Transcription of Tales of Tragedy & Triumph, #111
Speaker 1: You’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, recorded in the studio of the Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland Maine. Download past shows and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Michael: When it comes to what people are willing or are able or want to hear, I think the storyteller tells the story and people can decide if they want to listen or not. That’s a little bit too what this book is about, is me finally taking control of a story that needed to be told and in the end I do take control of it. I tell the story I need to tell whether or not people want to hear it.
Sheila: What our goal is, is to reach the parents, educators and other care givers of children at risk who are the children with social, emotional and behavioral challenges much earlier in their lives before they’re making decisions perhaps in their teenage years that alter their past.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors; Maine Magazine, Mercy Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Premier Sports Health, a division of Black Bear Medical, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists, Sea Bags, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage, Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes and Tom Sheppard of Sheppard Financial.
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 111, Tales of tragedy and triumph. For the first time on Sunday October 27 2013. Today’s guests include Michael Paterniti and Sheila Nee. Michael Paterniti is the author of the Telling Room, A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge and The World’s Greatest Piece of Cheers .This bestselling book about ancient views and how stories evolved gets us a glimpse of the greater world which mirrors our world here in Maine. Sheila Nee comes to us from Lives in the Balance which is working to help at risk youth change their own tragic stories to ones of triumph.
I was asked today what the most interesting aspect of my job as a doctor is. I answered, the story. It is the privilege of sharing the stories of others and sometimes playing a small part in their stories that I find most compelling and sometimes most heartbreaking because not all stories are easy and not all stories end well. Largely I am entering the story long after it began. I have no control over what came before. Even worse I have little control or far less than I might like over what will come next. All I can do is show up and offer my best which sometimes is good enough and sometimes not because of course I can only play the part that I have been offered. I’m not a god, I’m not omnipotent nor omniscient. That is the end life.
We expose ourselves to heartbreak or we don’t. We show up or choose to hide. We know sadness, joy, frustration and love for our fellow human beings. We decide every day as doctors and as humans whether we will commit to being part of the story. We hope you enjoy our conversations with Michael Paterniti and Sheila Nee. Thank you for being part of our story.
As listeners of the show are well aware, I love nothing more than a good book. I found such a book in the Driving Mr. Albert which was written by Michael Paterniti, a Portland area author. Then I found another such book in the Telling Room, A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese by the same author who also is the founder of the Telling Room itself here in Portland, who’s very excited to be able to bring this author Michael Paterniti into the studio with me and have a conversation about some of these themes that have been woven throughout his book. Thanks for coming in Michael.
Michael: Thank you Lisa.
Dr. Lisa; These books are every interesting in that one of them is about Einstein’s brain and the part that you took across the country to return it to its rightful owner, although its rightful owner is relative. Another one is about following a piece of cheese that you discovered in the early ‘90s across the ocean to learn more about its story. These are different subjects that one might encounter.
Michael: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: Usually you’re a magazine writer in general. You’re not usually writing about cheese and brains, are you?
Michael: That’s not my bit exactly when I’m doing magazine stuff but I do everything. I’m a journalist. I’m always looking for stories. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in a war zone or in a small village in Spain. I’m always looking for the elements of a great story. The case of at least the books, the first book started as a folio for Harper’s Magazine. It started as a magazine piece, a very long magazine piece. I was able to and I had so much material from it that I was able to make a book from it. In the case of the Telling Room, I had as you say, this encounter in a deli when I was in grad school I was proofreading their newsletter at Zingerman’s deli in Ann Arbor, an incredible food bazaar.
Even then in 1991, it was one of those places where you could find amazing delictables from around the world. The owner flew around the world gathering cool food, great food and the stories of those products. He had mentioned this piece of cheese in the newsletter and I thought the story of it was incredible. I ripped it out, I saved it and ten years later I was in Spain on assignment profiling the great chef Ron Audria. I took a Sunday off and went over to the village and wasn’t expecting much. I just wanted to try the cheese.
By the time I left the village after sitting in one of these telling rooms with the cheese maker in Brazil, I realized that it had all the elements of an amazing story. I started returning. It’s not so much this whimsy or an absurdity to say the cheese or Einstein’s brain, but those are for me parallels into these deeper stories.
