Happy Veteran's Day - Operation Enduring Opportunity from UPS

Operation Enduring Opportunity: Franchise Fees Waived for Vets - WOW!

   

 

The San Diego-based company that franchises UPS stores announced today that it will award 10 franchises next year to qualified veterans and waive the franchise fee of nearly $30,000.
The announcement was part of a national initiative announced by First Lady Michelle Obama in Washington, D.C.
The goal of "Operation Enduring Opportunity," an initiative launched by the White House, the International Franchise Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and franchise companies, is to recruit as many as 75,000 military veterans and their family members by the end of 2014.
Beginning Jan. 1, honorably discharged veterans who meet certain financial qualifications can apply for new UPS Store franchises, said Becca Andrews Hogan of Mail Boxes Etc., a subsidiary of UPS. The sign-up period will last for up to six months, and qualifying veterans will be awarded franchises on a first-come, first-served basis, she said.
She said the program is an extension of incentives already provided to veterans, 150 of whom have received discounts of between $4,500 and $10,000 off the franchise fee -- totaling about $700,000.
It's unknown whether any of the new stores to be opened under the program will be located in San Diego, but it's possible given the concentration of veterans in San Diego County, Andrews Hogan said.
-City News Service
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Operation Enduring Freedom

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News: FET gears up for spring deployment

Story by Cpl. Jennifer Pirante 

Photo by Cpl. Jennifer Pirante Lance Cpl. May Holzhauser, Female Engagement Team 12-1 tiltroter mechanic, performs a radio check during a period of instruction here Sept. 19. Radio familiarization is one of the many periods of instruction and training the Marines can utilize to prepare for challenges to come.

MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. - A group of 48 female Marines are about to prove why women matter in war.

The new Female Engagement Team formed and met for the first time here recently to begin training for its upcoming spring deployment to Afghanistan.

The FET program evolved from the Marine Corps Lioness program where female Marines were assigned to search the Iraqi women and children because cultural norms forbid men from touching or speaking to them.

The FET mission evolved as Marines realized that more progress could be made in Afghanistan if they reached a large percent of the population prohibited from speaking to male infantry.

When the time comes, the FET will primarily be called upon to reach a critical demographic of Afghan culture only females have access to: the women.

"It started out as a trial period," said Sgt. Sheena Adams, FET platoon leader and instructor. "Marines learned the language and went out there to try to talk to people to see how the community turned toward them."

The Marines will undergo scenario-based training to help them learn how to interact with the women, embed themselves in the culture and prepare themselves for any situation.

The Marines also have a chance to learn Dari and Pashto, two prominent spoken languages in Afghanistan to allow the Marines to break down language barriers as much as possible.

"It's going to be a lot of trial and error, learning what really works and what does not work because each village is different," Adams said.

"There are certain things I can say and do in one village, and the people would think it was awesome; but people in other villages would not really understand."

For many of the FET members, a deployment to Afghanistan and interaction with the culture will be a first-time experience, but Cpl. Daisy Romero, logistics embarkation specialist with 3rd Marine Air Wing, Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, Calif., decided to volunteer her services for the second time.

"I think everything was unique about what we did," Romero said.
"Whenever the infantrymen or the males can't get into the compound because of the Afghanistan women, we erase that boundary."

Romero was witness to many of the FET's recent accomplishments during her first deployment, where the teams helped set up schools and provided medical assistance.

Romero explained how the FET has accomplished a lot during its previous deployment in Afghanistan.

"When we got to our [area of operation], there were no clinics established," Romero said. "There weren't any schools established and the schools that were established were war-torn."

Romero said by her unit left Afghanistan they established grounds for a female doctor and midwife to practice her profession. The doctor and midwife was seeing more than 20 patients per day and more than 60 girls and 90 boys were attending school.

Marines like Sgt. Julie Nicholson, Combat Logistics Regiment 17 supply administration specialist, expressed their eagerness to get out there and put their training to the test.

"It's really motivating," Nicholson said. "I'm excited to deploy."

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Sometimes stories are just very moving; usually involves someon who has had bad breaks and yet, they thrive on...here is a powerful story.  Tragedy Thrusts Young Californian.

