Claire Sylvia’s Afterlife Dreams

By Kevin Williams

Dr. Ken Ring writes, "After posting my spoof of Dick Cheney’s heart transplant in my last blog, my webmaster, Kevin Williams, drew my attention to a story he had written up on his website that concerned a remarkable, indeed, an amazing, case of cellular memory following a heart/lung transplant. The satire I wrote about Dick Cheney was fictitious, but it was based on extensive research that shows in that in some cases, the recipients of such transplants begin to experience the tastes and habits of their donors. After reading Kevin’s article, I asked him if he would be kind enough to reprint his story as one of my blogs.  Kevin graciously acceded to my request, so what follows is his article.  I think you will find it as mind-bogging as I did.

One of the strangest cases in the history of dream research is described in the documentary, The Secret World of Dreams. It describes the amazing story of a woman named Claire Sylvia, a 47-year-old drama teacher from Boston and former professional dancer with several modern dance companies. In 1983, she was diagnosed as having primary pulmonary hypertension – an often fatal, rare progressive disease which causes blood vessels in the lungs to collapse. Her health slowly deteriorated until she was forced to give up her job and became home bound. She was also dependent on oxygen and could only move around in a wheelchair with great difficulty. A heart-lung transplant was her only hope and the risks involved were considerable.

Soon after the transplant, she began having strange and incredibly vivid dreams about a young man she didn’t recognize. Eventually, Sylvia realized that the young man in her dreams was the 18-year-old organ donor whose heart and lungs resided in her chest. Through her continuing dream contacts with her donor, she learned a lot about him including his name. She then decided to do some research to find out if this “heavenly” information was correct. Her research proved that it was indeed correct. Sylvia then met the young man’s grieving family and Sylvia shared with them the amazing story of her contact with him through her dreams. Claire Sylvia died in August of 2009 from a blood clot in her lung; 21 years after her heart-lung transplant. The following is the detailed account of her amazing story:

“My mother was basically dying,” says Amara, “She prepared herself for death and she was preparing me for her death. She labored to get up in the morning to go to the bathroom. Her breathing was labored and I was afraid every morning whether she would be alive or not.

Then Sylvia’s bizarre dreams began to unfold.

“I started to have a series of dreams. One dream was that I had the transplant and I had to drink four glasses of milk a day. At the time I questioned this, I said, ‘I wonder what this means? Where does this four glasses of milk come in at? I don’t understand what this means.’

“And there was no explanation so I just let it go. I lived each day with a thought and a prayer that I would live till the next day and that I would live to see my daughter graduate from high school which was about a year away.”

Finally, Sylvia’s prayers were answered.

“The phone rang and it was the transplant coordinator. She very calmly said, ‘We officially got permission to do heart and lung transplants and we have a donor for you today.’

“I was speechless. All I could say was, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God!'”

Within hours, Sylvia was rushed into surgery and after a delicate three-hour operation, she awoke.

“I knew that I would have to take an anti-rejection drug, cyclosporine. They injected a certain amount of this liquid into two little cups of milk. Then at night, I repeated this same process. I realized that these were the four cups of milk a day in my dream.

“At first I didn’t accept it, I kept saying, ‘I must have gotten this information from someplace.’

“I kept checking around and nobody told me. Then I thought, ‘This is bizarre. I don’t know why and I still don’t.'”

It was May of 1988, and Sylvia’s operation was Connecticut’s Yale-New Haven Hospital’s first successful heart-lung transplant on a female patient.

Five days later, journalists were invited into the hospital to interview Sylvia in the intensive care unit. During the press conference, a reporter asked her:

“Now that you’ve had this operation, what do you want right now more than anything?”

Sylvia replied: “To tell you the truth, right now I’d die for a beer.”

Sylvia was momentarily stunned by what she had just said, not so much because it was flippant, but because of the fact that she does not like beer and has never liked beer.

When Sylvia returned home, another sequence of unexplained occurrences began. Her taste in food changed dramatically. Five weeks after the operation, when she was allowed to drive for the first time, and she headed straight for Kentucky Fried Chicken – a fast food she had never previously enjoyed. She couldn’t explain this sudden craving. Nor could she explain many other apparent changes in her personality, such as, why she was starting to look at women the way a man might look at women, for example, or why her favorite colors are now green and blue rather than the hot shades of pink, red and gold she used to prefer. Other strange things occurred. Sylvia started eating green peppers, a vegetable she had formerly meticulously picked out of salads.

Around this time Sylvia had a strong, unexplainable desire to visit France. On her return, just when Sylvia thought her life couldn’t get any stranger – it did – in another mysterious dream.

“I’m in an open field and it’s very light. It’s daytime and I’m in a playful relationship with a young man whom I see clearly. He is tall, has sandy colored hair and his name is Tim L.

“I come back and say goodbye to him and as we approach each other, we kiss, and as we kiss, I feel as if I inhale him into me. It’s like taking this enormous breath. And I know that he will be with me together forever. But it also seemed that this man in my dreams, whom I knew as Tim, must be my donor.

“I was very curious to find out who my donor was because of all the things that were happening to me and because of the dreams I was having – and the feeling of living with his presence.”

Claire became convinced her donor was trying to communicate with her. She contacted the hospital but they informed her that donor records were confidential. When all hope seemed lost, her friend Fred Stern called to tell her of a message he received in his own dream.

“I had a clear image of a dream,” says Fred Stern, “that we had gone to the basement of the public library and had seen in the Portland newspaper a story on either the third or fourth page several days before her operation. A story about the boy who was killed and whom she had gotten her heart from.”

