on track to meet or have already exceeded the Buffalo Public Schools' Kindergarten expectations despite the fact that 98% of these children live in poverty, and many were developmentally behind in literacy skills when the program began.”

Statistics show that literacy education does work. In a world where we have to remind ourselves to look for unforseen consequences, the consequences of not being able to read—and of literacy--are not unforseen. We already know about them.

If you are looking to volunteer where you can watch your work have results—for the person you help and also for you-- help someone learn to read.

Linda Chalmer Zemel is the Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner for Examiner.com. She also writes about her personal interviews with local authors who have a Buffalo tie—or whose books do-- for the Buffalo Books Examiner column. She has been a News Book Reviewer for The Buffalo News, and created and hosted “What’s New,” a radio  interview program that aired on WHLD 1270 AM.

It Gets Better: Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem

Not only research but also practical applications of that research are making their way into suicide prevention programs for young people. Understanding why bullying takes place is one step toward inroads. Peer intervention is another. Helping victims make gains in asserting themselves is still another, and so is providing emergency assistance and ongoing conversation for those contemplating suicide.

When I was a college student, I was a counselor on a freshman hall. Then as a young stay-at-home mom, I spent a day each week volunteering at a Planned Parenthood clinic, and a few years later a day a week as a telecounselor on a crisis line. Those I met with and spoke to who were contemplating suicide had similarities: a pervasive belief that there was nothing that could help them, ever, and that everyone else would also be better off if they just ended it. The counselor was sometimes their last resort.

Linda Chalmer Zemel writes the Buffalo Alternative Medicine and Buffalo Books columns for Examiner.com. She received the Excellence in Teaching Award from Rochester Institute of Technology, and retired from SUNY as adjunct assistant professor of English. She is a Consulting Hypnotist and Certified Instructor for the National Guild of Hypnotists. The author of a book on dream theory, she also facilitates dream circles and communications theory workshops.

Just a couple of miles from my house sits the Great Baehre Swamp, just where Hopkins was once a corduroy road. Inside the swamp, a boardwalk wide enough for a kid on a bike to pass walkers parallels the sidewalk. One sign as you enter says walk your bikes and another one says be safe—walk with a friend, but almost everyone ignores these. When illicit bikes threaten solitary walkers, most of us just lean quietly against the rail fence until they go by.

No matter what you think about the troubles of actors in real life, their troubles in films mirror current social issues, too. One film, for instance, is Mean Girls, which grossed over $129,000,000, and was well reviewed.

But that’s not the only reason people still rent the movie. It struck a collective nerve with its representation of what its high school age characters call “plastics”—girls who are cold, shiny, and hard—and what they can do to other girls. As the characters themselves say in the film, everyone is required to support the queen bee. So they pretend things are true that they know aren’t, and they keep or tell secrets, depending on what will work best for them.

Strategy is key, and tactics are crucial. The self-explanatory “Burn Book” in the film, where the plastics write nasty comments about other girls, may not exist in real life, but the representation of it mirrors what happens. “Get her” is real-- for instance, the “three-way phone attack” in the movie.