Thursday, September 30, 2010

A Little Doggie Dental Work Today


This is the sweet little ole Chip.  He probably doesn't feel too good right now.  
He's getting his teeth fixed today.  

He''s five pounds, ten years old, and it's costing between $600 and $1,000, depending on what needs to be done.  No matter how you chart it out, it doesn't seem right, does it?  

But I just can't bring myself to haul out the pliers myself, so I guess we'll just have to hand over the plastic to someone else.  

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

That Sixties Liberal Is On The Loose Again

An incredible story came out of Iraq stating that on Sunday nine American mothers received comfort from dozens of Iraqi mothers who had lost their sons during the Saddam Hussein era which ended in 2003. 
"When I hugged an American woman we couldn't express ourselves in words, but what helped us to express our feelings and understand each other were our tears. We found them as a true expression to our grief and suffering," said a 55-year-old Kurdish woman who had lost most of her own close family during the scorched-earth campaign against the Kurdish rebellion.  
The American women expressed how they had been angry before their visit to the country in which their sons had died, and yet had found peace and comfort as they visited the land where their children lived their last moments and spent time with people who inhabited that country and felt their same pain.  "I'll have visited the land where a piece of my heart will remain forever," said Amy Galvez, who is from Salt Lake, and whose son, Cpl Adam Galvez was also from Salt Lake City.   
The meeting of the two groups of women was organized by a group called “Families United Toward Universal Respect’ from the state of Virginia and officials from the local f Kurdish government and our State Department.
Yet while these women were meeting together in the northern part of Iraq, which is a mostly peaceable area currently, other parts of the country were experiencing  ongoing bombings and death.  
Doesn’t it seem silly to fight and kill?  The people who are doing the fighting are hardly able to sit down and discuss the points and minutiae, doctrines and principles they are fighting for.  If people have differences, it’s ridiculous not to work them out with discussion, arbitration, judges.  
But using innocent people as battering rams, target practice and ammunition?  Mothers can see how stupid that is.  Why can’t supposedly intelligent old men?  Old men who are too old to fight themselves? 


Source:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39369062/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

My Heros

Soph and Al
Today I sat in the warm sun watching Sophia and Alison play soccer.  
What a gift this September is.  It more than makes up for the crummy, rainy June we had.  To see the girls play soccer is just a huge bonus.  Thank you God.  
Ali’s team is no longer ‘Fire Dragons”, or “Dragon Fire” or whatever it was.  It’s “Lygers” or maybe “Ligers.  Snappy and much easier to yell.  Also they are very rare.  Don’t tell the team they’re impotent when they do come along.  The team is rough and ready to score, though they are a little bedraggled towards the end of the second twenty-minute half.
I’m pleased to say that both girls get into the fray.  I was worried they’d hang back, but no.  They like to get into the pack, which is definitely what you call the team positioning.  At this age, there are no positions.  There are those who hang back and those who are in the bunch.  Ali is in the five-year-olds and they don’t even have a goalie.  The Lygers won 9 to 2 today.  They might be named the “Marauders” next week.  
Sophia’s team remains the “White Dragons”.  A quiet dignity which bespeaks their 1 to zip loss today and their 1 to 1 tie at their last game of play.  I think, though, she’d rather win.  
But what makes it all really beautiful, though, is that the girls seemed to just really enjoyed playing.  Running, breathing, kicking the ball, laughing, throwing grass, wearing uniforms, eating oranges and having fun with friends.  Here’s my hope:  that they never stop having fun and enjoying themselves just like that in some form or another. The points?  They really aren’t that important after all.  

Monday, September 27, 2010

Churchill, The Man of the Twentieth Century, And What A Man He Was

From the ridiculous to the sublime, I finish first Cheever, then Churchill.  I enjoyed Cheever more but certainly admired Churchill much more.


But Churchill taught me one thing:  I knew next to nothing about the World War I from the point of view of the British.  Plus, I really knew relatively little about World War II from the perspective of the British.  


He was the only British Prime Minister to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature and the first person to be recognizes as an honorary citizen of the United States.  He singularly impacted the twentieth century as no one else could.  He is quoted to this day.  http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/winston_churchill_2.html He was Prime Minister of England twice, he was listened to by everyone, loved by his countrymen, inspiring, though certainly not loved by all, but a brilliant, and incredible speaker and writer. 