Claire and Stern made arrangements to meet at the local library.

“I met Fred at the public library and we looked at the papers the week preceding my transplant. Sure enough, the day before my transplant, as was in his dream, the obituary of a young man who was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was 18 years old. His name was Tim L. as it was in my dream. It felt like my heart stopped beating for a moment. I was standing up and I remember getting kind of weak all over. My knees went a little weak. It was a shock.”

According to Fred Stern: “It was almost like magic, like some sense of knowing. It is just wonderful to be a part of it – this unfolding.”

It turned out that Tim L. had died in a motorcycle accident shortly before Sylvia’s life saving surgery. She had received the organs of Tim Lamirande, 18, of Saco, Maine.

“I was shocked because now it became more real. Now I had all the information. I had the family’s name. I had details. This person really existed.”

Wanting to know more about her donor, Sylvia wrote to Tim’s family in Maine and made arrangements to meet them.

“I was very excited,” says Tim’s sister, Lee Ann, “and the whole family was very excited to meet Claire.”

Sylvia then met the Lamirande family. According to Fred Stein:

“She [Claire Sylvia] was very apprehensive because she didn’t know what she was going to meet, but she was warmly received, particularly by Tim’s sisters. They were very positive and said how much Claire’s atmosphere and behavior reminded them of their brother. What was important too was that we had come to the conclusion from her dreams that the donor must have been a hyperactive person, and the family confirmed this, saying that when he was little he had to be kept on a leash because otherwise he would run off, and at the time that he died he was holding down three jobs as well as attending college.”

Tim’s sister, Lee Ann, said:

“It was like meeting my brother all over again for the very first time – seeing him alive again. Claire was very warm towards us. She was loving. She was loving like Tim was. There was so much feeling that it was absolutely exhausting.”

Sylvia told the Lamirande family about her dream. Afterward, Tim’s sister replied: “My first reaction to Claire’s dream was one of disbelief. I really didn’t believe it until she just started describing things about my brother – like how he was tall and wiry. She described him almost to a T. She was getting the information from her dream. She described how Tim was loving and that he came to her and wanted to be a friend. I just kind of felt that, ‘Yeah, that’s what Tim would do.'”

Sylvia told them: “When I met the family, I was trying to corroborate some of the things that had been happening to me. I asked them if he happened to like green peppers and they said, ‘Oh, yes, he used to love green peppers. He’d fry them up with cabasa.’

“They told me his favorite food was chicken nuggets and that he had apparently just bought them before he died because they had to pull them out of his motorcycle jacket when they found him. When they told me that I said, ‘Oh my God!'”

The Lamirande’s also confirmed that Tim liked beer. And Sylvia’s burning desire to visit France was also explained. The Lamirandes were French Canadian. Tim’s favorite colors were also blue and green.

One night after visiting the family, Sylvia dreamt that 22 motorcycles were being revved up to be driven round town to commemorate some event. In the morning she realized it would have been Tim’s 22nd birthday. To celebrate, she asked a friend with a motorcycle to take her for a ride. It was, she said, “exhilarating.”

Tim’s sister Jackie remarked: “Why would she have a dream about her donor unless God was trying to tell her in a way who we were and trying to make it easier for her to get to us so she could see that there was good out of everything she went through.”

Sylvia stated: “All the images that have come to me since the transplant are, in and of themselves, having to do with this new part of me.”

Over the years, Sylvia kept in touch with Lamirande’s family. When Sylvia died in 2009, Joan Lamirande said, fighting back tears in a telephone interview from her home in Saco:

“She was a wonderful person. As long as she was living it was as if my son was still alive. Now that she is gone, I know that my son is gone.”

The implications of Sylvia inheriting personal characteristics of her donor are astounding. This is because it supports “cellular memory” which is the hypothesis that memories can be stored – not just in the brain – but in all the cells of the human body. One particular study published in a 2008 edition of Nature called Cellular Memory Hints at the Origins of Intelligence is suggestive of cellular memory; however, mainstream medical science does not acknowledge memory outside of the brain is possible. If it were possible, it would mean medical science would have to re-evaluate the accepted view that all memory is stored in the brain, much like data is stored on a computer’s hard drive. Nevertheless, research in Israel indicates that 34% of people who have undergone heart transplants have had some kind of experience of what is now known as "trait transfer."

Re-Runs

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

As I grow nearer to the dreaded age of ninety, I have found myself joking about the triple threat of attaining that age: running out of time, ideas, and functioning neurons. Well, I can josh about this now, but it’s really no joking matter; it is almost certainly my destiny. But before I subside into the shadows of dementia, I figured I could resurrect, if not myself, then at least some of the nugatory trifles I wrote sometime ago, which you may have already read but more likely have forgotten

For this purpose, I decided to draw on one of my less well-advised books, which I called Confessions of a Humorist Manqué.  So, I’ve adapted some of the contents of that book and rewritten portions of it so as to conform to the dimensions of a blog.  I hope you will enjoy reading some of my whimsical tales, especially those that demonstrate my proclivity for making a fool of myself.

***********************

Jews are funny.

I am a Jew.

Ergo:  I am funny.

Well, I may be funny, but I also know that’s a slippery syllogism, or as we used to say behind our teacher’s back, a sillygism. After all, it doesn’t say All Jews are funny. I could be the rare exception. By the time you finish this blog, you can render your verdict.