Dr. Lisa: We’ve often spoken about the macrocosm within the microcosm. We talk about that a lot on this show. I think you talk about it in the telling room you can find a world within some small object or some small story. One thing that I was struck by in Driving Mr. Albert, well, first it does feel as if it’s a story rather than something that’s being reported. It’s more poetic than it is prosaic or maybe it’s somewhere in between. I also thought it was very interesting because I can watch you almost evolve as a young man through these stories. You’re now a father of three; you have a 13 year old, then you have 11.
Michael: 11 and 8.
Dr. Lisa: When you started Driving Mr. Albert you were describing this relationship with a woman who had become your wife and the decision to leave her and take out across the country. It is the mindset of young man. Do you mind if I read this passage?
Michael: Not at all.
Dr. Lisa; This is from Driving Mr. Albert. “The garden of Eden. The road is gold and mystical, running smack dab along the geological middle of America. The scene with the West and tethers from the East so that nothing, nothing will look like the East again. We’re at the place where the light begins to hit the cross country freight trains differently, in longer brilliant rays, in condensate bunch and then the shadows lay purple over everything fall in wondrous, warm rain plagues over the small town bankers. Everyone seems equal in this light and shadow. This rich penniless air. We’re up at a place too where the sky gets large and loud with big wisping castles of clouds. Where things become more of an improvisation, trailer homes haphazardly laid out on wide plateaus, surrounded by tubal layers of junk.”
“Old rusted gas refrigerators from basketball times, bed springs on which generations have been conceived and born eating through cars, the ravaged sights of so many first days and first kisses and funeral processions. All these goes to come alive as we pass some invisible marginal line with the American mind moves from a imprisoning whimsy of cities through some harder brail practicality to eagle flight of the west.”
This makes me want to jump in a car and take off.
Michael: I’ll come with you.
Dr. Lisa: It’s such an interesting sense of freedom and sense of just being simultaneously completely present where you are as you pass through. What happens when you go from that place to the place where you have three children, a wife, a reporting career and a book that needs to get finished? How do you maintain the sense of freedom and adventure?
Michael: That’s the question we ask every day. I think in our house it’s one of them. We do have this professions both Sarah my wife and I, as magazine journalists that enable us to go out, travel and have these conversations with people and these intimacies with people that we wouldn’t otherwise have. That being part of the job description means that we get to do some of these. In order to do some of these we both have to cover for each other when the other one is on the road. We have over time here a flexible machine in our house that allows for one of us to be on the road when one of us needs to be.
The beauty of writing too is when you come back you’re very present for your kids so you can be there in the middle of the day if someone needs or someone is sick or someone needs a pick up. The time away often feels like a partial escape but it’s work related. We always tell each other when one of us is off the tour bring back some good stories and take a lot of pictures. We want to see it. We want to hear it. In some ways I hope that informs our family life. The kids have gotten used to some of these rhythms. We bring them when we can. There are also these reporting trips where you have extra frequent flier miles and you know you could actually stretch it out and be gone for a while. What would that look like if the kids came? Could we get the work done?
We’ve been able to take them on some bigger trips which have been great. I agree with you, how do you keep that person who is driving across country in a sunset where he or she felt so completely alive and free a part of who you are today when you have all these other obligations? Part of it too for both of us is that we write to find out things about ourselves. We’re constantly teaching ourselves in this exercise, by this exercise of writing. I think it’s an ongoing conversation but it’s a very full one end. I think the key to it is that we always feel the sense of possibility. However outlandish the idea, one of us will often say, “That sounds cool. Why don’t you do it? Why don’t we do it?”
Dr. Lisa: Both of these books have in them older male characters, I call them characters except they’re real people. One of them is a retired pathologist named Thomas Harvey who performed the autopsy on Einstein and then kept his brain. That is one individual that you described as having a past possibly littered with the metaphorical bodies that XY and Z left behind. Then we have Ambrosio on the other side in the Telling Room who is very much tied to his past and yet has tried to reinvent it around himself. How does this change the way that you view your own self, your own life and your own personage as a man in this world, as a person in this world?