His public image was first greatly damaged in the First World War in the Dardanelles as he underestimated the power of the Turks and the British suffered tremendous losses.  He again took his blows as he supported King Edward VIII in his marriage to Mrs. Wallis Simpson in 1936.  Many felt, each time, his political career was over, but as history shows, it was indeed not. He showed his resilience and became, well, Churchill.


In spite of his philandering mother, he was always faithful to his Clementine and she to him even though they had their own bedrooms right from the first.  They did have four or five children (I foget which) and adored one another.  


He took up painting in mid-life to and profesionals were more than amazed at his abilities.  He entered an amateur painters' contest anonymously and judges could not believe he was an amateur.  He painted all the rest of his life and his many paintings have sold for very high prices.  


He landscaped his own home, as well, complete with lakes he carved out himself with his own dredging machinery and walls he built himself.  He even applied to a masonry union only to be refused on general principles and not because of his lack of skill.  He was an amazing man to say the least.   


I've studied World Wars I and II a bit since and plan to do more.  I must read this book again after I do.  


I do remember one thing that wasn't mentioned in the book.  My father used to say that Roosevelt and Churchill were drunk at Yalta and sold us out to Stalin.  My dad was one interesting guy and I kinda don't want to know for sure anyway.  However read this article from a 1955 Time Magazine article.  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,937135-1,00.html



Thursday, September 23, 2010

I Warn You, I'll Curse the Skies

What do I hate most about the end of summer?

The unpredictability of the weather?  The wearing of coats?  The shortening of days?  The irregularity of the blueness of the sky?   The onset of chilliness?   Potential precipitation?  Not really.  that's not it.

I really like Autumn.  I like harvestime.  I like crisp beautiful days.

I like the holidays.  I even like goofy Halloween.  I like Thanksgiving, Brad's, Julia's and Ben's birthdays.  Sophia's and Alison's birthdays too.  And of course Christmas.  Who wouldn't?  Then we get to go to Hawaii!!  Three glorious weeks in Hawaii!!  Most of January in Hawaii.  What's not great about all of that?

But then what?

Winter.  February.  Nasty, cruddy, ugly old February.  That should sum up my Winter.

I should then perk up and say "March!"  Nearly the onset of Spring again is it not?  "Who can't tolerate the short, little month of February?" you say.

But remember this year?  Didn't we have Winter until the end of June?  Didn't we?  I thought in retirement we'd beaten it.  We head off to Arizona to see Ben, to Hawaii, to warmer climes like Las Vegas, but global warming doesn't seem to be hitting us if you use Utah as a reference point.  And we can't stay away forever.  Really, if you were paying attention, it was a miserable Spring.

Well we'd just better not have that happen again.  I'll raise my fist to Zeus or whoever is in charge of the weather and also fire off a letter to Al Gore -- as if he had any power over the situation.  I warn you, I'll curse something, anyway.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Can't Learn Enough About Theodor Geisl


Trust me on this one.  You can't.  And you can't wish too much he was your uncle.  
And also, still alive.  Let's just hope Heaven is happier for having him around because they're sure all the better for it.  Know who he is?  Hit the link.  

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/8Vzkqu/www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/66293

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

John Cheever -- A Book Worth Reading


Oh, no.  I’ve finished another good book.  I hate that.  
Cheever, A Life, the biography of the writer, John Cheever was fabulous and I’m not sure why I liked it so much.  He was a lonely bi-sexual, a drunk for most of his life, an unhappy man, yet  I loved this book.  
It was honest, sharp and so insightful yet no one around him seemed to know him well.  Everyone seemed to think of him as a nice and kindly man except for his wife who despised him for most of his life and his children who didn’t understand him.  These were the people, incidentally, he wanted to please most, but he didn’t seem to know how to do it.  Relationships of all kinds seemed to elude him.  
What interests me, too, is that much is told from the point-of-view of his journals which he seemed not to want to hide, in which he referred to his loathing of his homosexual tendencies and fears that his drinking is what made his wife hate him so much (though she fixed him dinner without fail for all the years of their marriage and cared for him during his final bout with cancer.)  I wonder, too, why more didn’t read his journals during his life and find out more about him.  He invited his son to read them and sat watching him at one point as he read.  No one seemed interested.  It made me want to keep a journal better and more honestly.
I think I love the beauty of the writing of this book and the mingling of that with the beauty and honesty of the writing of John Cheever himself is what got me.  I don’t really know if I’ve read much of John Cheever’s work at all.  I’ve read much of his rivals’ works:  John Updike, whom I love, Saul Bellow, John Irving.  Cheever is mostly known for his short stories.  But I’d heard so much about this biography that I had to give it a shot and I’m so glad I did.  I still may not try much of his work as it has settled back into obscurity a bit, but his life I love.  