But consider my background. I am old enough to have grown up listening to Jewish comics on the radio. (Do you remember radios or at least remember hearing about them? They were very popular in my day along with slide rules.) Jack Benny, for example, or in the early days of television, Milton Berle (Uncle Milty!), Sid Caesar, Amos ‘n Andy. (All right, they weren’t all Jewish.) Most kids grow up wishing they could be football quarterbacks or well-healed thugs wearing shades and Armani suits. Me? I grew up wishing I could be Woody Allen, only better looking. 

Anyway, when I was a kid, I had a reputation for being the quickest quipper in the West. For a while, some people even thought I had Tourette’s. But no such luck. Besides, I soon found that being King of the Yock Hill didn’t get you the girls. They just tended to look at you pityingly and then went for the nearest jock. So I was obliged to recess my tongue and devote it to licking the crumbs off my bagels.

Nevertheless, in high school I retained enough of my humor to be voted “class wit.” (This is true. I still have my plaque. That is not true.) These days, of course, as I begin to slide ever nearer into the early stages of dementia, people tend to refer to me as a halfwit (okay, I know that’s a lame joke, but what do you expect from a lamebrain?) But I think it’s in the genes, anyway, because my son, Dave, recently told me that in high school, he was voted “class clown.” It runs in the family, I tell you, it’s tribal, it’s tradition! (Think Tevye.)  

Speaking seriously for a moment (I promise it won’t last), in my life as a professor and author, I have spent much of it writing books about seemingly grim and morbid subjects, such as what it’s like to die (it’s not as bad as you think) or what it’s like to be a Palestinian living in Israel or the West Bank (it’s as bad as you think) -- books that I hoped would educate and edify my readers, maybe even enthrall them if they were to read about what people actually do report when they come close to death, but don’t get around to it. But I have mostly not written blogs like this one whose main purpose is merely to entertain. But if not now, when?

I mean, in this dark and dysphoric age in the reign of Donald II, when the world seems to be going to hell, anyway, maybe what we need is not love, more love, but laughter, more laughter. At least in the tenebrous gloom of our time, it is one way to keep our sunny side, up, up, before we go back to putting our head in the sand or spending our time looking to join the local opioid club.

So, in this blog I have gathered some amusing stories of things that have happened to me or that I’ve witnessed, some of which, I must say, do not present me in a flattering light. But at this stage of my life, I have no reason to conceal from the world what a sometimes ass I was, and no doubt still am.

Embarrassing Moments

When I was a young professor back in the Antediluvian period, before the invention of computers and other devices to further the art of plagiarism, I used to teach large classes in social psychology in banked lecture halls where the seats rose steeply seemingly into the stratosphere. With my poor vision, I couldn’t even make out if the top rows were full of students paying close attention or whether they were masturbating to relieve their boredom.

Anyway, in those days, professors were accustomed to distribute course syllabi on the first day of class, and for my large classes, I simply asked students in the front row of the aisle to distribute them for me.

When I approached a young man sitting in the first row on the left side of the auditorium to do this favor, he refused.

I blinked with surprise and said, “What’s the matter? Are you blind?”

Guess.

One day, a student came into my office during office hours when my door was open and said, “Professor Ring, may I s-s-s speak to you?”

He had a strange grin on his face, so I thought he was putting me on.

“Certainly, I said. Please s-s-s sit down.”

He wasn’t.

When I was a teenager, I fell in love with classical music and listened to it obsessively. I even kept a little brown spiral notebook in which I listed every piece of classical music that I had heard over the radio. During my high school years, I arranged to become an usher at the performances of the San Francisco Symphony where I could hear the performances for free. Even in those days, but it is worse now, I confess, I prided myself on my knowledge of the classical repertoire.

One night the orchestra was playing a piece by the Hungarian composer, Zoltán Kodály, called The Hary Janos Suite. At its conclusion, I initiated the applause, but was surprised that only a smattering of applause followed.

Then the music continued.

I spent the rest of the concert under my seat and to this day, more than a half century later, I am never the first to clap even if I’ve heard the work fifty times.

How I Became a Pyromaniac

On May 21, 2012, I received an intriguing email from a trio of authors in Colorado, which contained a rare compliment: They were planning to write a book modeled after one of mine dealing with near-death experiences, Lessons from the Light, and wanted to advise me of their intent to make sure it was okay with me. They also asked if I might be willing to confer with them about their undertaking, if I wished.

I had not heard of these authors, but apparently many others had. I learned that they – a husband and wife, and the brother of the husband – specialized in giving retreats on spirituality and healing, that they had done so in about 60 countries, and had already written some twenty-two books, which collectively had sold over a million copies. These were certainly well established and successful authors, so I quickly assented, and with delight, to their overture.

This was the beginning of what has become a deep and loving friendship with the Linns – Denny and Sheila, Denny’s brother Matt, and John, Denny and Sheila’s teenage son.  

After many delightful email exchanges, they suggested that, inasmuch as I was planning to visit one of my daughters in Colorado, I might want to spend some time with them during which I could actively collaborate with them on their book over a period of several days. I accepted with alacrity.

Once my visit to my daughter was over with, a friend of the Linns drove me to their house in the Colorado mountains. There were forty-five steps up a seemingly small mountain to their front door – for a moment, I thought I was back in Amsterdam! But the Linns were very welcoming and we all had a wonderful and warm conversation over the dinner that Sheila had gone to a great deal of trouble to prepare.

But trouble of another kind was soon to come.

In the morning, after taking a shower, I nearly burned down their house.  