Michael: One of the things that attracted me to Dr. Harvey was the mystery of his life. He had performed the autopsy on Albert Einstein. He cut his head open and taken his brain and decided that this was a good thing and that he should keep the brain. The US government thought this was a bad thing. The family thought it was a bad thing. They wanted this brain. Dr. Harvey vanished. He left Princeton and moved from town to town and kept this brainy world profile all the while harboring the brain and trying to send parts of it out to different scientists. Trying to take control of some study that would lead to our understanding to Einstein’s genius.
I was intrigued by the mystery of him and the rumbling life that he had led. Maybe because of having had children and because we’re so settled here in Portland, when I first met Ambrosio in 2000 I was completely drawn in and intrigued not just by this huge character that he is because he’s like a hurricane and when he tells a story, they last 48 hours long and you were with him all the way. You’re not allowed to be diverted in any way. I was really compelled by his commitment to this one place, into this one history. History was alive and everything he talked about. The characters from the town were always alive in these stories. A lot of them had died and they were still characters in the stories that he told.
He had this way of honoring and keeping memory alive through narrative. I loved that. I resonated to that and also knowing that it was one village in one region of Spain. I thought that this was maybe the perfect place to settle in and to try to understand that the competing impulse inside of me to stay and to go, to travel and to grow roots in a place.
Dr. Lisa: There are also possibly the competing impulse to find reality or whatever that means versus create a reality around yourself?
Michael: Yeah. His connectedness was so complete as this American visitor, I felt the jumpy, speedy sense of dislocation that is a little bit a part of American life unless we control it in other words just a digital speed of American life alone can be overwhelming. To meet a guy who didn’t have a phone and sat for hours in the Telling Room drinking red wine and eating chorizo and telling stories with nothing but time to tell them and to get lost in that, in the timeless moment of listening to a story and the timeless, the tunnel moment of storytelling was fantastic. It also put me in touch with a deeper connectedness and it was through this place Guzman this village that I found more connected in my own life when I came home. That’s partly to what travel is.
You return to yourself eventually. You make all these promises about how you’re going to change when you’re out there but the facts of your life remain the same when you return though the spirit of your life might have changed and hopefully has. In some ways you’ve returned to yourself knowing yourself better for it. That was very much a part of the journey and part of the book.
Dr. Lisa: You’re on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. You’ve long recognized the link between health and wealth. Here to say more on the topic is Tom Sheppard of Sheppard Financial.
Tom: In 2013 there’s a story playing out about triumph and tragedy. For some the return the return of the stock market to all time highs is the triumph born out of patience, endurance and faith. For others it is the tragedy made worse by the low yields and significant declines and safer ‘investments’. Stocks seem to be winning and bonds losing. How the year ends is anyone’s guess. Two weeks ago you had a choice. Stay till the end of the Patriots and Red Sox games or bail out early. Those of you watching for the excitement that comes with victory may have left with the test of defeat.
If you hang in for the enjoyment of the game, you’re treated to a glorious knowing on sports day. Tom Brady and Big Poppy brought both teams to victory by never giving up and playing through to the end. Celebrate the wins, it’s good for the soul but remember the triumph is pleading and the tragedy means more work. New Orleans and Detroit have seen a lot of tragedy recently but they both have tomorrow and the next game. I guess the point in all this is that if you want to triumph in your financial life you do have to see things through to the end. You have to play your game patiently. Endure the ups and downs of the market and keep the faith that set backs are just another opportunity to triumph in the end.
If there’s time left on the clock or strikes on the batter, never give up on your team. To learn more, like Sheppard Financial on Facebook. We believe in you and want to help your team evolve with your money.
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Dr. Lisa: Connecting this that he thought was his situation was proved in the end to be a bit of a disconnect that I don’t want to give away anything in the story but you found his story to be one thing and then when you went back after trying to finish the book for many years, and I love the part of the book where you put in a letter from the publisher saying pretty much, “Finish this book or give us back our money.” That sort of advance on the book. Finally you back to push through and become a journalist again and extract yourself from being part of the story as your wife Sarah needed to do, it turned out that the story was sort of other people knew to be more real. It was very different from what Ambrosio had told you.
Michael: As a journalist going to the village somewhere inside of me I knew I should have known or would have known that when someone tells you a story that there’s always a second story, a counter story. I didn’t want to believe that there was one. I wanted to be suspended in the spell that he cast and to be allowed to live in a place where I was asking nosy questions all the time. That I could just make a life in. When it came to the ending or trying to put an end to it I realized that I did have to go speak to some people, some very key people in the book who did have another version of it. What’s interesting though, is that this friendship I have Ambrosio was very deep and became he like part of a family. Their family I feel like is part of my family and my family feels like part of their family.