Hope my family, friends and former students aren't too alarmed at the range of my reading interests.  Somehow such things don't alarm me as much as they seem to other people.  I think there is great beauty in understanding the difficulties of others.  I don't enjoy crassness nor do I have a prurient interest in obscenity and suffering.  In fact I'll stop reading if I find in books things that appeal to such things.  

But perhaps that is what the appeal in my Master's Degree in Educational Counseling was.  To understand the human heart a little better and sympathize, empathize and wish a little I could help out those for whom life is tough.  God knows everything and I am so far from that but something inside me tells me that he approves when I seek to understand the hurting that goes on.  I think that's why he made me tough and not especially judgmental.  No excuses, just a little explanation I guess.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Carl's Off The Table And Recovery Ensues

Carl is home from the hospital at last.  
He has never really had quite the assault upon his person that he has had the last five days in his whole life.  
He had stents put in his heart arteries -- a couple in the early nineties and three last July, but his insides were never quite so abused as this.  
I feel, though, that he was so blessed to have his kidney stones a couple of months ago so that Dr. Daniel Hibbert, a 6 ft. 9 in. giant could check out his prostate and PSA count and find that Carl indeed did have prostate cancer.  It’s just a little like my brother, Brent having kidney stones about this time last year and finding he had kidney cancer.  I think it’s God’s way of putting on a little sticky note to say “I don’t want you home quite yet.  Do something now right about right here.”  
Thank you, God, for both of them.
But there are some inconveniences.  
As I said in a previous blog, Carl doesn’t swear, but he does get to wear a little catheter bag for a couple of weeks and he almost cussed out the length of tubing, clamps and bag as he tried to figure the whole mess out his first day with it at home.  I wasn’t laughing to be sure as he commented that anyone who thinks catheters are funny doesn’t know what funny is.  It’s not that we think they’re funny.  We just are mighty glad it’s not us.  He's more used to it now, but he still doesn't like it.  
He hurts pretty bad still.  Not as bad as he did yesterday and not as bad as he did the days before.  I presume tomorrow will be even better.  
His surgery was the robotic laproscopic prostectomy which is much less common than the usual wide open hands-on job, but has far less hacking and hewing on the outside and is far more precise on the inside, but it still requires lots of cutting through the muscles of the stomach and still hurts like a son-of-a-gun.  
He will have a total of two weeks with the catheter and some recovery besides, including another four weeks of getting better and better, according to the good Dr. Hibbert and then after that he should feel pretty good.  Who knows how long before he's "back to normal" whatever that is.
I did mention to Dr. Hibbert that a "Dr. Hibbert" is also on the Simpsons and wondered if he gets teased a lot.  He said that those in the circles he travels in don’t watch the Simpsons much.  What?  You’d think patients of Urologists would gravitate right to the Simpsons.  I’ll let you provide the punchline yourselves.  

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Happy Birthday, Sweet Girl, I Only Wish I'd Known


What do you do when it’s too late?
Cristi Buffenbarger and I were about all there was when we lived in Bolingbrook, Illinois.  
We lived across the lawn from each other when our children were little.  Ben was three when we moved in, her Stephen was two, Brad was one and her Suzie was a baby.  


She came over and held Brad in cold water when he was running a fever while I was reading to Ben and Carl was working and I was desperate.  I babysat for her and she babysat for me.  We spent hours together, laughing and talking.  We were kindred.  Neither of us had a car, both of us loved to laugh, and hardly the day went by that we weren’t together, outside in the summer, inside in the winter.  She was so funny, so kind, so dear to my heart.
She was raised in Chicago, I was raised in Utah, and we had much to share.   
One day, I borrowed a thermometer and broke it.  She told me not to worry because she had another, but I replaced it anyway.  She thought that was a remarkably honorable thing to do.  It was really nothing, but a long story made short, she investigated the Church and became a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- a Mormon.  
It’s hard to relate how much I love her.  
Yesterday I went on Facebook to wish her a Happy Birthday and things were strange there.  People said they’d miss her.  Then someone said she’d make a great missionary in the Celestial Kingdom.  I Googled her name and there was her obituary.  She’d died on June 10 of this year after a three-year battle with breast cancer.  I’d known she was sick.  But I thought she’d beaten it.  I’d not talked to her in so long.  I am crying.
She’d not even had a funeral.  She was cremated.  If I’d only known I’d have been back there before she died.  Why didn’t I know?  She’d been divorced for so long and her children wouldn’t remember me so who would have told me?  I guess it would have been her, but was she too sick?  I should have stayed closer.  I should have done something.  I should have known somehow.  Maybe she thought that would be too much to ask for me to come see her.  It wouldn't have been.  No way.  Not for Cristi.  
God give us strength.  God preserve our love.  God fill the in blanks.  God, thank you for those we love and still have in our midst.  God help us.