When the shower was over, I turned on the switch that controlled the heat lamp in their downstairs bathroom.  Or I had innocently assumed that it did. I was wrong.

It actually controlled the sauna in the adjacent room.  

That sauna was rarely used, however, and had been used mostly for storage.

Soon smoke began to billow out, the smoke alarms went off, and all hell broke loose!

Matt, who had been sleeping in the room next to mine, jumped out into the hallway. The other Linns, who had been sleeping upstairs, leapt out of their beds and came charging downstairs (Denny injuring his leg in the process) and we all began furiously trying to beat out the fire before it spread any further.

It was touch and go for several minutes, but finally it was quelled.

I felt like killing myself.

By now, the fire brigade had arrived, the paramedics, ambulances, the works. We all had to clear out for a time.

When we were allowed back it, the house reeked of smoke, although the actual structural damage was confined mostly to the sauna.  

The rest of the day was devoted to various officials coming by, insurance inspectors, cleaning people, etc.  

The house would be uninhabitable for several days. (Fortunately, there was an attached house that was empty that we could use in the meantime.)

So much for our book collaboration!

By now, I had learned that though the Linns had insurance, their deductible was still $5000. I wanted to pay them before killing myself.  

And you know what? They wouldn’t hear of it! I insisted, they resisted. I persisted. Finally, Sheila told me in so many words that she would horsewhip me if I dared even mention the subject again.

I won’t continue with everything that took place over the next few days except to say that all the Linns did was to offer me love, support, kisses, and promises of their enduring friendship. We had the best time together – despite everything – and shared many intimate personal stories together. We even managed to get quite a lot of work done on their book.  

This is how I really came to know and love the Linns. That’s the kind of people they are. And though it all, we have remained in touch ever since as loving friends.

I have also learned to take showers in dim light, if necessary. And I have promised them they will never have to put me up as a houseguest again. God willing, my days as an inadvertent pyromaniac are over. 

Memorable Encounters

The Girl Who Didn’t Like Mozart

In graduate school for a while I dated a girl with the rather unfortunate name of Bonnie McBane. She was not alluring either, but in those days before my life as a lothario began, I took what I could get.

One evening, I took Bonnie to a concert. Opening the playbill, we found that a Mozart symphony was on the program. I think it was “The Haffner,” one of his best. Bonnie sniffed, “I don’t like Mozart.”

“You don’t like Mozart?” I spluttered incredulously. She confirmed that I had heard correctly, and indeed during the performance of the symphony Bonnie looked bored.

Of course, that put the kybosh on my relationship with Bonnie, the girl who didn’t like Mozart.

Afterward, I thought I would write a short story about her. After all, I already had a title for it. But I never did.

Though I think I just I have.

Very short.

The Student with the Box

During the years I taught psychology at the University of Connecticut, I offered a course on perspectives on human behavior that began with psychoanalytic theory, moved on to existential psychology and next ventured into the then new field of transpersonal psychology before ending with a sampling of Zen Buddhist thought.

For this class, I asked students to maintain a course journal in which they were to write their comments on the assigned books, the lectures and on anything in their personal lives that they felt connected with the themes of the course.

One year, I had a particularly intelligent and thoughtful student who would come into see me during my office hours to discuss the topics of the course and his reaction to them.

Although I always offered students the option of submitting their journals to me for evaluation during the course, I often did not see them until the end of the semester.

However, I was puzzled to find that my splendid student had not turned in any journal at all.

I managed to track him down at his dorm and asked him to come in to see me

He came bearing a box, a large box. I was puzzled by the box, but first I asked him about his journal and why he hadn’t yet submitted it.

It turned out there was a good reason for that. He had never bothered to keep one. Instead, he had spent his time constructing this box, the one that now lay on my desk. He explained that he felt the box had somehow expressed what he had learned from the course, and better than words could ever do.

He invited me to peer into the box through an aperture I hadn’t noticed.

When I did, I saw that he had constructed it with a complex of internal mirrors that seemed to reflect infinity, the incomprehensible, a universe of light.

I was impressed, but how was I to grade him?

“Are you willing to destroy this?” I asked in a moment of inspiration.

He looked at me in shock, hesitated, and then he picked up the box and heaved it with full strength onto the floor where the shards shattered seemingly into a thousand pieces of glass. It made a terrible noise and since my door was open, nearby professors rushed into my office to find out what had made such a clatter.

The student was shaking.

I gave him an A-. Because he had hesitated for a moment. Very Zen, no?

Mom Near the End

My mother had a sad life and a long and slow descent toward the edge of the cliff of her death over which she toppled at the age of almost 89 in June of 2001. 

Her last years were spent in a nursing home in Berkeley where, until her last year or so, I was accustomed to pushing her around the neighborhood in her wheelchair. She was, however, lucid to the end, even though she was by then hard of hearing and generally very passive. She did not like to be touched, and mostly she was taciturn, too.

I tried to entertain her by recounting my latest adventures and sharing family news.

“You talk too much,” she said to me one day.

On another occasion, when I thought she might not have long to live, I spent five minutes or so telling her about my work on near-death experiences. Finally, I asked her, “So, mom, what do you expect will happen when you die?”

She narrowed her eyes and replied in a flat voice: “Nothing. I expect to be dead.”

Once, on what turned out to be one of our last times together, I asked her if she could tell me some of the things in her life that had given her the most happiness.

“You,” she said. 