An Aging Body is also a Beautiful Poem

This is a beautiful piece about aging...  
"life is meant to ruin my body."
A Ruined Body is a Poem

Job Description of a Social Worker in Foster Care

Notes from the Underground: Job Description for Social Worker

foster (fôs’tər) v. cherish, nurse, nourish, raise

      I remember the first day of graduate school when the professor asked how many of us had children. Very few hands went up and mine wasn’t one of them. Then, in a foreboding tone he prophesied that we would most likely not become parents because this career path would realize our motherly needs.

     He was right. Of the 23 years that I have worked in social services, I have only been a mother the last four. My maternal needs were, in fact, met by my clients. Good social workers nurture their clients, of any age.

     My mentors have all been childless, all work horses: two rock solid women and one wise-as-a-library gentleman. All three had the real-deal look of a social worker, that mystical combination of fatigue and enthusiasm – flyaway hair, comfortable clothes, tired faces - always racing towards their feeble vehicles loaded with boxes and files.

     Today, I am the dinosaur in the system: pencil, clipboard, common sense, big heart.     It’s a draining job and the rewards must come from within - one’s own internal dialogue about making a difference and how the world is better and all that smart self-talk.

     But, the real reason I put off bringing a child into this world for so many years was because I rarely experienced a happy kid. The only children I knew were raging rivers, sad, and unable to attach - their psychic injuries manifested in a thousand different ways.

     It’s a bit like trying to re-weave a basket, with the reeds stiffly jutting out of shape, except they are tiny hearts and minds. TLC is necessary but no longer sufficient to meet the developmental needs of the kids in my care. Once a child’s folder has been handed to me, the child has not only been abused, but she has now abused others.

     Being pregnant was a chilling time for me. A social worker often becomes the central authority figure in a family’s life, and to the children involved, my pregnancy signaled one more inevitable abandonment. Angry adolescents assault and lash out, the most towards their consistent and safe adults.

     Children raised in foster care, crudely referred to as “system kids,” know how to find your vulnerable area, like bloodhounds, they seek out a soft spot and target it. Even the sweetest child who is happy to see me will wish a miscarriage upon me so I don’t leave her, for my new “real” family.

     They know every square inch of their environment - scan, study, memorize, know my world!  Abused kids are especially hyper vigilant, often their very life has depended upon it. When I wonder if a client’s mom has returned to drugs, the child always knows after “hello.” From a block away, transporting a boy for a short supervised visit with mom, he can tell by her walk if she is homeless again, given up the violent boyfriend or found a job. He will know instantly, yet do his best to hide his discovery from me (I may not be able to read her but I can most definitely read him).

     Raised without their rightful canopy of love, injured children learn to use these ex-ray vision survival skills as weapons. The front line counselors, “staff,” guide them through their days in shifts. Medical appointments (numerous), therapy appointments, hygiene (charted in detail), study hour, group, dinner, television time if earned.

     Counselors are usually in their early to mid twenties; they enter the field for all the right reasons but the long hours, weak pay, and harsh environment takes its toll quickly. If you are short your clients will dredge up words to repel you, only intended to hurt, and it will not be so kind as vertically challenged. Gay? Just imagine. Racial slurs are especially favored – each a hollow attempt to morph from the hunted to the hunter.

     The names of “clients” rattle around in my head – press in on my heart - and seem to be unforgettable, but they are, over time.  I try to recall the girl with the long hair and pretty teeth. She was quick…broke a staff’s nose during Phys. Ed. She later cut her hands on a window in my office during a therapy session with her pedophile father. Another client was found dead at the age of twenty in a nearby anonymous park, a beautiful park really, after “aging out” at 18 with nowhere to go. Never had a chance really.

    Or the 7-year old blond girl who had witnessed so much perversion that she would masturbate against bedposts, door knobs, and trees, with a maniacal energy – pitifully unable to manage her anxiety and over exposure.