There was this internal struggle between what I had to do for my job, the journalist part of me was aware that I had to have these conversations and I was going to have to write some truth. It was going to be my truth but something maybe more objective than his truth. That was going change that relationship somehow. Right now as this book comes out we’re in the middle of redefining that relationship. I was just there three weeks ago but he hasn’t read the book. He doesn’t read English and his daughter is probably going to translate it for him. We’ll see. I think the book itself is a huge love letter to a way of life and a philosophy and to these ideals that he holds dear. There was a murder plot and those things resolved in a way that maybe in the book at least he didn’t intend though.
Dr. Lisa: I’m going to have you read a few paragraphs because I think it’s very interesting thing to me.
Michael: “Not everyone believed that Ambrosio intended to kill Julian and of those who did, you were in favor of the idea. Relatives called one evening for hushed conversation with Ambrosio senior. Does something need taking care of? He would be nice to settle this the old way instead Ambrosio’s father but no that’s the sure cost to insanity. He reiterated to his son that a life in jail was hardly an even trade for having something, even the family cheese stolen from you. It would be double captivity. Others in the extended family asked Ambrosio to take refuge for a while at a nearby monastery to cleanse himself of his anger which was an idea he gave serious thought to, but the deeper Ambrosio fell into the meaningless of his life, the more he lost a grip on his equanimity, the more vehement he became.
If other people doubted his intentions he felt all the more resolved. This kind of sudden disorder, this up ending of happiness, this complex of utility loss and violent fantasy, gives rise to many strange bed fellows; drink, depression, self loathing. Having seen Julian so completely as a doper ganger Ambrosio lost his bearings. Yes, revenge was paramount but was there something more to this wish to kill Julian. Was it a wish to kill some part of himself too, to silence his mind? Was it possibly more useful to keep an enemy thereby keeping yourself intact than to eliminate him?
There was a story about the time Ambrosio had taken his place in Out of the Way Bar. A virtual ghost turned. Ambrosio sat with his back to the door and Julian had allegedly entered in the shadows, seen Ambrosio from behind and then simply retreated. For Ambrosio’s faced friends who betrayed nothing until much later, when they were sure Julian was gone. Two years past in this way and who knows how many near misses there might have been. Julian entering a bar for five minutes after Ambrosio exited, Ambrosio stopping for gas where Julian had just bought cigarettes. Ambrosio went on living his life, stalking Julian in his mind ready, for him when the moment arose.
Dr. Lisa: It seems as though what Ambrosio is feeling is that he somehow needs to create this other life so that he can keep living the life that he wants to live. He wants his family to look a certain way, wants to look at him a certain way. He wants the story to be a certain thing. In order to reconcile himself with the realities that other people are getting him to understand, he projects everything on to this. What we’ll call brother from another mother, Julian. You wanted there to be some resolution. Julian wanted it too but Ambrosio never agreed to this.
Michael: I think it’s part of one of the bigger themes of the book which is this idea of storytelling and what storytelling is in our lives, and the stories we tell about ourselves and what we need to project about ourselves. I think Ambrosio had clearly suffered this great loss when the cheese had been stolen or taken from him or he was somehow out-maneuvered and lost the cheese that came from an old family recipe. It was basically a family heirloom. It was this magical thing to a lot of people in that village and beyond actually because when people ate it, it gave these memories of being in the kitchen with their mother who used to make the same house cheese. For Ambrosio to have lost this he needed to construct the narrative and that impulse goes all the way back to cave walls. We need a reason. We need to understand why we don’t get the orange Popsicle.
There has to be a conspiracy. There has to be a larger narrative that explains this because we can’t be anything but good and pure in our minds in order to sometimes carry on. In this case I think Ambrosio, such a great story teller and so adapted reading people and so completely knowledgeable about how storage work and the most experience sense of story was able to create a narrative in which he was betrayed and that could only end in violence. I think that allowed him to save partial face in this village and with his family. He’s part of a family that started as a farming family but his two brothers are very successful. Have lived in different places of the world and have had very successful lives.
