Music Heals

By Diane Petryk

Hospital green. Children's ward. The 6-year-old boy with a tracheotomy tube lay motionless. Medical staff couldn't lift his despondency. Kathy Lord and Susan Weber tip-toe in.
A parent nods. Softly, they begin to sing. It was the holiday season, so they chose “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

At first, said Laurel Whitaker of the Brooklyn Children’s Medical Center, the boy watched listlessly.

“But before long one hand came up and he began to snap it to the music, then his other hand came up and he began to clap," she said. "By the time they finished he had both hands over his head and was mouthing words to the song." When the musicians were about to leave, he clasped his hands together and reverently bowed his head and mouthed ‘thank-you.’”

The boy’s reaction wasn’t unusual. Hospitals across the city have seen music’s almost magical power for triggering metamorphosis. Moods lift. Blood pressure falls. Will to live can be brought back. Music -- especially the gentle and loving Lord and Weber style -- can often trump medicine.

Musicians Kathy Lord and Susan Weber, who play guitar and electric bass respectively, had been performing together for more than a dozen years when, one day in 1997, Weber experienced a numbness in her left hand. Her doctor referred her to “the best,” Beth Israel Medical Center’s chief neurosurgeon, Dr. Fred J. Epstein. It turned out that Weber’s problem was transitory, but she sought some way to repay Epstein for his kindness and expertise.

Epstein was also head of the Pediatrics Department at the Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery at Beth Israel and therein lay the answer. Lord and Weber would donate a performance for the hospitalized children. That day, as they sang and strummed for children gathered in the ward’s playroom, miracles began to happen. Depressed kids brightened. Unresponsive faces soon beamed. Some children forgot their pain and picked up tambourines. They sang, they laughed; they were swept from their cares by melodies and harmonies. And the effect lasted long after the duo had gone. Epstein was thrilled with the residual positive effects of the performance. It had actually helped the children heal! He insisted Kathy and Susan return, and soon. The rest is history.

“A fire got lit under us,” said Lord. Before long, they had formed Music That Heals, a non-profit organization to raise money and provide performances for hospitals, nursing homes, homeless shelters, hospices and other groups of people needing their spirits lifted. Lord and Weber, with and without their band of 4 to 6 others, already had a full bookings schedule. They were in demand at colleges, for weddings and church groups, and on cruises. They soon found, however, their Music That Heals gigs were the most satisfying.

Kathy, who grew up in Gravesend, said, when she was young, she couldn’t go near a hospital because seeing sick and suffering people upset her. Now, a rare week will go by when she doesn’t make the rounds in one hospital or another.

“It’s not like I don’t see the tragedy,” she said. “I just don’t take it in. I focus on the gift we have to give.” Sometimes it’s more than music. At the Brooklyn Hospital Center recently, Susan had to catch up with Kathy after being delayed with a 3-year-boy. He had a big IV needle in his arm. “He said it felt better if I held his hand,” she said. At the hospital, Weber, a Bronx native, now of Valley Stream, and Lord, now of Bensonhurst, are familiar faces. They stroll the hall in pediatrics and peek into each room.

“Would you like a song?” Kathy asks. Sometimes the child is alone and the music also alleviates loneliness. When parents are present, they are often surprised at the request and shrug an indifferent “okay.” Then they see how their child perks up and hope the women will sing another.

"How about that Lion King song, or a little Bob Marley?" Kathy strums her guitar and sings. Susan sings and shakes a small egg with little pellets inside that make a soft maracas-like sound. She keeps a supply of the eggs in her bag and gives one to each child so he or she can shake it in time to the music, too, and they get to keep it. In the intensive care unit, a nurse is washing her hands with a weary look on her face. She turns and sees Kathy and Susan and her lips curl upward.

“Listen,” she says to a young boy as the women begin with some Kenny Loggins lyrics: “Christopher Robin and I walked along Under branches lit up by the moon Posing our questions to Owl and Eyeore . . .” The atmosphere in the ICU changes for doctors, parents and patients. A young boy talks about his school and learning to play the guitar himself. In another room, Kathy finds out the young girl would like a sad song. They play Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You.”

