Home  >> Stories  >> The Tale Spinner #2013-08

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IN THIS ISSUE

• Shirley Conlon forwards an article of special interest to women
• Pat Moore shares a letter from a friend about her daughter
• Catherine Nesbitt sends the story of a family dinner
• Betty Audet shares observations and stories about growing old
• Pat Moore forwards a story about a remarkable bird
• Marilyn Magid posts some examples of Mensa humour
• Veterinarian tests can be expensive
• Sites are suggested by Carol Hansen, Catherine Green, Catherine Nesbitt, Gerrit deLeeuw, Irene Harvalias, and Tom Williamson

Shirley Conlon forwards this article by Gale Berkowitz:

FRIENDSHIP AMONG WOMEN

A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between women are special. They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and help us remember who we really are. By the way, they may do even more.

Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach quivering stress most of us experience on a daily basis. A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other women. It´s a stunning find that has turned five decades of stress research - most of it on men - upside down.

Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible, explains Laura Cousin Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioural Health at Penn State University and one of the study´s authors. It´s an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by sabre-toothed tigers.

Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioural repertoire than just fight or flight! In fact, says Dr. Klein, it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is released as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect. This calming response does not occur in men, says Dr. Klein, because testosterone which men produce in high levels when they´re under stress seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen, she adds, seems to enhance it.

The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic "aha" moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA. There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded, says Dr. Klein. When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something.

The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs. Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists had made a huge mistake: the fact that women respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for our health. It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the "tend and befriend" notion developed by Drs. Klein and Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men.

Study after study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. There´s no doubt, says Dr. Klein, that friends are helping us live longer. In one study, for example, researchers found that people who had no friends increased their risk of death over a six-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a nine-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60%.

Friends are also helping us live better. The famed Nurses´ Health Study from Harvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the results were so significant, the researcher concluded, that not having close friends or confidants was as detrimental to health as smoking or carrying extra weight!

And that´s not all. When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse, they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of all, those women who had a close friend and confidante were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality. Those without friends were not always so fortunate.

Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them? That´s a question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D., co-author of Perils of Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls´ and Women´s Friendships (Three Rivers Press, 1998). Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women, explains Dr. Josselson. We push them right to the back burner. That´s really a mistake; women are such a source of strength to each other. We nurture one another. And we need to have unpressured space in which we can do the special kind of talk that women do when they´re with other women.

It´s a very healing experience.

Pat Moore forwards a letter from a friend which illustrates that

SOME PEOPLE ARE ACCIDENT PRONE

Last night my daughter was biting into a chocolate-covered strawberry, one of many she had eaten of those her husband had given her for Valentine´s Day, and the last one was kind of hard. As she bit down harder on it, her retainer broke in half and ... she swallowed it! Yes, swallowed it! Yikes, that girl! She said she tried to reach down her throat and get it, but she couldn´t. So she went to the ER, and they rushed her back to the trauma area in case it tore something in her throat, or got caught somewhere, and they might have to take her to surgery real quick. They gave her an x-ray as soon as possible and she was very lucky: it was already in her colon. They told her she would probably have no problem passing it out, and if she wanted she could check you-know-what when she went.

I never know what that girl is going to do. She has more things that happened to her. That was why we always called her Boo Boo.

When she was real little and would play outside, she was the only kid who would come running in for me to get a gnat out of her eye. That went on for several weeks and finally quit. No-one else playing outside had that problem, just her. Not long after that, she was riding her Wonder Horse on wheels, and she fell over the top of it and hit her lip on the cement. Her mouth was all bloody and she was screaming bloody murder, and it scared the whole neighbourhood to death. All the mothers came running out of their houses, and one brought my daughter in to me. I told her she would be all right, that she had just cut her lip. She had also torn the piece of skin that was between her two front teeth and her upper lip. The dentist said they can usually clip that, but with kids falling like they do, they usually end up tearing it themselves, which she did. So he said it was ok.

We had her baby teeth checked, and he said he did not see anything at the time, but depending on how hard she had hit, they might darken later, or loosen.

That did not happen for a couple of years, but one day when mom was visiting, my daughter woke up with a monkey mouth, as I called it. Her upper lip was all puffed out. It was from the hit to the teeth. The doctor gave her a prescription for the infection and said the teeth would loosen on their own, and they did; she did not have to have them pulled out. And she wasn´t sick from the puffiness either.

She sprained her ankle at school one time and the principal carried her over his shoulder into the nurse´s office from the school ground.

Another time, we had a tall wooden stepladder sitting in the middle of the floor. I can´t understand how she did not see it, but she ran into it and got a huge splinter in the side of her knee. So it was off to the hospital again. The doctor thought he could just get it out little by little, but looking at it more, he finally decided to numb the area and cut into her leg. The piece that came out was about seven inches long, and thick. We were all shocked to see a piece that big. It was an old ladder, but we had never realized something like that could happen in all the years we had used it. The doctor said he would never had thought that something that big was in there. You could not tell by the point sticking out as it had gone in at an angle, so it was hard to determine how long it was.

