Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Response to book

Dear Bob:

I just finished reading your book. Congratulations! You have written an engaging story of your rural past and your urban success. You are a great testimony to the perseverance needed to overcome huge obstacles in life. This book encourages everyone who reads it to never give up.

I am so honored to know you all these years. You have inspired my life.

Praying for you always.
Sincerely, Pastor John and Irene Smucker

Thursday, February 12, 2009

A lovely and treasured letter I received

Your book arrived in the mail yesterday, and I stopped everything to read it right through, nonstop -- couldn't help but. I've read through any number of books in one sitting of course, but only one other comes to mind in which I definitely should have been doing something else, as was the case here, and that was Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," so you're in good company.

The book was wonderful and I hope it will be a best-seller. Modest in tone, but wonderfully vivid and uplifting, and wonderful stories that reflect your personality so well, I chuckled many, many times, remembering all the similar good laughs we had during our high school years. I hadn't realized you were so close to your brothers all those years, nor that you had had to work so hard on the farm. You've really had a most interesting life, and, I liked the emphasis on good luck, which Liz and I have also appreciated over the years -- but it was a great way to start the book, setting the tone for the book and reinforcing it throughout.

I remember how thorough you were in learning the material in the one rigorous course we had in high school -- biology. So, the intensity you brought to your profession in patent law was but a continuation of that resolve. We actually had to study in that class and you were a master. Also, I was pleased that you mentioned Jaderborg, our English teacher, who made a huge difference in our lives. Many of his significant passages still reverberate in my mind and the wisdom they conveyed have been unforgotten.

I liked the three quotes you used at the beginning of each section, particularly the Einstein quote. It's been a hard lesson for me, because I've always felt I could do anything, and that's been the cause of alot of disappointment and depression. But it's so true; once you realize you're limitations, life can open up and you can get a perspective on what's important, and can accept other people much better as well.  The other quotes were very apt too -- you meet life where it is, and that's what you choose.

Congratulations again on a beautiful book, and on getting it reviewed in The New York Times -- no small thing! We hope to buy lots of copies and give them to friends as gifts -- and so proud to have been part of your life and can claim you as a lifetime friend. I wish everyone in our class could write such a memoir -- everyone has an interesting story I expect -- though your life has really been exceptional. Liz is reading the book now; it's spawned so many conversations, and we again are so thankful for all the good luck we've enjoyed -- an important attitude to carry into old age (so many are embittered).

Loren

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Kindness


For Bob, October 21st 2007

Before you know what kindness really is
You must lose things,
Feel the future dissolve in a moment
Like salt in a weakened broth.

From “KINDNESS” by Naomi Shihab Nye


As you all know, I lost my sister Diane a few years ago. She had not been ill…she just died… suddenly…drowned while doing work with the Guatemalan people. I’ve come to know the acute woe you feel with sudden death. I’ve also come to know what it is like to live with a catastrophic prolonged illness…through Bob.

In March of 1998 Diane said... “Where is God in all of this…I don’t know…but He has promised to be with us always in the darkness and in the light…In the darkness we cannot see or feel…Know that you are surrounded by people that do love you both and your family as well...” And here we are with YOU… our family and friends.....thank you.

ALS has made our old dreams die…but new dreams emerge…We have learned to mourn each loss and move forward…And this Bob has done with elegance and undying courage...I love him for this.

Bob is a sophisticated man…even though he hales from a wheat farm in rural Lindsborg Kansas. But, he draws his contentment from simple things…a ride in the van to the boardwalk in Brighton Beach, the dinners and lunches and movies with you...our friends, watching Tiger Woods play, being glued to a Yankees game or CSI, listening to opera. Because of your KINDNESS, Bob is at home and can enjoy all these simple things.

A mixture of emotions sweeps over me tonight…High on this list is JOY, LOVE and GRATEFULNESS.

Herman Melville, a New Yorker by the way, said “We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads”… You all are those threads.

Thank you again for your KINDNESS.

I would like to leave you with a quote from James Baldwin…”The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out” but you all know this already ….you have kept on our light these past years…



Love and Thanks, Maureen

Monday, February 2, 2009

New York Times Article


NEW YORK REGION / THE CITY | February 01, 2009
Reading New York: The Bagel, the Lobster and the World's 'Luckiest Man'
By SAM ROBERTS



Robert E. Paulson’s “Not in Kansas Anymore: A Memoir of the Farm, New York City and Life with A.L.S.” (Gemma B. Publishing, $19.95) is an inspirational must-read record of one man’s indomitability with the support of his wife, his family and his friends.

Mr. Paulson, a former patent attorney, began suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, when he was an adult and the father of three sons (one still a teenager). He recalls his first view of New York in “the bad old days” of the early 1960s and his later move to Yorkville, where Lou Gehrig, the ballplayer who gave his name to the disease, grew up.

Along the way, Mr. Paulson offers some intriguing arcana regarding patent law, but the most moving passages involve his discovery, beginning in 1993, that “something was wrong with my body.” He chronicles his metamorphosis from a vigorous former farm boy an amateur singer into an invalid unable to speak, one who breathes through a mechanical ventilator and is dependent on a feeding tube. “I was essentially entombed in my own body,” he writes.

But he lived and wrote this memoir on an eye-responsive computer keyboard. The “diagnosis of this disease need not be a death sentence,” he concludes, adding: “Life is everything. And what is it but the ability to feel, think and communicate? Thanks to today’s technologies, A.L.S. can’t take any of these from you.”

Echoing Gehrig, Mr. Paulson, who is 71, writes: “I am a lucky man.”