“You have to respect what the child wants,” Susan explains. “But nobody is too sick,” she adds. “Some will decline. Often it’s because they’re unfamiliar -- culturally they’ve never seen someone playing in a hospital. We make sure they realize it’s free.” She’s quick to point out she and Kathy are artists and not clinical musical therapists. Where a clinical therapist is limited to certain textbook methodologies, they are free to adapt to the dynamics of each situation.

“Kathy and Susan are so soft in terms of their playfulness that kids let them in even when they won’t let others in,” says Honey Shields, Beth Israel’s director of Child Life Therapy. “Sometimes they’ll follow them down the hall. It’s a form of empowerment for them.” “We use our intuition and our sensitivities,” Kathy says. “We express feeling in song.” That’s important, even in situations where it’s clear that neither medicine nor music will cure.

At Beth Israel once, they encountered a child with a brain tumor, near death. Many of her family members were gathered in her room. None of them spoke English, but Susan, with her perfect Spanish, was able to learn that the family did want them to play. Softly, they launched into Guantanamera, LaBamba, Cielito Lindo and more. Susan learned that the dying girl loved music. As they played, her family began to sing to her.

“Suddenly there were about 20 people singing and crying and it was beautiful,” Kathy said. “It was a bonding experience for the family and a poignant send off. And I think the girl heard it. I think she got it on some level, the love they had for her they were able to transmit in vibrations of sound. I think she got it.”

Another time they were in a neo-natal unit where a physician was working on a baby the size of one’s palm,” Kathy recalled. The baby was just a few days old. The doctor nodded for them to sing and they did, with several family members around the tiny bed. After awhile, the baby stopped breathing. “The doctor said to us, ‘At least she got to hear a song before she died.’”

In another type of venue, Lord and Weber can reveal more of their rock ’n roll roots. Recently they played for a group of about 30 autistic and developmentally challenged youngsters and young adults at Holy Name Church’s basement rectory in Prospect Park. Able to forget their handicaps for a while, the youths danced exuberantly for more than hour to tunes like “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Hot, Hot, Hot,” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” They had a great time, but it was Susan and Kathy who were grateful.

“We were born to do this. We are grateful to be able to give them our gifts,” Weber said. “That’s the satisfaction. If I died today I would feel my life had been worthwhile.” Now in its 10th year, Music That Heals has grown to include about 15 additional musicians who tour the same types of venues. But the organization is still small.

“I’m a musician, not a fundraiser,” Kathy says. Still, she’s also a runner and that led her to arrange an annual 5K Run to help raise funds. The event is held in Prospect Park each Fall. It has grown from about 80 participants the first year to about 200 in 2004. Last year it raised $8,000. Matty Heavey, owner of Circles Restaurant, always donates his restaurant space for a party after race day.

Some of the children who heard Lord and Weber when they were ill, inevitably turn up for the race, giving testimonials to the power of music in general and Lord and Weber in particular. ”Chase all the clouds from the sky Back to the days of Christopher Robin Back to the ways of Christopher Robin and Pooh.”

"Come By the Fire"

by Diane Petryk-Bloom

Winter comes early to Michigan’s upper peninsula, especially the windy Straits of Mackinac linking Lake Huron and Lake Michigan above the mitten part of the state.

It was only early November, but we had our first serious snow storm already.

They say it’s a sign of good insulation if snow doesn’t quickly melt off your roof, but I had no cause to be pleased with my new 2-bedroom A-Frame on that account .

I was about to have a hole cut in the roof and for some reason the man set to come up from Cheboygan to do the job on my St. Ignace dwelling was on the phone asking me if there was ice up there.

On examination, one side of the steeply pitched roof was fairly dry. The other side looked like a giant splattered snow cone.

“Not much,” I said. The sun will probably burn it all off by the time you get here. Was there ever sunshine in northern Michigan in November? Why was I willing to risk this man slipping into oblivion?

In a word: Imprinting

We are all indelibly imprinted with certain image and experiences from our childhood -- those that stick and dictate our lifelong preferences.