Metamorphosis

Most of you are probably old enough to remember Vice-President Dick Cheney, with his perpetual snarl. He was sort of a Darth Vader character, pulling the strings for an often hapless George Bush, who sometimes seemed to be Cheney’s puppet. Cheney, however, suffered for many years from heart problems, and eventually had to undergo a heart transplant. But few people know the story of what happened to him afterward. You are about to find out about Cheney’s change of heart, one might say, with a double entendre definitely intended. 

One morning, two days after his heart transplant operation, Dick Cheney awoke from a pleasant dream feeling distinctly odd. For one thing, he was smiling.

His daughter, Mary, also noticed that there was something strange about her father.

She calls it to the attention of her mother.

“Mom, there is something distinctly odd about Dad this morning.”

“What do you mean,” Lynne asks, looking puzzled.

“Well, for one thing, you know how Dad always looks dour in the morning, as if life is a pain and why does he have to bother being pleasant.”

“Well, that’s just your father, darling.”

“I know that, Mom. But this is different. Dad looked positively radiant this morning.”

“Hmm, that is distinctly odd,” Lynne agrees.

“But that’s not all,” Mary continues. “What really was strange was what he was saying.”

“Mary, I’m in a hurry this morning. You know how angry your father gets when I don’t have his eggs ready for him. Please get to the point.”

“OK, Mom, it was about Obama.”

“So?”

“He likes him now.”

“What!”

“He likes him. He thinks he’s been wrong about him all this time.”

“Mary, I have no time for jokes. Now, really, I have to get to the kitchen.”

“I’m not kidding, Mom. If you don’t believe me, ask him yourself.”

***********************

“Dick, how are you feeling this morning, dear?”

“Couldn’t be better.” (Beaming) “I’m a new man!”

“You look well, dear. I even notice that snarl -- er, I mean, that little mouth tic of yours is absent today. Ah, Dick, I was wondering – Mary said you were talking about Obama this morning.”

“Yes, I’ve been thinking a lot about him lately. You know, Lynne, I really think I’ve misjudged the man. I mean, he’s not such a bad fellow. And, you know something else, Biden was right. For a black man, he is very clean and uncommonly articulate. You gotta give him that.” 

“Dick, what are you saying!”

“I dunno, Lynne, it’s just something that I feel. I think when I’m up and about we should invite him and Michelle over for dinner. Maybe we can make amends.”

“Dick, I’m calling your cardiologist. I think the drugs that they’ve given you to prevent rejection must be making you delusional. I’m worried about you, honey. You’re not yourself.”

“Balderdash, Lynne, I haven’t felt this well and this clear-headed in years. It’s like I’ve just woken up from a bad dream – except my dreams this morning were very pleasant.”

Mrs. Cheney looks ashen-faced.

“And another thing,” Cheney says. “This thing about Mary, you know, her….”

“Please don’t bring that up, Dick.”

“No, really, Lynne. I’m proud she’s gay, and I’ve also been thinking she’s right about same-sex marriage. I don’t know what I was thinking before. I must have been bamboozled by all those rightwing nuts and those Tea Party crazies.”

“Dick, those are your people. How could you be talking this way!”   

Cheney continues to beam. His mind is elsewhere, a beatific smile of satisfaction on his face.

***********************

“Doctor, I need to talk with you.” Mrs. Cheney is talking on the phone, which she cannot hold steadily. Her hand is shaking too much.

“Of course, it’s about Dick. Doctor, he is talking gibberish this morning. I mean, he is actually talking like a Democrat!”

“You don’t think it’s the drugs? But what else could it be?”

Mrs. Cheney pauses, and then she has an idea.

“Doctor, I know we are not supposed to know the identity of Dick’s donor, but do you think….”

There is a long pause.

“I know it is against the rules, but doctor, this is the Vice-President we are talking about, and he is a very sick man, and I don’t mean just physically!”

“All right, I’ll wait….”

A few minutes pass. Mrs. Cheney is very agitated.

The doctor comes back on the phone.

Mrs. Cheney listens with stupefaction.  

Then she faints.

Mary, hearing a noise, rushes in, sees that her mother has now staggered to her feet and is sitting, dazed, in a chair, her eyes glassy.  

She picks up the phone.

“A teen-aged black boy. From Chicago?”

My Life with The New Yorker

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

Before my mother went bonkers (you can read the sad story of my mother’s life, if you wish, by consulting a series of blogs I wrote several years ago under the title, “The Rose That Failed to Bloom”), she was a reader with a wry sense of humor. In those days we often played Scrabble together, and though, as I recall, I generally won, she usually gave me all I could handle. She had a good vocabulary.

I have many reasons to feel indebted to my mother, but one of them for which I have long been especially grateful is that it was she who introduced me to The New Yorker when I was thirteen years old. Of course, at that time, I was probably more interested in their cartoons than in their articles, so I know I didn’t continue to read its issues regularly. It probably wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I started to read it regularly (and could finally understand most of the wit of the cartoons). But whenever I began, I have never stopped. Every week, when a new issue is published, I am usually avid to scan its contents to see what reading pleasures await me.

Recently, I had occasion to think about my mother’s gift to me because a week or so ago, there was a special issue of magazine to mark its exact centenary, as its first issue came into this world in February, 1925. Like Bizet’s opera, Carmen, after its premiere just a hundred and fifty years ago, it was a flop. But, again like Bizet’s opera, it eventually became an enduring hit. It certainly has been an indispensable companion to me all these many years.

Once that issue arrived, I was eager to peruse its contents in order to revisit some of my favorite contributors from years past. After I had read a couple of articles, I wrote about them to my girlfriend, Lauren, who, like me, has long been a regular reader of The New Yorker.

