Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 15

Apr 09 2010 Post-Gazette PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE aP 10, 2010 WWW.POST-GAZETTE.COM B-7 ith National Library Week coming up, reminded of the day I discovered books. I lay between the crisp, chill sheets of the hospital bed with my eyes patched, trying to decode the Braille letters in the manual on my lap. I read the letter easily just one lonely bump. like a raised colon, and an embossed hyphen, were also straightforward. But even when I scraped with my fingernail, the rest of the letters bunched together like cold rice.

My hand dropped to the mattress. I was pathetic at this exercise. Pathetic generally, having spent most of the previous 10 months in East or West Coast hospitals, having tests, laser treatments and eyes patched to allow retinal hemorrhages to settle. Not the life been living in my mid-20s no third-grade students, no California beach walks, no sailing or tennis, and no diagnosis or sense of how long my limited sight would last. It was Celeste, my nurse.

Rolling, squeaking wheels of a cart accompanied her footsteps. our local library I got a talking-book machine for I asked. record player that plays She placed my hand on the needle. She gave me earphones. do you want to listen to, Great and Voila! I morphed into a book lover probably the most important transformation of my life.

Of course, read before that day in October 1968 every book assigned in high school and college. As a teacher, studied books about classroom management and child development. But never read for fun. I was a swimmer, a beach volleyball player, a water ballet nut. Reading had always seemed too quiet.

But trapped in bed with just one object in mind to let the retinal blood settle listening to books beat worrying, and it sure topped deciphering Braille. During that three-week stay, I fiction. Back home, I read inspirational memoirs and other nonfiction. Through my rehabilitation training, I read medieval classics like During my first job after I became blind, I took a Shakespeare class. I went to graduate school in social work to change careers and read Haim Ginott and other child psychiatrists.

I married an English professor. If I fallen in love with books, I have fallen for my husband, or he, for me. Two years later we had a son, and after that, a daughter both sighted. Since there many Braille books with print and pictures, I curled up with the kids around a tape player or listened while my husband read to them. I devoured books never read, like in the And on walks with our daughter in a backpack, our son in a harness and leash, and my guide dog leading the party, I told them stories.

Soon I heard about a writing workshop in a local book store. think join a critique I told my husband. Now eight published books later, hooked. Not only do I read daily, I write constantly. I gave up the social work career to write, but I use my social work skills when I lead critique groups out of my home and teach Chatham M.F.A.

students. I could never have become a writer without first becoming a reader. Discovering books not only enriched my life and led me to my husband, family and a new career, it clarified my thinking, my values, my faith. Reading had another unplanned consequence. It addicted me to learning and gave me a mental life.

As a former jock, I still find ways to enjoy physical pursuits I hike with my guide dog, swim, work out on a tread-mill, tandem bike and kayak. Nevertheless, finding enjoyment in things of the mind is an invaluable byproduct of reading. Since over the years, also developed serious hearing problems, I take solace in knowing that Braille books will always be available from the library. Although I minimize the challenges of my deaf-blindness, I do believe that were I to lose all my hearing, I would still find meaning and joy in reading and writing books. Finally, reviewers of my books often conclude with some variation of the line from blind, but now she As a writer, I rebel against that cliche.

But when books came into my hospital room and into my life as I went blind, they may not have opened my eyes or my ears, but they opened my mind. And for that, I thank the libraries across America. Sally Hobart most recent book is Touched the World: Laura Bridgman, Deaf- Blind zon.net). She lives in Squirrel Hill. Stop the bus.

gotta hang up. I missed my the woman shouted into her cell phone loudly enough to jar everyone onboard. The accommodating driver pulled over at the next possible stopping place. she been talking on that phone she have missed her another passenger said. Here, here, I thought.

The cell phone was mostly fun at first, a novelty. My husband got his first one in a ticket auction at The Meadows when they were as big as a brick. My father got an especially big kick out of it. A few years and a couple generations of much-smaller phones later we became a two-cell family. I was working two or three nights a week at a newspaper off I-79 in Cranberry, which was still fairly rural back then.