     Still, there are a few names that I will carry to my grave, like Milo. He was an obese boy with an electric face.  He needed his second hip surgery and it fell upon me, alone, to be with him through that surgery. His mother came to visit each week. She started showing a pregnancy about the same time I noticed she was using drugs again. Mom made a long trek by bus, always punctual, soft-spoken and polite. I would bring her a dinner plate from the kitchen. It was sickening and surreal to witness; those slow gray lids as the baby inside her grew a little each week. All I could do was standby. The baby was born premature and blind.

     And another name - Rebecca, the oldest of seven children, was getting beat by her father when she got in the way of him beating up mom. Rebecca’s mom could hardly make eye contact, suffering with severe depression. Yet, she would bring her daughter complete meals - fresh salad! - accompanied by silverware and real plates: the family’s best to sit at our dirty picnic tables with some feeling of normal.

     Mom would bring her other six children when visiting, including a newborn. To this very day she was the most agile nurser I have ever seen.
     I remember her mentioning, doe-eyed and hazy, that this was to be her last baby - she had her “tubes tied” when the doctors declared one more pregnancy would kill her. I always wondered about that.

     The foster care child of today is usually hit in all major arteries. There are numerous reasons a child enters foster care but the cornerstone of all social services recipients are those evil twins known as economic and psychological hardship.

     Often times a child lands in a foster care setting when one or both parents are mentally ill. An otherwise marginally unstable family may become flooded with the needs of a “special” child. A child born with cognitive impairments or mental illness can exacerbate what an already stressed home can tolerate. The family system tilts sideways and is unable to right itself. Ultimately, the parents surrender him up.

     Or maybe a parent dies and no one else comes along. It is estimated that the United States has as many as 80,000 children orphaned by AIDS. With HIV infection, both parents are likely infected and the mother is often alone and without assistance.

     (The American Academy of Pediatrics predicted that social services would be ill equipped to preserve the children of these families and made a call to arms in 1999 for all health care and legal professionals to swiftly assist families with HIV in planning for their chronic illness and matters of guardianship).

     A grandparent may step up to the plate only to find the child’s needs outweigh the elderly’s limited resources.

     Occasionally a family excitedly adopts a high-needs child, only to learn that they are profoundly mismatched. The adopting parents had naively underestimated how labor intensive a special needs child would be, with all of her past trauma’s and difficulty in adjusting to a safe and secure environment. Or, maybe a mother adopts with deep psychological wounds from her own history and inflicts these upon her new child.

     Sometimes it’s just a poor fit and without the glue of biology to keep everyone moving through the system like a determined machine, each family member loses hope for harmony. It’s never done without tremendous anguish.

     The most familiar reason for foster home placement is drug involvement and/or incarceration of the parents. These families often blend and mix themselves so often that a child’s constitution becomes consommé…simply over strained.
      The epidemic of crystal methamphetamine in particular has exponentially increased this population. When children are born exposed to drugs in utero, their brains look like jumbled up Christmas lights - the synapses don’t connect properly, hence, more cases of learning disabilities. Even a statistics cynic will have to accept that increased cases of ADHD and consequently, the voluminous prescriptions to fix that problem, are directly tied to the cheap and filthy chemicals known as meth.

     These babies are now adolescents and the foster care gates are bursting; the ones that make it in are the most difficult to love. And, during the bloodletting that we call their childhood, they often prefer an institution for its safety and clear boundaries to an affectionate home, loaded with all of its intimacy and familial expectations. Intimacy and closeness often trigger feelings of pain and powerlessness if sexual abuse was part of a child’s past. Many of these thirsty children will seek physical touch through aggressive contact instead of a gentle hand.

     Physical touch and professional boundaries have become words with the single most weight these days. In the current climate, it’s best if I don’t make physical contact, but if necessary, maybe a quick hug, in broad daylight only, and after asking, of course.  My touch is authentic but feels dryly clinical.

     In Noelle Oxenhandler’s exquisite book, “The Eros of Parenthood,” Oxenhandler contends that the prevailing no-touch policy has inadvertently amplified the risk for inappropriate touch to occur. Our kids are hungrier than ever for physical affection.     