Back in 1950-something, I’m in second grade at Jefferson Elementary School in Livonia, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. The school was six or seven blocks from my home – too close for school bus service.

On a morning that didn’t even hint at a need for leggings, I set off for school. But by 3:15 it had started to snow and turned much colder.

Two things about this era: Many moms didn’t drive, mine among them, and girls weren’t allowed to wear slacks or jeans to school—even little ones. That wouldn’t change in my district until 1968.

So on that afternoon – no bus, no car, no long pants, I turned my newly 7-year-old self into the wind and pushed for home. The sharp, icy gusts bit into my bare legs. I was only halfway home when they started to numb.

My mom had no means to rescue me. She did the next best thing. She started a fire in the fireplace.

When she saw me tumble in red-cheeked and red-kneed, she looked relieved and said, “Hurry, come by the fire.”

I still see her kneeling there before the fireplace rolling newspapers into paper logs to put under the grate to help ignite the wood above.

In choosing a floor plan in this post World War II suburb, I knew my parents had sacrificed the third bedroom for the larger living room with fireplace. Considering they had a boy and a girl who would soon outgrow sharing the same bedroom, you can see the importance they placed on that.

It might have been the wisest choice. Through the fifties and sixties and into the seventies that fireplace warmed us while we read or watched TV, its amber aliveness welcomed relatives and guests and it pitched in for the furnace in a crunch.

I learned the importance of opening the flue before building a fire by smoking up the entire house a few times.

Every Christmas my mom would tuck the red ribbon bow of her pine cone cluster in the same gap in the fireplace fieldstone. I knew the fold-out Hallmark Christmas card train would be on the long mantle to display the greetings that would come in the mail. And the little candle carolers and a gum-drop tree from the dime store would be up there as well.

At college in East Lansing I had a house with a fireplace which became a social gathering spot for students in the neighborhood.

When I got my first job, I rented for awhile and always missed the hearth part of making a home. So when I was offered a deal on my first house my first question was “Does it have a fireplace?”

Nevermind that it was Florida. (The air conditioning system could be added later) Yes! It had a fireplace. Sold. The only thing to do before moving in was have the white paint sandblasted off the fireplace bricks.

My memories of that fireplace include two glasses of wine and conversation that lasted well into the morning.

Apartment hunting in Savannah, Georgia, was a dreary until I was shown the garden-level two-bedroom on Monterrey Square. The landlady talked up the picturesque view and the history of the square, which included the mansion you could see to the left, already scene of the murder that would be depicted in the bestseller “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” But all I needed to see was the fireplace. It was small with no mantle, just a curved black marble framed opening.

Does it work?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “But you have to sweep the ashes out – there’s no chute.”

In Livonia, the ashes dropped to the incinerator in the basement, but this was a 100-year-old townhouse. I didn’t mind. Eye level out the front windows were the feet of passersby and the wheels of tour buses. I preferred to watch the logs flame-dance in purple, orange, yellow and blue. That fireplace assuaged the lonely hours between work and sleep.

A baby son and a new life took me to North Carolina and the fireplace that came with the house in the Blue Ridge foothills was necessary for Santa to make his stop. It also roasted marshmallows at Halloween parties and – history repeats – helped us survive a year of pesky furnace woes.

When we decided to return to our home state of Michigan in 1995, we first rented an old Victorian home with bay windows and – of course – a fireplace. It served us well, but when the time came to buy a home there was nothing available with a fireplace in my price range in the small town of St. Ignace.

There was a cute 2-bedroom that had everything but.

Then someone leaned into my ear, and, in the manner of the man who whispered “plastic” to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, said "Vermont Castings."

I bought the fireplaceless house with the pitched roof. From the loft bedroom you could see Lake Huron. Undulating water has somewhat the same effect – waves and fire both roar in strength and then ebb – like life.

After the closing, I headed south across the Mackinac Bridge to the fireplace shop in Cheboygan. I picked out a beige, enameled Vermont Castings wood stove with a glass door front, top lid for loading while burning, and mitten-warmer sides. I chose a gray stone base and black chimney pipe. The pipe would extend the full height of the 2-story living room, take a dramatic jog to avoid the central beam and go out above the roof. All this for $4,200. I didn’t hesitate.