I thought my cell was as necessary a safety precaution as my AAA membership. We became a three-cell family after my father had a serious stroke and went to live in a nursing home. My aging mother drove about 60 miles round trip from her home in South Buffalo, Armstrong County, virtually every day to see him, first when he lived in a home near Worthington and later in a Veterans Administration facility in Butler. She never bothered to figure out any of the programmable features (I still either) but she learned to call and tell me she had gotten home safely. That was enough.

I began to hate cell phones after my mother, by now in her late 80s, had two strokes of her own and went into an assisted living facility here in Pittsburgh. She had lost enough physical function that punching the increasingly tiny buttons with her gnarled-by- arthritis fingers would have been impossible. She also had lost so much hearing that any kind of phone conversation became difficult. Still, when my sister called from California, my mother would try to listen and respond on my cell. Her struggles on that phone were incontrovertible evidence that my time with her was coming to an end.

Then came the call from the assisted living facility. One of the aides had found Mom on the floor in the throes of a seizure. It left her even more frail and seemed to change her personality. When some people from the facility came to the hospital to assess her for readmission, she was as mean as a hungry buzzard. The director of the place called my cell to tell me there was no longer any room for Mom at the inn.

We got her settled into a beautiful room in a highly regarded nursing home and things were fine for a while. She like sharing a two-bed room and was mildly depressed, but she was relatively healthy and the meanness seemed to fade. Then came another call to my ever- vigilant cell phone: OK, but well acting I met my mother at the UPMC hospital in Braddock (now closed). was a good word for her, all right, but so was Her frailty seemed to have disappeared and she was scurrying around the waiting room, greeting and comforting everybody. The next day she was moved to Western Psychiatric Hospital Clinic.

The head of geriatric psychiatry, who knew my mother from visiting the nursing home, called me on my cell. in the family have bipolar he asked. I replied and then gave him details. he said. bipolar and manic right I saw that myself when I visited her that evening.

My mother, who refused to even have dinner with a man after my father died, was holding hands with a male patient. They looked cute together, and she hurting anybody. The meds would slow her down eventually, but for once, I have to worry about any bad phone calls. Wrong. Just before she was to be released, she had chest pain.

Western Psych called to tell me she had been transferred to Montefiore. There, the doctor on call told me I should consider changing her living will to Do Not Resuscitate. From then on, the calls were all the same: OK now, but we have to tell you she Then last autumn came the call disclosing she had pneumonia. A month later, it appeared she had it again, but subsequent tests showed tumors in her lungs. She had cancer and was admitted to UPMC Shadyside.

Five days after she was diagnosed came the final bad call on my cell: you want to see your mother before she dies, better come I had a half-hour to say goodbye. Four months later, I still jump and my heart still races when my cell phone rings. Maybe someday get over that and appreciate it for all its useful purposes. Maybe even use it for casual conversations. Until then, I will continue to hate my cell phone and everybody Pohla Smith is a staff writer for the Post-Gazette 412 263-1228).

he White House is confident that a financial regulatory reform bill will soon pass the Senate. not so sure, given the opposition of Republican leaders to any real reform. But in any case, how good is the legislation on the table, the bill put together by Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut? Not good enough. a good-faith effort to do what needs to be done, but it would create a system highly dependent on the wisdom and good intentions of government officials.

And as the history of the last decade demonstrates, trusting in the quality of officials can be dangerous to the health. Now, impossible to devise a truly foolproof regulatory regime anyone who believes otherwise is underestimating the power of foolishness. But you can try to create a system relatively fool-resistant. Unfortunately, the Dodd bill do that. While the problem of big to has gotten most of the attention and while big banks deserve all the opprobrium getting the core problem with our financial system the size of the largest financial institutions.