Many of you may not be familiar with the writers whose articles I refer to here, but I will say more about them in the course of writing this blog. In any case, this is what I wrote to Lauren:

The reason I asked you if you could read The New Yorker online is that tonight, over dinner, I read two terrific pieces I wanted to recommend to you. The first one is a short article about Janet Malcolm who was always someone I would read anything by. She was, of course, a very important  journalist. This article was about the letters she exchanged with a famous psychoanalyst named Kurt Eissler when she was researching the work for her exceptional piece of reportage, In the Archives. Do read it.  BTW, in it, the man she wrote about, besides Eissler, was named Jeffrey Masson. I was friends with him.

But the second article, which is much longer, is by Adam Gopnik. It’s about a devastating profile written by another famous New Yorker journalist, Lillian Ross (a longtime lover of the longtime New Yorker editor, William Shawn), about Ernest Hemingway. This article is a stunner; it’s brilliant. For several reasons, among them Gopnik’s riff on a psychoanalytic interpretation of the possible dynamics between Ross and Hemingway.

These two articles really complement one another and should be read in the order I’ve given here. First, the short Malcolm piece, and then, the Gopnik article.

I think you’ll enjoy and appreciate both of them, especially since you're a therapist yourself.   

I love reading about these writers since, as I’m sure I’ve told you, I started reading The New Yorker when I was 13 (my mother had a subscription) and grew up and old reading these writers. They were really my teachers and mentors; they educated me.

Indeed, I have been to three schools in my life: Cal-Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, and The New Yorker Academy. The writers for this magazine were my professors. From them, I learned about history, politics,  psychoanalysis, writers, the arts, especially painting and music, fiction – and humor! What smattering of culture I have managed to acquire during my long lifetime I mostly owe to what I’ve read in The New Yorker.

For the remainder of this blog, I would like to introduce you to some of the contributors to this magazine who have meant so much to me and who have enriched the lives of so many others. But I want to start with someone who did not actually write for the magazine himself, but who played an indispensable role in making it into the outstanding and justly celebrated periodical that it became, its longtime editor, William Shawn.

But to backtrack a bit before getting to Shawn, the magazine’s founder and first editor was Harold Ross, who was a legendary character in the annals of the history of The New Yorker. Books have been written about him and his role in the creation and masterminding of the magazine in its first years is well known. But as he died in 1951, he was before my time. I came to know and love the magazine only when Shawn succeeded Ross as its editor in 1952. He continued in that post for the next thirty-five years, until 1987, during the heyday of the magazine.

The first thing to say about Shawn is that he was a very strange man. He was elusive, enigmatic and, frankly, downright weird. For one thing, he was pathologically shy. He was also claustrophobic and had a phobia of getting stuck in elevators. It was rumored that he carried a hatchet in his briefcase lest he became trapped. Shawn himself was very short and physically unprepossessing, which may account, in part, for his almost passive, self-effacing personality.

His editorial practices were quizzical, too. He would buy articles and keep them in his desk for years. He also was unusually devoted to his writers. One of them, Joseph Mitchell, who as a young man wrote superb articles and stories about New York life, especially about oddballs and the down-and-out during the Depression, stopped writing in the 1960s. Nevertheless, he continued to come to his office until he died in 1996 without writing another word. Mitchell, too, is another New Yorker legend, and like Shawn himself, a mystery.

But for all that, Shawn was a beloved and revered editor.  J. D. Salinger, the author of the best-seller, The Catcher in the Rye, about whom I will be writing later, loved Shawn, dedicated his novel, Franny and Zooey to him,  and called Shawn the "most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors." Many of the writers Shawn edited also had nothing but appreciation for his scrupulous devotion to his craft.

Perhaps the oddest thing about Shawn is that he lived a double life. He was married to a woman named Cecille by whom he had three children. But he had a second secret life and home that he shared with a New Yorker writer, Lillian Ross (the same woman who would write that devastating article about Hemingway), with whom Shawn fell hopelessly in love and by whom he had another child. He would divide his time between his two homes and families, spending some holidays with one, and some with the other. All very civilized. He would not divorce his wife, and Ross apparently never asked him to do so. 

There is a sad and somewhat shocking coda to the love story between Shawn and Ross. After Shawn’s death, Ross, who would herself die at the great age of 99, wrote a tell-all memoir about Shawn and their relationship, Here But Not Here. The title apparently refers to the phrase used by Shawn to describe his sense of not being fully present or himself when he was with his wife. The book was widely panned when it was published, perhaps in part owing to the fact that Ross did so while Shawn’s wife was still alive. Not so civilized, after all, it seems.

By the way, I mentioned in passing that Shawn had three children by his wife, Cecille. You have heard of one of them, the actor, Wally Shawn. Wally, like his father, is a runt, a gnome-like figure, almost a kind of homunculus. In his films, he is almost invariably portrayed as a kind of Jewish Danny DeVito, a comic character like a jester we are meant to be amused by.

But don’t be deceived by his appearance. Like Kierkegaard whose physical deformity made him a sometimes laughingstock for the children of Copenhagen who could not know how supremely intelligent he was and what a great religious thinker he would become, much the same is true for Wally Shawn.

Among other things, he can be a very serious actor. Check out his playing Uncle Vanya in a film of Chekhov’s play called "Vanya on 42nd Street," or in one of his signature roles in the 1981 classic film, "My Dinner with André."