Monday, September 13, 2010

Some People Can Really Say It For Us

 Laure-Anne Bosselaar
It seems like so much is going on.  Some is personal, so much has a national and an international impact.  Some is good, some is not.  So many lives impacted.  Some hurting. Some rejoicing.  Some afraid,  Some hopeful. Some just living on.  That's why I love this poem.  It reminds me that Heaven knows about it all, too.  Laure-Anne Bosselaar is a very talented contemporary poet, don't you think?  Try to read it through to the end.  I think you'll like it.




The Worlds in this World
Doors were left open in heaven again: 
drafts wheeze, clouds wrap their ripped pages 
around roofs and trees. Like wet flags, shutters 
flap and fold. Even light is blown out of town,
its last angles caught in sopped
newspaper wings and billowing plastic — 
all this in one American street. 
Elsewhere, somewhere, a tide 
recedes, incense is lit, an infant 
sucks from a nipple, a grenade
shrieks, a man buys his first cane. 
Think of it: the worlds in this world. 
Yesterday, while a Chinese woman took 
hours to sew seven silk stitches into a tapestry 
started generations ago, guards took only
seconds to mop up a cannibal’s brain from the floor 
of a Wisconsin jail, while the man who bashed 
the killer’s head found no place to hide, 
and sat sobbing for his mother in a shower stall —
the worlds in this world. 
Or say, one year — say 1916: 
while my grandfather, a prisoner of war 
in Holland, sewed perfect, eighteen-buttoned 
booties for his wife with the skin of a dead 
dog found in a trench; shrapnel slit 
Apollinaire's skull, Jesuits brandished 
crucifixes in Ouagadougou, and the Parthenon 
was already in ruins. 
That year, thousands and thousands of Jews 
from the Holocaust were already — were 
still — busy living their lives; 
while gnawed by self-doubt, Rilke couldn’t 
write a line for weeks in Vienna’s Victorgasse, 
and fishermen drowned off Finnish coasts, 
and lovers kissed for the very first time,
while in Kashmir an old woman fell asleep, 
her cheek on her good husband's belly. 
And all along that year the winds 
kept blowing as they do today, above oceans 
and steeples, and this one speck of dust 
was lifted from somewhere to land exactly 
here, on my desk, and will lift again — into 
the worlds in this world.
Say now, at this instant: 
one thornless rose opens in a blue jar above 
that speck, but you — reading this — know 
nothing of how it came to flower here, and I 
nothing of who bred it, or where, nothing 
of my son and daughter’s fate, of what grows 
in your garden or behind the walls of your chest: 
is it longing? Fear? Will it matter?
Listen to that wind, listen to it ranting
The doors of heaven never close,
that’s the Curse, that’s the Miracle.

 by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Friday, September 10, 2010

Where Are the Fire Extinguishers?


This whole business of burning the Koran for whatever reason makes me heartsick.  Of all people, we members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints know what it’s like to be assaulted for what we believe and to have our scriptures belittled.  
However, I was pleased the other day when the Church issued a statement (September 8, 2010) through a spokesman which said, “A key tenet of our faith is to accord everyone the freedom to worship as they choose. It is regrettable that anyone would regard the burning of any scriptural text as a legitimate form of protest or disagreement.”
The Church is definitely not defending the actions of the church in Florida or the one potentially in Kansas which are threatening to burn the Koran.  It is merely defending their right to do so.  
Does that leave us to allow such disgraceful behavior to take place on our country’s soil?  Certainly not.  Nor does it leave us vulnerable, as says General Petraus, to retaliation against our troops who are serving in Muslim countries.  
I have a former student, Nathan Dalley, who is shown in the picture above, who was killed on November 3, 2003 in Iraq.  He was as fine a person as I’ve known.  Among other things, he was Senior Class President at Brighton High School in Salt Lake City which shows the value other students placed on him.  He was a great kid.  He was respectful, loved the Lord, was bright, was a fun, joyful boy who loved everyone.  He is missed to this day.  I, and many others, don’t want to run the risk of losing anyone else if we don’t have to.  
So do we put our hands in our pockets and say, let anyone just go ahead and do anything they want regardless of how it might impact on the rest of us?  Of course not.  That’s not what the Lord meant when he inspired the eleventh Article of Faith which is:  “We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.”
He also taught us to teach, preach and to pray to bring upon ourselves and our families, friends, and our detractors his greatest blessings.  And these we need so badly these days.  He also taught us to be courageous and to take heart.
We can’t forget this because of fear, despair and in our forgetfulness of one of the greatest scriptures of them all:  Luke 1:37,  “For with God nothing shall be impossible.”  