      For two years I ran a monthly “rap session” for mothers in maximum-security prison. It’s not hard to guess that the sentiment most echoed, wrenchingly so, was the void of their children. The inmate uniforms were identical, yet, each woman would tie yarn threads in such a way as to make it hers, individualized, mindful, conscious. The big stories and personal dramas don’t tug at me so much, it’s the dainty poetic human behaviors that capture my attention.

      I would come home from that morning visit and sleep for the rest of the day, limp from the full-body invasion.     

     Another facility gave me such a wallop - it was the “holding” center that was the child’s first stop once removed from a home. Their counselors were well trained and genuinely cared for the children, albeit temporarily. The plastic plants and blue wallpaper weren’t any worse than other facilities I visited but my visceral reaction was overwhelming. I never left there without a stomachache. My supervisor told me to visualize a mesh screen applied to my upper torso. This cellular exercise worked as well as butter on a burn.

     And when they move, so to speak, they carry their worldly possessions in a plastic garbage bag, unless someone was kind enough to give them a suitcase during a hand-off, maybe a sentimental photo or two, a dog-eared birth certificate, and inevitably clothes that don’t fit properly. I remember a colleague mentioning to me a brilliant idea about soliciting Samsonite for donations, to give a child at least a modicum of dignity while being uprooted, one more time. She worked too hard to make time for her idea but it’s still a brilliant one.            

     Huge volumes of research have recently gone into something called “the resiliency factor.” Resiliency refers to a person’s innate ability to not only survive, but also thrive, in spite of horrendous disadvantages. It’s quite remarkable. Holocaust survivors have been studied along this vein to better understand how two people can experience the same external world, yet their response is uniquely and powerfully different - some sort of internal reconciliation, “a making sense of it all.”

     Mark Katz, in “On Playing a Poor Hand Well” studied children and adolescents. A common denominator of those that prevail, those that have resiliency, seems to be simple, really. If at least one person has faith in you, expectations that you will make it, a certain hopefulness becomes the harbinger of strength and perseverance. Just one person, any ol’ person will do.

     Being able to receive love is a learned skill, requiring complex and intricate machinations early on, between infant and caregiver. The new enrichment programs, such as Zero to Three, wisely emphasize the critical window period of the first three years of life - developmentally, this is when children learn how to love and be loved.

     Years ago, I volunteered as a mentor for an at-risk youth program. I was asked to take on a brother and sister pair living with their disabled grandmother. Occasionally they would stay overnight with me in my small apartment near the beach. We would gather shells, bake cookies and attempt to wash my gigantic dog, until the laughter overcame us. Their grandmother made me tamales sabroso every holiday and her only condition was that I leave the neighborhood before dark set in. My best memory is an out of town drive we took to visit my family - they inhaled those two children and everyone was better for it. This could never occur today. 

     I ran into that little boy, now a gorgeous young man, while standing in line with my baby at the DMV. He had grown up well, strong and responsible. He had just come from seeing his mother hospitalized, one more time. His sister had followed his mother’s legacy into a life of prostitution and heroin addiction. We exchanged numbers but I never heard from him again. Oh, he also said that I had made a difference in his life.

     In recent years I have had two very close friends disclose their molest to me as young girls, as if trying to swallow a white-hot morsel (Contrary to popular belief, most abused children do not grow up to abuse their own offspring). The very fact of their molest is not slightly surprising, but the length of time they took to share this information with me was a reminder that the shame of having been abused is raw and real, even if young and innocent, even if only once, even if you are accomplished and decades in front of it.                          

     Working in a non-profit industry has taught me how to best utilize resources in my own backyard (I teach parenting classes but just as industriously attend them). Begging and arm-twisting become second nature. Recently, I twisted the arm of my neighbor, to share her story of survival with a group home that cares for teen girls. One spirit survivor inspiring another, for free and for fun. Their lives could not be more different, yet, more similar.

     Mai, as a young girl of 9, escaped Vietnam with her family three days before Saigon fell. A la Green Dragon, she was one of numerous refugees transplanted to Minnesota, where she later met and married another refugee, to have children of their own. Our kids play together every day and no one would know the difference. The only beauty in tragedy is that it is always an opportunity for someone or something to change.