It is, instead, the fact that the current system limit risky behavior by institutions like Lehman Brothers that carry out banking functions, that are perfectly capable of creating a banking crisis, but, because they issue debt rather than taking deposits, face minimal oversight. The Dodd bill tries to fill this gaping hole in the system by letting federal regulators impose rules for capital, leverage, liquidity, risk management and other requirements as companies grow in size and It also gives regulators the power to seize troubled financial firms and it requires that large, complex firms submit that make it relatively easy to shut them down. all good. In effect, it gives shadow banking something like the regulatory regime we already have for conventional banking. But what will actually be in those for capital, liquidity and so on? The bill say.

Instead, everything is left to the discretion of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a sort of interagency task force including the chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Treasury secretary, the comptroller of the currency and the heads of five other federal agencies. Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute, whose blog has become essential reading for anyone interested in financial reform, has pointed out wrong with this: Just consider who would have been on that council in 2005, which was probably the peak year for irresponsible lending. Well, in 2005 the chairman of the Fed was Alan Greenspan, who dismissed warnings about the housing bubble and who asserted in October 2005 that complex financial instruments have contributed to the development of a far more flexible, efficient, and hence resilient financial Meanwhile, the secretary of the Treasury was John Snow, who actually, I think anyone remembers anything about Mr. Snow, other than the fact that Karl Rove treated him like an errand boy. The comptroller of the currency was John Dugan, who still holds the office.

He was recently the subject of a profile in The New York Times, which noted his habit of blocking efforts by states to crack down on abusive consumer lending on the grounds that he, not the states, has authority over national banks except that he himself almost never acts to protect consumers. Oh, and on the subject of consumer protection: The Dodd bill creates a more or less independent agency to protect consumers against abusive lending, albeit one housed at the Fed. a good thing. But it gives the oversight council the ability to override the recommendations. The point is that the Dodd bill would give an administration determined to rein in runaway finance the tools it needs to do the job.

But it do much to stiffen the spine of a less determined administration. On the contrary, it would make it easy for future regulators to look the other way as another bubble inflated. So what the legislation needs are explicit rules, rules that would force action even by regulators who especially want to do their jobs. There should, for example, be a preset maximum level of allowable leverage the financial reform that has already passed the House sets this at 15-1, and the Senate should follow suit. There should be hard rules determining when regulators have to seize a troubled financial firm.

There should be no-exception rules requiring that complex financial derivatives be traded transparently. And so on. I know that getting such things into the bill would be hard politically: As financial reform legislation moves to the floor of the Senate, there will be pressure to make it weaker, not stronger, in the hope of attracting Republican votes. But I would urge Senate leaders and the Obama administration not to settle for a weak bill just so that they can claim to have passed financial reform. We need reform with a fighting chance of actually working.

Paul Krugman is a syndicated columnist for The New York Times. WEEKEND PERSPECTIVES FIRST PERSON SALLY HOBART ALEXANDER SATURDAY DIARY POHLA SMITH I hate my cell phone and yours, too PAUL KRUGMAN Opening my mind I could no longer see, so I started to read Fool-resistant financial regs Legislation should protect against do-nothing administrations In late November I harvest the last roses and offer a bouquet to the gods of winter. I pray for a mild season let there be no deaths from avalanches, slippery back roads, subzero freezes. Indoors I tie ribbons to rose stems and hang them to dry. Their elegance shrivels yet all winter my garden lives in those petals.

The July sun shines in the wake of their honey-spice scent. Mulched soil sifts through my inhalations. Seeds sprout with every breath. Fat tomatoes, almost lewd in their profusion, incite my eyes with their rufescent flush. The plush purple flesh of an iris spreads like butter beneath my skin.

The gods do not hear my prayers. Teens perish on slick roads. A mother dies diving for her drowning child; the frigid fingers of the lake strangle both. Still, the roses offer their fragrance. Within their death, the resurrected garden billows.

Marlene Goldsmith Marlene Goldsmith, a clinical psychologist, lives in Dried Roses Margaret Scott Paul Lachine.