This was his greatest success and obviously it became this massive momentary sensation. Fidel Castro wanted to buy all of these cheese and Ronald Reagan was given as a gift and the British royal family were served the cheese and the Spanish king and queen loved it.
This was something that meant a lot to him and to have it taken and perhaps taken by her mother’s down missed steps along the way required an explanation and that’s what he came up with in part, so but I think for me listening to this story I kept asking myself as I went along and as I read the book, what are my delusions. What are the stories I tell myself? Why do I need to hear those stories? Why do I need to hear these stories about this? The story of the righteous man who was undone by the evil one, who stood for goodness and purity and was betrayed for it. That was a lot of literature is full of and for some reason I needed to hold on to that one.
Dr. Lisa: As a physician and a small business owner I rely on Mercy Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me with my own life fully. There are a few thoughts from Mercy.
Mercy: As I was thinking about the theme of today’s show, I couldn’t help but fixate on the word tragedy because in my business clients look to me to make certain financial tragedies don’t happen. Through proper planning, forecasting in day-to-day operational management. It’s an interesting juxtaposition for me because when you keep your eyes focused and plan for the pitfalls, your business cannot only thrive it can triumph by being financially sound.
I’m Mercy Booth let’s talk about the changes you need boothmaine.com.
Speaker 1: This segment of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is brought to you by the following generous sponsors; Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage in Yarmouth Maine, Honesty and Integrity can take you home. With RE/MAX Heritage it’s your move. Learn more at rheritage.com.
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Dr. Lisa: I enjoyed this description of your life versus his. He was webbed to the here and now, sank into it and seemed to spend a great deal of time racing through airports. A processed cream cheese bagel in hand, trying to reach the future. Now I start noticing everything infused of mindfulness, the power of light, the still life of the smooth glass perone on the wood groove table. The oversized man sitting in his shadow occasionally revealed angles about a rumble or ruggedness of his voice or the various ways he simply lit a cigarette between big fingers now will show, now as an afterthought, now with this slinky fumbling desperation as an addict. Outside the light oozed over the fields.
That’s just such a contrast between his life and your life, and you wanted to believe that this life that he put forth was good, true, and honest. I don’t think that sensation is certainly one that I think a lot of people can relate to, this wanting this thing to exist.
Mike: His desire for authenticity even that way we eat now authentic now is that we all eat local products that we’ll go to the butcher who slaughtered the animal at the shop or that there is this authenticity we’ll grow our own vegetables in the garden.
Authenticity that we’re seeking in American life, and I think and to get a place like Castil and just step back in time, to touch that, to see it and it’s real. It’s not that he’s making up this life; it’s not that he’s just showing up in The Telling Room when I show up and putting on a show for me. This is the way of life has been for hundreds of years.
The part of it that I wonder about is how one carries some of these ideas forward into the modern world. Now Ambrosio was undone by the modern world when it came to his Cheese as they try to expand the operation. He wasn’t equipped to handle any of the big business decisions and was just signing contracts without reading them, and eventually according to him signed away this Cheese of his.
There is something in the speed of American life that requires this counter idea of slow food, slow thinking and for me it became slow reporting, it became a slow epiphany, it became slow living. I saw this as a slow food tale gone completely array but I love the idea of this flow and I thought that would be a great antidote to the way I was living and so the person who was sitting in The Telling Room was projecting a lot too on this Ambrosio, I wanted it and I needed it, a part of me needed to have that taste of life and it was completely different from being at home on deadlines, keep the recycling out and everything of your everyday life.
Dr. Lisa: It seems we all need this to some extent and in some cases we even need it as a culture. You described the reclamation project that was taking place where people were sent out into Spain to try to find the bodies of people who had been killed during this civil war, and the older generation was saying don’t go digging because in the end nobody’s innocent.
Mike: Right, the truth was much uglier than one would want to imagine so that feeling at least among the older generation is let’s not tell this story. For those people in Spain who were trying to tell the story, they’ve met with a lot of resistance but had the honor and privilege to go to one of these mass graves with a forensic archaeologist, and he was a storyteller just like Ambrosio he was just piecing together the evidence of this last moments of a life of these people who were taken in the middle of the night , shot and buried in shallow graves for their political beliefs or just in revenge killings.