     I had always assumed that becoming a mother would make me a better social worker… make me more sympathetic to the nuts and bolts of child rearing. The antidote for cynicism is the realization, at the finish, that everyone did not begin the race from the same line.

     When I become judgmental (an occupational hazard) I take inventory and remember that I am very, very lucky. I have a supportive partner who devotedly helps raise our child. I live in a safe neighborhood with family nearby. We have good health care and reliable transportation. I can usually afford the more nutritious food choice and am grateful for the luxury of time and health to breastfeed my son, sharing with him my great gifts – as James R. Lowell says it, “That best academy, a mother’s knee.”

      And, when I sometimes I wonder if these experiences have made me a better mom, I realize, yes, they have broadened my scope of human nature, with its terror as well as its victories. My radar is well developed and constantly scans. I trust my intuition and encourage others to pay close attention, be present at all times. I have been elbow-to-elbow with enough perpetrators…I look into their eyes, and say “I KNOW” and they look away.

     My father told me that he avoids this shadowy “other” existence, while I run directly towards it, and I know this is true. I defer to the wide and textured arc of humanity because darkness is true too, pulsating. They say an artist should pursue a career in art only if he cannot imagine doing anything else for a living. The same philosophy would apply for social work as well. Only do this if you cannot imagine doing anything else.

San Diego North County Cancer Support and Meditation Group

 

Advocacy and Support Groups

San Diego Cancer Center

Studies at Stanford University have shown that patients who participate in support groups lived longer than those who were not assisted by a support group. We know that people who use mind/body approaches feel better, have a better quality of life and frequently live longer.

Under our non-profit, The San Diego Cancer Research Institute, Integrative Medicine Volunteer Program, Encinitas Center, offers the following support groups. These groups are open to all cancer patients in San Diego County. Please see the Integrative Calendars or flyers for more information. Call our Encinitas Office at 760-634-6661 or our Vista Office at 760-598-1700 to register and to check for any changes in times.

Meditation Offerings

Facilitator: Bob Bunshaft
Date: Please call front desk or check the calendar
Time: Please call front desk or check the calendar
Place: SDCC Encinitas Office (1200 Garden View Road, Suite 200)

Living With Cancer Support Group

Facilitator: Paul Brenner, M.D., Ph.D.
Date: Tuesdays
1st & 3rd Tuesday in SDCC Vista Office
910 Sycamore Ave., Suite 102
2nd & 4th Tuesday in SDCC Encinitas Office
1200 Garden View Road, Suite 200
Time: 2pm-3:30pm

Who Cares For The Caregiver?

Facilitator: Paul Brenner, M.D., Ph.D.
Date: 1st & 3rd Thursdays
Time: 4pm to 5pm



SDCC "Self Empowerment for Patients"

Newest Research and Statistics on Military Suicide Rates; What Can Be Done?

Losing the Battle: The Challenge of Military Suicide

Newest Study and Research on U.S. Military Suicide Rates and How to Stem the Tide

Dr. Margaret C. Harrell and Nancy Berglass 

 

"From 2005 to 2010, service members took their own
lives at a rate of approximately one every 36 hours.1
While suicides in the Air Force, Navy and Coast
Guard have been relatively stable and lower than
those of the ground forces, U.S. Army suicides have
climbed steadily since 2004. The Army reported a
record-high number of suicides in July 2011 with the
deaths of 33 active and reserve component service
members reported as suicides. Suicides in the Marine
Corps increased steadily from 2006 to 2009, dipping
slightly in 2010."

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Another USMC suicide in San Diego
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irest

Military (Active Duty and Veterans)

Overview of iRest in the Military

The origins of IRI and iRest are deeply tied to the service and support of the US Military. In 2006, the Department of Defense conducted research at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) on the efficacy of Yoga Nidra (an ancient meditative practice dating back to 2500 B.C.E.). Renamed Integrative Restoration, or iRest for short, the protocol was developed and led by Richard Miller, PhD. The study was conducted with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Following the study, the Deployment Health Clinical Center (DHCC) at WRAMC integrated the iRest protocol into its weekly treatment program for soldiers. iRest programs have subsequently been set up at VA facilities in Miami, Kentucky, Ohio, Chicago, North Carolina, and Washington, DC.