But, again, Shawn is more than a talented actor; he is a deeply gifted playwright whose plays are often difficult to watch or read because of their searing intensity and the raw feelings that they evoke. I have seen one of his plays (twice), "Aunt Dan and Lemon," and read a book of his other plays. They are brutal and wrenching to read.  

Shawn makes his living as a comedic actor, but what you see on the screen is not what you get when you learn about his mind. 

But I digress. Let’s return to The New Yorker and to some of the contributors I have especially cherished.

The journalists

Janet Flanner (who wrote under the pen name Genet) joined The New Yorker at the very beginning, 1925, and wrote for it for the next fifty years. She was based in Paris and wrote dispatches from there during WWII.

Of course, I only became familiar with her work in the 1960s, but I distinctly remember seeing her name, Genet, often in those years. She exemplified the excellence of The New Yorker reportage during her long career.

A. J. Liebling wrote for The New Yorker beginning in 1935 (the year of my birth) until his death in 1963. He was an epicure (loved French cuisine, perhaps too much),  a war correspondent like Genet, a biographer, and wit. His book on boxing, The Sweet Science, was named “the greatest sports book of all time” by Sports Illustrated.

A New Yorker writer of my generation, Pete Hamill, captured Liebling’s ebullient personality and proclivities in a few words: “He was a gourmand of words in addition to food… he retained his taste for ‘low’ culture too: boxers and corner men, con men and cigar store owners, political hacks and hack operators. They’re all celebrated in [his] pages.”

I discovered his work only after his death, and loved the man, though, of course, he never knew it.

Janet Malcolm was the journalist I most admired for her acerbic prose and gimlet-eyed intelligence. She wrote with a stiletto. She was particularly celebrated for her writings on psychoanalysis, which I read avidly during the 1970s, and for her penetrating analysis of the dynamics between a journalist and his subject. As a journalist she was, in my opinion, peerless and fearless.

Elizabeth Kolbert is a contemporary journalist specializing in writing about the environment and, especially, climate change. An author of the best-selling book, The Sixth Extinction, she has travelled the world to interview scientists about their work. Writing about the most depressing of subjects with wit and elegance, she has educated me (and many others) about the dangers of a warming, and possibly doomed, planet. I read all of her articles religiously and have never been disappointed.

The critics

Pauline Kael for years wrote about film for The New Yorker in a way that was matchless. She was the queen of movie reviewers – provocative, iconoclastic, fulsome with praise for the films she liked, and withering for those she detested. I always read her reviews eagerly and learned so much from them.

Peter Schjeldahl wrote about art and educated me like my own weekly docent. I never learned how to pronounce his name, but he never seemed to care. Before his recent death, he wrote very movingly about facing the end of his life. I have missed him ever since, as I’m sure many his fans have, too.

Winthrop Sargeant was during my twenties my go-to-music critic. He was a marvelous writer, and helped not only to inform but to form my own musical tastes. I will always feel indebted to him for what he taught me about classical music.

Adam Gopnik has been writing for The New Yorker since 1986 and has become its pre-eminent critic. The winner of many awards for his writing, Gopnik is simply a wonder. I can sum him up by saying he has read everything, remembers everything he has read, and seems to know everything worth knowing. He is one of a kind, a treasure, and I am thoroughly in awe of him.

David Remnick is the longtime editor of the magazine as well as the author of many books. But I list him here among the critics largely because of the incisive essays he has written in recent years, particularly about Trump and the dangers Trump and his satraps pose for American democracy.   

The writers

Oh, where to begin? The writers have been the lifeblood of the magazine. But in this blog, I can hardly do much more than to mention a few of them and to apologize to the many I will have to ignore. In some cases, even here, I have room for only a few words about some of them.

Mavis Gallant wrote many short stories for the magazine, and, if I remember correctly, also wrote some film reviews.

John Cheever did likewise. Widely read and admired during his lifetime, he seems little read or even remembered today. But perhaps I am wrong about that.

John Hersey was the author of several well-regarded books, but in the history of The New Yorker, he is known primarily for the publication in the August 31st issue of the magazine in 1946 of the entirety of his book, Hiroshima, about the effects of the nuclear attack on that city. Shawn was not afraid to devote entire issues to one writer. Couldn’t happen today.

John Updike was my absolute favorite writer for The New Yorker. He wrote dozens and dozens of articles for it - short fiction, literary criticism and book reviews, wrote on art, and so on. His justly celebrated prose – he was a master stylist, as is well known – was exemplary. I would always read anything he wrote. I read many his novels, too, including all four volumes of his Rabbit Run series, a chronicle of mid-20th century American life, as my way of honoring him after his death. 

J. D. Salinger was another one of those nutty New Yorker writers who wound up being a Garbo-esque recluse living in the woods of New Hampshire where he engaged in innumerable, bizarre metaphysical practices that you can read about on the Internet.

But before he went off the rails, he was a literary sensation after his book, The Catcher in the Rye, was published in 1951. It soon became an iconic best-seller. Salinger was briefly regarded as the 20th century Mark Twain. He also published a number of short stories in The New Yorker that eventually was published in a collection called Nine Stories, which was similarly lauded.  

What happened to him after that, you’ll have to read for yourself, if you’re interested.

Oliver Sacks is everyone’s favorite writer, including mine (though Updike was my favorite novelist). I fell in love with him after reading his marvelous book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which I remember reading aloud to my then girlfriend, while in bed with her, in Big Sur. After that, I read many of his other books and various articles, some of which appeared in The New Yorker.