That story is the story of Spain as much as Ferdinand and Isabel and Columbus flying to America is a story of Spain, so I think this idea of trying to tell the stories honestly and openly gave me some energy to try to tell Ambrosio’s the same way, and when it comes to what people are willing, or are able or they want to hear I think the storyteller tells the story and people can decide if they want to listen or not.
That’s a little bit too what this book is about is me finally taking control of a story that needed to be told and as much as it’s a book that is my own telling room, it’s I try to create a telling room from the book and there are always different voices telling stories eventually in the end I do take control of it and I tell the story I need to tell whether or not people want to hear it.
Dr. Lisa: That’s interesting, this is probably the most internally footnoted book that I’ve ever read and it’s almost as if the closer you got to the place where you needed to make that turn, the more internal footnotes there were the more digressions you wanted to make, the more you didn’t want to own up to whatever new reality you needed to own up to and then things became clear again when you finally started talking to Julian and Ambrosio’s lawyer.
Assuming that clarity, you talked about the reclamation anthropologist I believe that he was on that you were talking to you said this was actually causing difficulties within his own family because I think it was his wife that … there was some family history and they were concerned about what truth would be revealed even then.
Mike: If you start tracking back, you do find that people inside a family stood on both sides and you find too that the violence was everywhere in every little village and touched every family, so whether you lost them or whether someone in your family did the killing, those truths are hard for people to accept and so he was very open and honest with me about his marriage and just saying the strain that this had put on his marriage because his wife knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t going to stop until he had identified these bodies, who they were, how they were killed and who they were killed by.
Throughout these villages in the countryside of Spain these were small towns and there were people who pass each other in the street belonging to families that lost people or on the other hand killed by members of the opposite families, so it’s gets very complicated and this mysterious censorship about talking too much about these things.
Their group is remarkable for that, and it’s just that they’re out there at these sites uncovering bodies, trying to tell their story and trying to give people some sense of how their relatives may have dies and also why.
Dr. Lisa: In addition to writing the book, The Telling Room you founded an organization called The Telling Room here in Portland, Maine. People who listen to this show are familiar with The Telling Room. We’ve had Gibson Fay-LeBlanc who was the past Director of The Telling Room.
Mike: Yeah, the Executive Director.
Dr. Lisa: The Executive Director. Why was it important for you to provide a space for children and other people to share their stories?
Mike: I think it was in 2003 we came back as a family from Spain. Sarah and I were talking about this job that takes two out to this places and hear his amazing stories, but then we felt dislocated from Portland that there were all these incredible stories here, stories being told every day, people living these incredible stories, and we thought it would be interesting to try to create a space that was like an actual telling room or like the telling room that belongs to Ambrosio where you would go to tell your histories, your dreams and the stories of your life, that you would feel safe and secure in these places, and you would be helped in telling of that story if you needed help.
That was the initial idea and we really wanted it to be for kids, we teamed up with Susan Connolly who was moving back I think from Boston. We flushed out the idea and we have a little bit of conversation with Dave and the people who do it at 26, then I was able to step in in San Francisco, spend some time there and spend some time at Dave.
It just came to feel like the right thing here and we wanted to tell it to community, so it wasn’t going to be part of the 26th network it was going to be a very a Portland local thing that we try to make and we were going to hopefully bring in a lot of working writers, artists and people who also are storytellers to work with the younger generation, so we really wanted this generational exchange also.
It started really modestly and has grown and it’s been a real pleasure to see the work that’s come out of there, the stories have been amazing and humbling. Early on we worked with the immigrant population pretty closely and that’s been a big part to this day of what we do and some of those stories are incredible stories.
I think as a journalist and as a human being you would go to places like Sudan to cover a famine, you hear the stories and you can go to the telling room this afternoon and someone will tell you the same story of having survived those things, how they did and to me that’s incredible at the whole world is here in Portland like that.
Dr. Lisa: Mike, what would you like people to feel after they’ve finished reading your latest book?
Mike: I felt last November when I brought my family back and we went to Guzman at thanksgiving, and it was one of those beautiful star filled nights that you get in Castil and we were headed back up into the village where we had gone to have dinner with Ambrosio at his house up in the fields, and he was driving our family back to the palace where we were staying, found some rooms in the palace there.