Click here to listen to a free download (short practice) of iRest Yoga Nidra for the military! Click here to watch a YouTube introductory video for the series of 15 meditations that includes this short iRest practice.

About PTSD and iRest


Post-traumatic stress disorder is a severe anxiety disorder with typical treatment being medications and/or psychotherapy. IRI and senior iRest teachers work with those experiencing trauma, their physicians and caregivers to navigate the symptoms of PTSD, and often associated conditions such as phobias, suicidal feelings, mood disorders, insomnia, fatigue, panic disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, all of which can be debilitating.

In working with traumas of the mind, as well as severe traumas in the body, iRest has helped navigate recovery and increase coping skills. iRest is integrative in that it heals the various unresolved issues, traumas, and wounds that are present in the body and mind, and restorative in that it aids the body and mind in returning to a natural state of functioning. iRest fosters freedom from stress and trauma, and helps identify and heal destructive tendencies that otherwise can impede the healing process.

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Saturday, November 5th, Free Scripps Empowering Health Event

Saturday, November 5th, 7:30am-noon

Scripps Empowering your Health

Free Seminar - Four Terrific Speakers

Hilton Del Mar

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A Chance Encounter, A Lasting Bond

Parade magazine

Alex Tresniowski

October 30, 2011

FRIENDS FOR LIFE: Laura Schroff and Maurice Mazyck at their reunion on the street last month.

On a busy street corner in midtown Manhattan in September, two old friends have come together to mark an anniversary of sorts. “This is where we met,” says Maurice Mazyck, 37. “Wait, wasn’t it further up the block?” asks Laura Schroff, 60. They finally settle on a spot and hug. “Sometimes,” says Mazyck, “I wonder if I would be here at all if you hadn’t done what you did.”

It was there on Monday, Sept. 1, 1986, that Mazyck, then a skinny 11-year-old in grimy sweats and sneakers, stuck out his hand as Schroff walked by. Thirty-five at the time and a successful newspaper executive, Schroff lived just two blocks away from Mazyck in New York City, but their homes might as well have been on different planets—he lived in a welfare hotel, she in a luxury high-rise.

“Excuse me, lady, do you have any spare change?” he asked, hoping to buy some food. Schroff didn’t answer and kept going.

Ellen Degeneres' Guide to Gift Giving

But then, just a few steps later, she stopped, turned, and came back. Instead of giving the boy money, she took him to lunch at McDonald’s. He got a Big Mac, fries, and a chocolate shake that day—and the two of them wound up with an extraordinary friendship that has changed both their lives. “Of all the achievements in my life,” says Schroff, who spent three decades in advertising sales before retiring in 2009, “there is nothing that makes me prouder than to call Maurice my friend.”

In 1986, the hungry child Schroff encountered was already trapped in a cycle of poverty, drugs, and violence. His father, a gang member, left when Maurice was 6; his mother was a heroin and crack addict. He had never known an adult who held a full-time job, and he’d received only two presents in his young life: a toy truck and a joint. Still, Mazyck, who today owns a small construction firm, says, “I know my mother did the best she could.”

And then he met Schroff. At the end of their lunch, she gave him her card and told him to call if he was hungry. After three days with no word, Schroff went looking for him. “I felt like he’d entered my life for a reason,” she says. Mazyck was on the corner where they’d met. They agreed to meet the following Monday, and the Monday after that, and a ritual evolved.

At first she took him out to dinner, but soon she began cooking for him at her place. The simple things they did on their nights together—setting the table, doing laundry, or just sitting and talking—were the kinds of comforting activities on which most childhoods are built, but they were foreign to Mazyck. Tellingly, no one in his family ever wondered where he was. When Schroff offered to make him lunch for school, he asked that she put it in a brown paper bag. “When kids see you walk in with a paper bag,” he explained, “they know someone cares about you.”