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Watching Your Mouth


I’m feeling pretty good about myself today.  I didn’t swear at all, all day.  I don’t think I did yesterday either.  I don’t know that for sure.  


But I’m still pretty good according to the August, 2010 issue of Psychology Today.  It reports that the average English speaker utters 85 swears per day.  I never come close.  I bet I don’t touch that in 85 days.  Maybe, but I doubt it.  
It also seems that women have raised their percentages among the outbursts of public swearing from 33 percent in 1996 to 45% in 2006.  It’s risen to almost half of public cursing!  (But then, how do they document this?  Who really checks the facts and figures?  Where do the folks with the clipboards stand and is there really a fair cross-section of society represented?  Just wondering, Psychology Today.)
Unfortunately, the “F”-Bomb tops the top ten list of preferred swears with “sucks” rounding out at #10.  I prefer not to list 2 through 9 but I am glad I don’t live in the society that enjoys using these words in this order.  The folks I generally know are those who kinda hang onto “suck”s as first with the “H” and “D” word occasionally thrown in.  I'm lucky that way, I guess.
I’m almost always sorry when I swear. I think when when I do it, it probably offends more people than I think, even when it’s just Carl, who rarely if ever swears himself.  

I am trying to stop, even under my breath in traffic.  Especially in front of Carl.
A final note that is kinda funny from the PT article is in reference to a deaf boy who has Tourette’s.  Some unfortunate people with Tourette’s Syndrome often curse involuntarily without the ability to control themselves as you probably know, and this poor lad signs his profanities!!  It hardly seems fair, though those offended would be reasonably rare.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Whattaya Know? We Liked It


Today Carl and I went to see Scott Pilgrim vs The World because it was rated sky-high by Rotten Tomatoes, because I like Michael Cera and because I was in the mood for a movie.  Julia had planned to g.o to Despicable Me, but she had wearied of spending, having bought carpeting for her downstairs, so I was left in the lurch.  Carl had no idea of what he was in for.  
And we liked it.  It was funny, pretty clever and quite entertaining though Carl said it was “good but a little silly” for his taste.
I found upon my return that it was based on a “graphic novel” which I presume is a smarty-pants word for a comic book but that’s okay.  Comic books are for kids, graphic novels are for geeks probably.  
We were easily the oldest people in the theatre but that’s okay.  If anyone has a problem with that, they can stuff it.  And if anyone there thinks that popular culture stuff was beyond us, it really wasn’t all that arcane.  Pretty easy to figure out, actually.  Sorry.  

Friday, September 3, 2010

Chicago -- City of Never-Ending Surprises


Well, then, I still really love Chicago, in spite of ever unfolding truths.  
To the left is Edgewater Hospital, the site where my beloved sons, Ben and Brad, each first saw the light of day. which is situated, obviously, on the shores of the beautiful Lake Michigan, address, 5700 No. Ashland Avenue in Chicago.  It truly was at the time a distinguished and reputable spot, one which anyone would have been proud to call their birthspot.  Dr. Eli Bernick was indeed the finest of obstetricians, competent, patriarchal, and indeed very Jewish.
Recommending it further is that Hillary Rodham Clinton was also born there.  Perhaps less thrilling is that John Wayne Gacy was born there, but I’ll not go into that.  He certainly wasn’t a mass-murderer as a newborn.  You’ll have to Google for more details.  I’ll not stoop to those here.