Which brings us back to the man on the icy roof. He survived. We had a fireplace in time for Santa.

The night my 7 year-old and I strung some holiday lights around the porch railing we made a snowman, frolicked in the snow, and studied the brilliant constellations visible on a northern Michigan night.

Then, after midnight, we stomped off the snow, chucked the boots, and started a log. When the fire flared we settled on a sheepskin rug to real The Railway Children.

Night after night that winter we read in front of that glowing, glossy robot with the very tall, crimped stove pipe hat.

Will my son remember me chopping the icy logs free on the porch or lighting the kindling as I remember my mother rolling newspaper logs and wielding the poker under the grate? And know that “come by the fire” means “I love you.”

Pakistan's Nuke Submarine Threat Credible

By Diane Petryk-Bloom

The cold white illumination of the computer screen was the only light in the bedroom.

It overlooked our bed like a wide-mouthed monster that never slept.

It was the 3 a.m in New York. My husband clicked open his email inbox.

“Here it is,” he said.

I had long gone to sleep, but not really. I got up on my knees behind him and put my chin on his left shoulder as he clicked open the email he had been waiting for.

Former top CIA agent Robert D. Steele had responded in just four words:

“Your scenario is credible.”

I know emails don’t flash. But whenever I remember that moment I see the words flashing in my mind.

There would be no more sleep that night.

My husband, Howard Kenneth Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle, is a mass behavior scientist, a scholar of the history of Islam, as well as a human encyclopedia of history and science. Earlier, he had been researching for his upcoming appearance on Coast to Coast AM, a radio talk show. He is often invited on the show to talk about current events. A 9-11 anniversary was at hand. The question was – what could happen next?

Pakistan was a likely place for him to start, because Pakistan, he says, has one of the most violently fundamentalist and anti-American populations among the world’s 57 Islamic states. Many of those hate us a lot, so that’s saying something, he told me.

Pakistan sucks you into a vortex of political and religious issues that branch offin endless threads: Osama Bin Laden in the hills, military dictator Pervez Musharaff holding on against great odds, fundamentalist agitation, religious vigilantes, the “Islamic” bomb…

Among these, Howard discovered Pakistan’s Agosta 90-B submarines.

You probably haven’t heard about those. For some reason, mainstream media just doesn’t want to report about them. But here’s what you should know:

These are state of the art stealth subs that pose a challenge even to our Navy’s sophisticated tracking equipment.

• Each can carry 16 Harpoon Stand-Off Land Attack cruise missiles
• Those are nuclear missiles
• Since Pakistan tested its first nuclear bomb in 1998, every nuclear device it has made has been a missile warhead.
• The Agosta 90-Bs have a range of 12,000 miles

That means they could slink into Chesapeake Bay or up the Hudson River undetected.

Pakistan has these powerful subs courtesy of our wise friends, the French. Their government-owned shipbuilder, DCN, which builds France’s naval vessels, helped the Pakistanis build not only the subs, but a shipyard that can make more.

“According to the Pakistani Navy Captain Iftikhar Riaz Qureshi, who commanded both of these subs in their test phases,” Howard wrote, “Pakistan acquired its Agosta 90Bs to provide itself with ‘second strike nuclear capability.’ Since Pakistan tested its first nuclear bomb in 1998, every nuclear device it's made has been a missile warhead. Qureshi's words imply that from day one, Pakistan's intention has been to tip these missiles with atomic warheads.

After a 12,000 mile journey, these subs, according to Defence Journal, could unleash their missiles on New York and Washington, and still be able to take refuge in mid-ocean, lay low and threaten other world capitals.

“The United States operates a network of hydrophones scattered all over the Atlantic and Pacific seabed. We are listening for subs like these,” Howard posted on his website, Howardbloom.net, “but we may not be able to hear them. The Pakistani subs use a methanol-and-liquid-oxygen engine bedded on a suspension system that quiets its purr to a whisper. We may not be able to detect their silent running beneath the sounds of zebrafish fanning their tails.”