He pulled over to the side of the road, this was just at midnight under a very bright moon and he jumped out of the car and he’s like, “Everybody come into the vineyard.” He said this vineyard was planted by his son, “ you’re standing in these vines and they all contain his love.”
The kids were wandering around and being rowdy and then he’s like, “Look at the moon, look at the stars. Listen to the silence,” and more on the top of the world on the masetos theme and it was completely silence and somewhere very far away a church bell rang.
He said, “Listen to the silence. The silence will tell you everything. The silence has a lot to say.” I just felt like I always felt there, like I always feel there just this incredible awe really, and the privilege of being with this guy who views the world this way and a world that doesn’t take time for that kind of silence, so I hope people will walk away feeling a little bit of that awe.
Dr. Lisa: Mike, how can people find out about Driving Mr. Albert or The Telling Room, a Tale of love, betrayal, revenge, and The World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese or where can people buy these books?
Mike: They can buy these books at Longfellow Books, my favorite bookstore and also check the random house website for readings. I think there is a reading schedule up there.
Dr. Lisa: Well, we appreciate taking the time to light your story in these books and also the work you do as an award winning magazine journalist and writer, and thank you for finding the time remembering children’s stories here to Portland and thank you for spending time with us today.
Mike: Thank you, Lisa it’s been fun.
Dr. Lisa: The goal of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is to help me connections between the health of the individual and the health of the community. The goal of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes is to deepen our appreciation for the natural world. Here to speak with us today is Ted Carter.
Ted: I have a beautiful Biogenomic garden and it was quite abundant this year. My Biogenomic landscaper Bennet Steel and told me about Max Garrison, he died I think in the late 50’s but he spoke about a plant based diet and how the enzymes ingrown fruits and vegetables really work to heal us and Max Garrison really worked on cancer therapies with using a new diet I guess you might say with vegetables and fruits, and it actually was quite successful.
Interestingly, nature does nothing but really reach out to us and heal us, and when we consume these plants they really work in constant with us bringing us balance and bringing us a sense of peace when I go down the garden I pick all my fresh vegetables and I squeeze them through a juicer that I have. They’re incredible and you can just tell your body is resounding in great happiness, so I think it’s important that we understand just how much plant life is here to really work with us, give us balance and spaces in our life.
I’m Ted Carter and if you’d like to contact me, I can be reached at tedcarterdesign.com.
Speaker 1: We’ll return to our program after acknowledging the following generous sponsors; Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine. At Orthopedic specialists, ultrasound technologies taken to the highest degree. With state of the art ultrasound equipment, small areas of tendonitis, muscle and ligament tires, instability and arthritis conditions can be easily found during examination. For more information, visit orthocareme.com or call 207-781-9077.
Dr. Lisa: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast understands the importance of the health of the body, mind and spirit. Here to talk about the health of the body is Jim Greatorex of Premier Sports Health, a division of Black Bear Medical.
Jim: Let’s talk about the can-do attitude for a moment. Stories about triumph, for some it’s about getting out of bed every morning, for others it’s about taking on the challenges of daily living with a disability or other medical condition.
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Dr. Lisa: This show is about tales of tragedy and triumph. We thought it would be good to link back up with Sheila Nee, who’s the Associate Director of Lives in the Balance to talk about something that we think is really important and that is making tales or bringing tales from the area of tragedy into triumph. Sheila is going to talk to us about a really exciting new event, something that she and Dr. Ross Greene have been working on for the past a little while, something that’s really important to have here in Maine, so thanks for coming in.
Sheila: Thank you for having me Dr. Lisa. I’m happy to represent our nonprofit, Live in the Balance, from just across the way on Exchange Street. I have been fortunate to work with Dr. Greene for the last year when I was hired last autumn, we were easing into the second annual international summit, so this past year I’ve been much more immersed in the planning and the logistics of this year’s events, which does have a long name because we’re covering a lot of topics that day and it’s going to be a very exciting, innovative event for Portland, Maine.
Dr. Lisa: What is the name?
Sheila: Lives in the Balance Third Annual International Summit on non-adversarial, non-punitive interventions for at risk kids there is a better way.