Why We Gave Away Our Home

But the impact Schroff had on Mazyck is only half the story. “When people tell me how lucky Maurice was,” she says, “I tell them, ‘I was the lucky one.’” She, too, had a turbulent childhood. Her father had a drinking problem and often hit her mother and brother. Schroff vowed that when she had kids, they would always feel safe.

With Mazyck, Schroff could try to repair some of the damage in his life that she couldn’t go back and fix in her own. And in the process he helped her see what truly matters. Watching him experience things for the first time—she took him to his first baseball game, bought him his first bicycle, let him decorate his first-ever Christmas tree—opened her eyes to the joy and beauty around her. “Sometimes those blessings are right there in front of you, just as Maurice was in front of me on the street,” says Schroff. “Sometimes you just have to open your eyes and open your heart.”

Then, in 1997, Mazyck, 22, vanished from Schroff’s life. She tried to track him down, but he had moved to North Carolina to try to set up a business. “I had to go away and become a man on my own,” he says now. There, Mazyck faced the temptation to make easy money selling drugs, as so many men in his family had done, but he resisted. “Because of Laura, I made the right decisions.”

He finally called Schroff in 2000 after his mother died. “I told her, ‘You are my mother now.’” She bore him no grudge for his absence. “I’d never given up on Maurice,” she says.

When Schroff helped the boy she met on the street get a shot at a better future, she was extending that same opportunity to his kids. Today Mazyck is a proud husband and father, and he and his wife have seven children, ages 4 to 19. He and Schroff see each other at least once a month. When she visits his New York City apartment, his kids swarm over their “Aunt Laurie.” “I have my own family,” says Schroff, who has three siblings and five nieces and nephews, “but they are my family, too.”

Back in 1986, Schroff took Mazyck to her sister’s house in the suburbs. For the first time, he sat down for a meal with her family at a large dining-room table. “To me, it was magical. I told them when I grew up, I’d have a big table in my home,” he says. True to his word, he now owns a huge dinner table, where he and his big, noisy family—and his friend Laura—eat and talk and count their blessings.

Alex Tresniowski is the coauthor of An Invisible Thread, on sale Nov. 1. The book tells the story of Schroff’s and Mazyck’s unlikely 25-year-long friendship.

The SCAR Project, David Jay's Breast Cancer Survivor Photos

Breast cancer and the I-Word (inappropriate)...

The SCAR Project, photographs of women who are on the other side of breast cancer and have the scars to prove it. "What my girls couldn’t handle in the flesh, many adults were uncomfortable with even just on paper. Jay’s photos, I learned, were deemed to be too real, too honest, and to show too much. There are nipples. There are lack-of-nipples. There are the curves of a woman’s shape. There are the glaring absences where a woman’s shape should be."

How to Meditate

My next meditation class is now open for registration.

www.sdadulted.com

This class is perfect for all adult ages and physical conditions. Those with knee or hip problems will be instructed on how to meditate comfortably in a chair.

We will use simply techniques known as "mindfulness" to meditate. Meditation is

• relaxation
• contemplation
• visualization
• affirmation

*****

join me! 

SAVE-A-LIFE WALK  

 Date: Sunday, November 13, 2011    

Suicide has touched most of our lives in some way or another. It continues to boggle the minds of most people and leaves loved ones confused, devastated, and angry.

Please come out on November 13 to help support the cause and partake in fighting the stigma associated with suicide. Honor those that have died by suicide while meeting new people or reconnecting with those you may have lost touch with.

Join our team, San Diego CAMFT and Friends by going to the website: http://savealifewalk.kintera.org.

No donation or fundraising is necessary, just come out and join us for a beautiful day that includes the release of doves, a resource fair, and a Remembrance tent. The walk is located at the edge of Balboa Park at 6th and Laurel.

The schedule is as follows:

Registration: 6:30 am - 8:00 am
Opening Ceremonies: 8:00 am - 8:30 am
Walk: 8:30 am - 9:30 am
Dove Release: 9:45 am - 10:15 am
Resource Fair & Remembrance Tent: 6:30 am - 10:30 am

We hope to see you there! Questions?
Contact Marni Goldberg, the Community Relations Chair,
camftsd.communityrelations@gmail.com