But here's something I didn't know until just the other day when Carl notified me of something he'd discovered.
Edgewater fell on hard times in the late 1990’s.  Ugly doings shut the place down, in fact.  Programs funded by the State of Illinois and the Feds were stopped due to some of Edgewater’s cheesy dealings.  Unnecessary operations and amputations on homeless guys they picked up from the methadone clinics around seemed to irritate the powers-that-be and without their money, Edgewater, the former Grande Dame on the Lake, had to close her doors.  Sounds like a really bad Law and Order episode.  
Now when Chicago looks down its nose on you, that really is the last straw I guess.  

But let me tell you, I love that city still.  It’s got something.  I think it’s because it’s brassy.  And I like brassy.  Wonder why?

Thursday, September 2, 2010

The Sixties Liberal Stumbles Onto the Stage Again

An incredible story came out of Iraq stating that on Sunday nine American mothers received comfort from dozens of Iraqi mothers who had lost their sons during the Saddam Hussein era which ended in 2003. 
"When I hugged an American woman we couldn't express ourselves in words, but what helped us to express our feelings and understand each other were our tears. We found them as a true expression to our grief and suffering," said a 55-year-old Kurdish woman who had lost most of her own close family during the scorched-earth campaign against the Kurdish rebellion.  
The American women expressed how they had been angry before their visit to the country in which their sons had died, and yet had found peace and comfort as they visited the land where their children lived their last moments and spent time with people who inhabited that country and felt their same pain.  "I'll have visited the land where a piece of my heart will remain forever," said Amy Galvez, who is from Salt Lake, and whose son, Cpl Adam Galvez was also from Salt Lake City.   
The meeting of the two groups of women was organized by a group called “Families United Toward Universal Respect’ from the state of Virginia and officials from the local f Kurdish government and our State Department.
Yet while these women were meeting together in the northern part of Iraq, which is a mostly peaceable area currently, other parts of the country were experiencing  ongoing bombings and death.  
Doesn’t it seem silly to fight and kill?  The people who are doing the fighting are hardly able to sit down and discuss the points and minutiae, doctrines and principles they are fighting for.  If people have differences, it’s ridiculous not to work them out with discussion, arbitration, judges.  
But using innocent people as battering rams, target practice and ammunition?  Mothers can see how stupid that is.  Why can’t supposedly intelligent old men?  Old men who are too old too fight themselves?


Source:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39369062/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

Hope for the Brain


Brain problems have been mixing around in my life since forever.  
I had a fiance who had an aneurysm while we were alone together in his car on a Sunday afternoon.  He never recovered.  
My father had a stroke when he was my age, never recovering his speech or his ability to use his arms, legs, or any kind of useful movement in his body aside from the ability to turn his head in a direction he chose.  This lasted almost a year until he died eleven months later.
My mother suffered from serious dementia and had so for too long a time. 
My brother’s sons suffered from serious, debilitating OCD.  
I have a great-nephew who potentially has Asberger’s Syndrome.  
ADD and ADHD seems to have its way with about everyone in my family.  
As a result, The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D., really intrigued me, but it’s cutting edge ideas and hope really won my heart. It deals with all these difficulties and more.  
Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to adapt, and is the topic of the book.  


It was earlier thought that areas of the brain were set from infancy and damage to various areas caused permanent damage to different skills and functions.  But this book shows that other parts of the brain can take over where failure in a specific area takes place.  Dozens of examples are given.
The first story is of a man, a professor in higher education in the 1960’s who suffered a stroke.  His son worked with the man well beyond the time, two-plus years, when recovery is expected by health-care professionals to be worthless.  His son had him crawl like a baby, pick up marbles, worked with his speech, until finally the man was able to return to teaching.  After the man died a few years later in his seventies, an autopsy was performed and it revealed he had indeed suffered a massive, debilitating stroke.  But his brain had rerouted its innerworkings to where it could re-command his functions
I wish we’d known this.  The professionals had given up on my father well after the time of this man.  His stroke was in 1988.  
The book spoke of a man who had had a stroke while in-utero during the second trimester.  Yet at an age about in his mid-forties was able to recover substantially through working with the principles of changing his brain in a clinic designed with this hope in mind though he had never been able to function well in his life to this point.
OCD, it would seem, can be worked with by some of these ideas as can autism.  
The same principles, however, can work in a negative way.  Addiction to pornography can recircuit the brain in the same way to a terrible result.  Hope for recovery from this, however, is in the same vein.
This book is really is quite readable as well. It won the 2008 U.S. National Alliance on Mental Illness Ken Book Award, it was a New York Times bestseller and a Scientific American Main Selection.  
If the brain interests you and hope for brain health appeals to you, it’s worth a read.