At one point, I even wrote to Sacks to ask him, as a world-famous neurologist, if he could account for how the blind people in one of my studies could actually see during their NDEs. He was kind enough to reply in two handwritten letters, which he wrote while suffering from a serious visual problem. He confessed he could not explain my findings, but his letters were charming and very kind. I loved him even more after that.

A few years later, he published an article in The New Yorker on an NDE case I was familiar with, and I wrote a letter to the editor about it. They were all set to publish it, but it was bumped at the last minute. Rats! My chance to be published in The New Yorker, along with my 15 minutes of fame – gone in a trice.

As you probably know, Sacks died a couple of years ago. Like his many fans, I mourned his death and miss him. But he was a person of immense importance in my life, and I will never forget him.

The humorists

Of course, from its beginning, The New Yorker was known for its humor – both for its cartoons and for writers like James Thurber and Robert Benchley who wrote humorous pieces for the magazine during its early years. Here I will just mention of a few of my favorites.

S. J. Perelman was certainly the most highly regarded humorist of The New Yorker during his long reign as a writer for the magazine. Not only were his pieces uproarious, but they were studded with his immense and wide-ranging vocabulary, as baroque and clever, as you could you imagine, and, in my case, envy. His satires afforded me enormous pleasure.  

A few years ago, I read his biography, which caused me to see him in a different light. He wasn’t really that nice a man, it turns out, but what does it matter? Many artists have immense character flaws, but so what?

We love them for what they have given us; we don’t have to live with them.

E. B. White on the other hand was seemingly a peach of a fellow, even if he was a risible hypochondriac. He joined The New Yorker staff early on and functioned in a variety of roles – he wrote amusing trifles for The Talk of the Town section, he edited the work of other writers, and he wrote humorous pieces of his own. I eventually read some of them, but I also read some of his books, beginning with everyone’s favorite manual of style, Elements of Style. “Brevity, brevity, brevity” was one of his ironic maxims. 

When my kids were young, I read his book, Charlotte’s Web, to them one afternoon. I wound up weeping at the end. “Mommy, mommy,” one of my daughters cried in alarm, “daddy is crying!”   

E. B. White was always called Andy by his friends and family. I don’t know why, but he seems to have been a loveable cuss.  

Woody Allen. Yes, when he was young and not yet that well known for his films – and long before his reputation became tarnished by accusations of sexual improprieties – he wrote several humorous satires for The New Yorker.  I remember that some of them were later published in book called, I believe, Pigeon Feathers. Who knows why?

As I’ve written elsewhere, I have always identified with Woody Allen. I could tell you why, but I won’t.   

The Sportsmen

Herbert Warren Wind was during my early years with The New Yorker, the man who wrote in a beautiful prose style about golf. In those days before I became a Fedhead and began to follow tennis in a devoted fashion, I followed golf. Those were the glory years of the sport. I became interested in it in the days of golfing stars like Ben Hogan and Slamming Sammy Snead, who were followed by the advent of later stars like Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.

Many people think golf is a boring sport. You wouldn’t think so if you could have read HWW on golf. He was a superlative connoisseur of the sport, and he wrote about in an enthralling way. He may be forgotten now, but not by me.

Roger Angell. I have saved the best of my New Yorker idols for last. There is no one who represents the spirit and the best of The New Yorker tradition than this man.

Consider his heritage. He is the son of Katharine Angell, one of the first and most important of the magazine editors who worked with Harold Ross at the beginning.  E. B. White, always “Andy” to Roger, was his beloved stepfather.

Roger worked for The New Yorker primarily as an editor, like his mother, but eventually he began publishing very long articles on baseball, particularly after the World Series. Since in those days I was an ardent fan of the Boston Red Sox, I would always look forward to these enjoyable year-end summaries. And in time, I would buy and read Roger’s books on baseball. He became as much of an expert on that sport as HWW was on golf. In time, I found I was as enamored of Roger as I was of Oliver Sacks. He became another one of my literary heroes.

He continued to write well into his nineties. The last book of his I read was called This Old Man, which he brought out in his mid-nineties. He died a few years ago, another one of those long-lived New Yorker writers, at the age of 101.  

What a joy was Roger Angell.   

*********************

A few final thoughts before wrapping up this long blog.

First, I must say something about its obvious omissions.

I have said virtually nothing about the many editors who have worked so diligently and silently over so many years to bring the articles in The New Yorker into the best possible form before publication. They are too many to name, so I'll just mention two of them. One is Katharine Angell to whom I have already alluded who worked so closely with Harold Ross soon after the magazine was started. The other I’ll mention is just because of his delightful name, which I’ve never forgotten: St. Clair McKelway.

I have also completely scanted all the cartoonists who have contributed so much pleasure and humor to New Yorker readers from the outset of the magazine to the present day. Who can forget the zany and zingy geometric stylings of Saul Steinberg or the macabre cartoons of Charles Addams? It pains me to have neglected so many others who deserve to be acknowledged and thanked in more than a generic note like this one.

Finally, I have to say that as I’ve become very old, I can no longer read the print version of The New Yorker, though I still look through it when it arrives. Fortunately, I can read it online these days. Nevertheless, I find that its current contents often don’t hold the same interest for me as they used to. Time marches on, but I seem to have been marching in place for years now. This is no longer my world; it belongs to the young.

Still, I treasure my memories of all those New Yorker teachers who did so much to educate, enlighten and thrill me through what they have written in the pages of this magazine.   

Thanks, mom!