And she has had asthma attacks off and on, when we would have to rush her to the hospital for breathing treatments, and again, it goes on and on. As you can see by this e-mail, it it does not stop! And this is why we call her Boo Boo, or Boob for short.

ED. NOTE: Pat suggests that other readers may have interesting or amusing stories about their children´s antics or accidents or accomplishments.

Catherine Nesbitt forwards the story of

THE DINNER PARTY

My wife hosted a dinner party for family far and wide, and everyone was encouraged to bring all their children as well.

All during dinner, my four-year-old niece stared at me sitting across from her. The girl could hardly eat her food for staring. I checked my shirt for spots, felt my face for food, patted my hair in place, but nothing stopped her from staring at me.

I tried my best to just ignore her, but finally it was too much for me.

I asked her, "Why are you staring at me?"

Everyone at the table had noticed her behaviour, and the table went quiet for her response.

My little niece said, "I´m just waiting to see how you drink like a fish."

Betty Audet writes: I thought you would enjoy these. My husband at 99 has reached the bragging stag. He is really active and strangers rarely think he is more than 80.

GETTING OLDER

A distraught senior citizen phoned her doctor´s office.

"Is it true," she wanted to know, "that the medication you prescribed has to be taken for the rest of my life?"

"Yes, I´m afraid so," the doctor told her.

There was a moment of silence before the senior lady replied, "I´m wondering, then, just how serious is my condition, because this prescription is marked ´No Refills.´"

An older gentleman was on the operating table awaiting surgery, and he insisted that his son, a renowned surgeon, perform the operation. As he was about to get the anesthetic, he asked to speak to his son.

"Yes, Dad , what is it?"

"Don´t be nervous, son. Do your best, and just remember, if it doesn´t go well, if something happens to me, your mother is going to come and live with you and your wife...."

Aging: Eventually you will reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it. This is so true. I love to hear them say, "You don´t look that old."

The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.

Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me! I want people to know why Iook this way. I´ve travelled a long way and some of the roads weren´t paved.

When you are dissatisfied and would like to go back to youth, think of algebra.

One of the many things no one tells you about aging is that it is such a nice change from being young.

Ah, being young is beautiful, but being old is comfortable.

Two guys, one old, one young, are pushing their carts around Costco when they collide. ? The old guy says to the young guy, "Sorry about that. I´m looking for my wife, and I guess I wasn´t paying attention to where I was going."

The young guy says, "That´s OK. It´s a coincidence. I´m looking for my wife, too. I can´t find her and I´m getting a little desperate."

The old guy says, "Well, maybe I can help you find her. What does she look like?"

The young guy says, "Well, she is 27 years old, tall, with red hair, blue eyes, is buxom, wearing no bra, long legs, and is wearing short shorts. What does your wife look like?"

To which the old guy says,"Doesn´t matter ... let´s look for yours."

Pat Moore also forwards this story about

CLANCY

People have been known to inherit valuables from deceased relatives - sparkling heirlooms, the family silver, works of art, outright cash - but my mother didn´t leave her ten children any of these things because she didn´t have them to leave.

Not that my mother didn´t own items of earthly value; she did: a more-elderly-than-quaint 100-year-old house in Defiance, Ohio, and the J.C. Penney stock she had loyally and painstakingly acquired over the years as a clerk in the fabric department. But in Mom´s world, wealth had little to do with money. The best things she left us were intangibles, like her sense of humour and her laughter, which still rings in my memory - and in fact, in my house.

When my mother died, I inherited a bird. Not a lightweight canary, but a foot-high African gray parrot who talks and laughs in the rich, gravelly voice of my mother. These days I wander around in a T-shirt that says, "My Mother Went to Heaven, and All I Got Was This Lousy Parrot," but this is only half true. There is nothing lousy about Clancy.

My brothers and sisters and I bought Clancy to keep Mom company after Dad died in 1983. She picked him out from a group of baby parrots in a pet store near Toledo. They bonded instantly - my gray-haired mother and this gray-feathered bird with a bright red tail.

The summer before Mom died in 1998, I went home to Ohio for a three-week visit. The first morning, I awoke to laughter and conversation coming from downstairs and wondered what fun-loving neighbour had dropped by. Once downstairs, I discovered that the source of all this joyful noise was simply Mom and Clancy going through their morning routine. He kept the conversation rolling, and his comments, with a voice identical to hers, had them both in stitches.

"Where´s my shoes?" he asked. She laughed and said that her shoes, not his, were lost. "Don´t know where I put stuff," he said. They talked all day like this, taking turns commenting on my mother´s ragtime piano playing, ("Isn´t that pretty?") and on his backyard view of Mom´s flower garden full of white hollyhocks and orange day lilies ("It´s beeyootiful!"). They looked after one another, too. If either of them dozed off, the other would say, "You´re so quiet. Are you OK?"