Steele confirmed Howard’s fears that we’d need intuition like The Hunt for Red October’s fictional heroes – every time out.

Who is Robert D. Steele? After a distinguished career a a CIA operative, including three dangerous tours of duty as a clandestine officer under deep cover, Steele spent seven years training intelligence professionals from 40 nations and consulted directly with 18 nations. He served in three of the four Directorates of the Central Intelligence Agency, helped program for overhead imagery satellites and managed an offensive national-level counter intelligence program. Steele was responsible for creating the newest US national intelligence production facility, the US Marine Corps Intelligence Center. He’s also an Amazon.com top reviewer of books on national defense.

This is the scenario Howard envisioned and sent to Steele:

Pakistan’s military dictator, Pervez Musharaff, will be killed or deposed (Musharaff is either a genuine ally of United States or pretending to be, but, either way, he has been target of at least five assassination attempts.)

Osama Bin Laden or his successor or followers will take power in Pakistan.

Then, Islamic extremists will have control of the country and its military hardware – including the Agosta B’s.

They unleash them on New York and Washington.

The nuclear devastation is enough to bring other nations to their knees.

Before long, your daughter and mine wear headscarves and live under Sharia, the religious law of the Muslim faith. Equal rights for women are no more.

Western men don’t have it much better. Western freedoms are history.

What facts add crcdibilty to this scenario:

*From 1979 to 1995, Pakistan was the headquarters for a group of ‘Afghan freedom fighters’ who were not Afghans at all. They were an international army paid for by the US, Saudi Arabia, and China, armed by the CIA, and trained, in part, by China's Peoples Liberation Army. We trained an army of 50,000 men from 30 nations to bring down the Soviet Union's most advanced tanks, jets, and helicopters. Why? Our mutual goal was to embarrass a common enemy--the Russians. Chief among the recruits to our proxy Jihad were Osama bin Laden and the founding members of Al Qaeda.

*Pakistan is the nation whose citizens rioted in the streets in 1989 over the title of a novel they didn't like--The Satanic Verses. It was Pakistan's street activists who forced the Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a Fatwa offering five million dollars to the Moslem who killed Salman Rushdie. The Pakistanis were more extreme than the most extremist Islamic leader of his day. And that was fifteen years ago! Since then anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism has grown.

*Pakistan is also the nation that educated a generation of Afghan refugees who later went home to take over their country in the name of Islamic purity and justice. We know those refugees as the Taleban.

*Today Osama bin Laden is one of Pakistan's two biggest pop-culture heroes. The other is "The Father of the Islamic Bomb" Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan. Khan and Osama have reportedly met in Afghanistan. Khan is the weapons expert. Osama is the weapons user.

*Many a Pakistani militant fundamentalist cell identifies itself as an Osama ally. One of the strongest among these Osama-loyalists is arguably Pakistan's most popular leader, Fazlur Rahman Khalil, the man who told 60 Minutes that: ‘God has ordered us to build nuclear weapons.’

According to Syed Adeeb, head of Information Times, a militant Pakistani press outlet based in the National Press Building in Washington DC, "an Urdu-language letter written by Pakistan Army officers on a Pakistan Army letterhead and sent to many members of the Pakistan Parliament" calls, "'Pervez Musharaff and his clique…a band of thieves and looters…imposed on this nation'" by the United States.

It looks like only this embattled head of state stands between Osama and the Islamic submarines, between Osama and the cruise missiles the subs can carry, and the 40 or more nuclear warheads Pakistan has built since it exploded the first Islamic atomic bomb.

And what bin Laden, in a January 2004 speech broadcast on Al Jazeera, called, "a surprising blow…one that…due to its magnitude…will change the international balances of powers…."

“Here's what I strongly suspect is Osama's dream endgame,” Howard told Steele : “Nuke a few key cities in the United States. Blind and devastate the Great Satan. Then watch while France, Germany, Italy, and England capitulate. Capitulate to what? To Osama's dream, his passion, his vision of truth and freedom--to a global Islamic caliphate.”

“Your scenario is credible.”

It didn’t flash, but it does.

###