Dr. Lisa: We are very interested in education as you know. We’ve had a profile in Maine magazine on Dr. Ross Greene. We’ve had people recently talk with us about charter schools, education, health, and I’m also personally interested in the prison system because I did work as a medical director in the jail. Why is it so important that you try to help kids understand ways to change their lives so that they don’t need to keep going back into that system?
Sheila: It is critical work and what our goal is to reach the parents, educators, and other caregivers of children at risk who are the children with social, emotional, and behavioral challenges much earlier in their lives before their making decisions perhaps in their teenage years that alter their past.
Ideally when parents are struggling with a child who has challenges beyond their toolbox let’s say, that’s an ideal time to know there are resources out there to help guide them in their parenting and perhaps introduce some ideas to that child’s school system. That also becomes a comfortable community because the pipeline begins early on and if the child is given a place of comfort in that school system, a sense of belonging feels like they are on the right path and really a part of that community, they will likely stay in school.
Earlier resources is key or when that child is veering off a path knowing where to turn for help for those caregivers.
Dr. Lisa: That sounds like you’re trying to help not only the child, the student but the parents, the teachers, the people who work with that student to help change the story, to help change the direction of where they might be going.
Sheila: Absolutely, and I believe the role of a teacher is one of the hardest jobs there is and when you have this community where each child is different and you’re trying to meet all these needs, it can be difficult, so there are tools to help create a setting in the classroom where the children who formally would have been placed out of the room or sometimes leading to a placement outside that school community with certain interventions in place, the teacher finds a way to keep that child comfortable in the classroom continuing his or her education of the whole population.
Dr. Lisa: I know that there are some good statistics out there that show that the work that you’re doing is important.
Sheila: There are and what’s exciting for me when I joined Dr. Greene about a year ago was I just really began learning more about the impact of his work in Maine. I’ve been familiar with his work for years through his first book, The Explosive Child, the statistic that stays with me I think is the critical one for our State and one that we’re proud of.
Within our juvenile correctional facilities about eight years ago, the number of children leaving Long Creek and Mountain View and returning was at our nation’s worst. We were the highest in the nation and it was at 65%.
With the support of the Maine Juvenile Justice Advisory Group, the JJAG led by Barry Stoodley who is our board member and the former Associate Commissioner for Corrections, with the work of Dr. Ross Greene and a whole change within the system. This whole line staff had to embrace this model and a new way of thinking about the children and treatment of the children, the statistics are now at 15%.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve gone from 65% to 15%?
Sheila: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: Sheila, this summit is coming up on November 8, who are you hoping is going to attend?
Sheila: We are inviting parents, educators and all caregivers of children with behavioral challenges and we are open to people within the school systems who are from superintendents and principals, educators, school nurses, school psychologists. We’ve heard from a great deal of parents in the community who are very excited about this event and we are continuing to hear from people throughout mostly New England. I know Dr. Greene speaks around the world and there are people from Canada and Sweden also hoping to attend our summit.
Dr. Lisa: Sheila, what’s the goal of this summit?
Sheila: The goal of this summit as dedicated as Lives in the Balance is to Dr. Ross Greene’s motto, we believe that coming together with other interventions and working as a collective voice on behalf of children at risk will help move this work further along and we also are encouraging participants to advocate on behalf of these children in their own home communities.
Dr. Lisa: Sheila, how can people find out about this summit and about Lives in the Balance?
Sheila: Lives in the Balance has a website that is full of resources for a parent and caregivers livesinthebalance.org.
Dr. Lisa: Sheila, thank you for the work that you’re doing putting this summit together on November and we encourage all of our listeners who have an interest in this area to look you up on your website. We’ve been speaking with Sheila Nee, the Associate Director of Lives in the Balance, and we hope everybody gets a chance to meet you at your upcoming event.
Sheila: Thank you very much Dr. Lisa, thanks for your time.
Dr. Lisa: You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 111, tales of tragedy and triumphs. Our guests have included Michael Paterniti and Sheila Nee. For more information on our guests and extended interviews visit doctorlisa.org.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter and on Pintrest and read my take on health and wellbeing on our bountiful blog. We’d love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. We welcome your suggestions for future shows.
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Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors; Maine Magazine, Mercy Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Premier Sports Health a division of Black Bear Medical, Dr. John Herzog of the Orthopedic Specialists, Sea bags, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage, Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes and Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is recorded in the studios of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street Portland, Maine.
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