Clancy learned every word and sentence from Mom, of course. For years she told him when birds visited the backyard, ("Look at all the little birdies!") or when the morning paper hit the front porch ("That was the paperboy.") He learned to repeat those sentences when appropriate, but he can ad-lib, too.

"There´s someone at the door," he said during my visit home. Hearing this, Mom walked out to the front door, only to find no one there. "Now don´t tell me someone´s there when they´re not," she told him. "I went all the way out there for nothing." He waited just a beat to reply, "There´s a little birdie at the door."

My mother died at home, after a three-week illness, and Clancy was by her side the entire time. Near the end, the two of them had the best seat in the house, in front of the double-wide open window in the bedroom, where they could see trees, birds, the tops of the ancient evergreens lining the front of the house, and the bell tower of St. Mary´s Catholic Church, just a block away.

When the parish priest came to visit, Clancy was a surprise participant in the conversation, reducing what should have been a solemn event into unholy hilarity. Throughout the priest´s booming recitation of the Lord´s Prayer, Clancy shouted his own version, "Good heavens! Good heavens! Good heavens!" Those of us in the room somehow managed to stifle our laughter, but just as prayer time came to an end, and as Father Ed delicately placed a communion wafer in my mother´s mouth, Clancy yelled, "OH, #%@&!"

Clancy is now 17 years old, and we´ve been together for the past four years. It took him many months to forgive me for not being my mother. Short of saying, "What have you done with her?" he let me know I wasn´t his first choice in companions. "NO!" he shouted whenever I came near, "Don´t you do it!" He became an expert marksman, flipping sunflower seeds at me with rat-tat-tat precision, and taking canape-sized bites out of the kitchen cabinets.

But time seems to have done its magic, and now we banter back and forth, just as he and Mom used to. When the phone rings, he carries on his part of the conversation in the background. "Hello? ... uh huh ... OK ... all right."

When I eat, he says, "How´s your food?" Several weeks ago I dumped a basket of clean laundry on the floor to sort it, and he said, "Where´s my shirt?" And best of all, fifteen minutes into my first attempt at silent meditation in the living room, he called out from his cage in the kitchen, "You´re so quiet. Are you OK?"

I miss my mother more than I can say, but her loss has been lessened somewhat by the appearance of this avian doppelganger in my life. I carry Evelyn Ryan in my heart, of course, and always will, but I also suspect that she´s still here, sitting up there on the perch underneath all those feathers.

Marilyn Magid forwards some of the results of a Washington Post´s Invitational, which once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition:

MENSA HUMOUR

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

2. Ignoranus: A person who is both stupid and an asshole.

3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn´t get it.

9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

11. Karmageddon: It´s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it´s like, a serious bummer.

12. Decafalon (n.): The gruelling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

13. Glibido: All talk and no action.

14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you´ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. Caterpallor (n.): The colour you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you´re eating.

TESTS ARE EXPENSIVE

Guy brings his dog to the vet. The vet says, "I´m sorry, your dog is dead."

Guy says, "how can you be sure? You haven´t done any tests. I want a second opinion."

Vet leaves and returns with a Labrador retriever. He sniffs at the dog, hangs his head, shakes it, and lets out a whimper.

"He says your dog´s dead, too."

The guy demands a third opinion. Vet leaves and comes back with a little orange tabby and places it next to the dog. The cat shakes its head.

"He says your dog´s dead, too."

The guy finally agrees and asks how much he owes.

"Six hundred dollars."

"Six hundred dollars just to tell me my dog´s dead?!?!"

Vet says, "Well, it would´ve been $25, but with the lab tests and the cat scan...."

SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Carol Hansen sends this link to a video of a panhandler party on a subway train in New York City. She says that from her 40 years of subway travel, she recognizes every type - well, except for the Ferrari guy:

Catherine Green forwards the URL to a scary video which shows how software can track your online activity:

Catherine Nesbitt sends this link to a video of a surfer wakeboarding with playful dolphins:

Gerrit deLeeuw suggests this site for a look at water bombers in action:

Gerrit also forwards this link to a video of Archie Bunker giving a eulogy:

Irene Harvalias sends the URL for an amazing demonstration of skipping and gymnastics which made her tired just watching:

Tom Williamson recommends this lively video to cheer these winter days:

In response to Tony Lewis´ suggestion that subscribers write about themselves, Zvonko Springer writes: For all of your present subscribers who do not know about my 88 years of life experience, here is the website where one can read about all the details. Just go to my URL, http://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/~zzspri/, and click on "Memories of a Croatian Soldier".

This BBC documentary explores what will happen if predictions of rising sea levels are correct:

To check out the features of the "freedictionary", which changes daily, go to