Angels among us

Community effort gives local family a new start

Story by Chris Graham
newdominion@ntelos.net

The angel came to Mary Martin not in a vision, but on the phone.

“We’re putting an addition on the back of your house, and you can’t say no,” the angel told Mary, mother of Joseph, in our modern-day retelling of the Christmas story an active Waynesboro 12-year-old who is wheelchair-bound due to complications from cloacal exstrophy, spina bifida and chiari malformation.

That the Martins’ two-story Maple Avenue home isn’t wheelchair-friendly wasn’t an issue when they moved there in 2001. Up until a couple of years ago, Joseph was walking with crutches, and a physical therapist was working with him to improve his ability to get around without the aid of a wheelchair.

“And as abnormal as it seems, for us that was normal. This is what we live and breathe. I wasn’t thinking that he would lose his legs. He was getting stronger. He was building up his ability to do things. I wasn’t thinking about him being in a wheelchair. That wasn’t the way I was seeing his life going,” Mary Martin said.

One of the 40 surgeries that Joseph has had to undergo to date in his young life rendered the work with the crutches moot, inserting rods along his spine to keep his upper body in proper alignment. The surgery also made even basic things like getting upstairs to his bedroom and getting ready for school in the morning difficult if not next to impossible without help from Mom.

“After he was born, I became his primary-care nurse. Which wasn’t easy for an English major,” joked Mary, now a freelance writer after serving for several years as a weekly-newspaper editor in Charlottesville.

It was the constant demand for attention to Joseph’s daily needs that pushed Mary from the full-time work world, straining the family finances to the point where the new normal for the Martins was a mortgage on a home with more than $100,000 in medical bills rolled in that Mom could neither afford for financial reasons to sell nor for physical and emotional reasons to continue to live in.

And then came the phone call, a turning point in a months-long effort that began with a video by Berkeley Glenn Elementary School teacher Suzanne Nesbit that was sent to “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and “Extreme Home Makeover” with the goal of trying to entice one of the TV shows to provide financing to make the Martins’ home wheelchair-accessible.

“My initial thought was, We can’t wait for Oprah or Ty. There’s some things that we can gather together as a community to make this happen,” said Jeff Fife, the angel on the other end of the phone call in our story, and the executive director of the Waynesboro Family YMCA, one of several community organizations taking part in a local project, called A Safe Haven, that is giving the Martins a new start.

Volunteers from Crozet Baptist Church have taken the lead in fundraising, collecting $100,000 in pledges to get the construction work on the project under way this summer. Rebuilding Together has provided the on-site project management and the financial vehicle in the form of its nonprofit status for the collection of monies. The local Lowe’s and Home Depot stores have kicked in money and materials and hundreds of hours of volunteer labor. And the YMCA provided the catalyst in the phone call from Fife, who had to do some convincing to get Mary Martin on board with the idea that he had in mind. Read more

Dinner with the First Family

Local chef assists with state dinner at the White House

Story by Chris Graham
newdominion@ntelos.net

Mike Lund found himself a few feet away from the First Couple at the November state dinner held at the White House in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his wife, Gursharan Kaur.

President Barack Obama broke away from small talk with First Lady Michelle Obama to talk with the people in charge of preparing the dinner, and Lund, the executive chef at Zynodoa in Downtown Staunton, had to take the lead after a fellow chef had trouble finding words.

“I said, Doing good, sir. He said, Well, everything’s looking great,” Lund remembered of the conversation with the president at the Nov. 24 state dinner, which Lund helped prepare at the invitation of White House executive sous chef Tommy Kurpradit, a fellow alum of the prestigious The Inn at Little Washington.

Lund, who took over as executive chef at Zynodoa in August, spent two days in the White House working with White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford and celebrated New York City chef Marcus Samuelsson on the meal, which featured on its menu red lentil soup, roasted potato dumplings and green curry prawns, among other items.

It was difficult at the outset for Lund to get to work. “It’s one thing to go on a tour of the White House and get to walk around the exterior. But to actually get to go down on the inside and see what most people don’t get to see, that in itself is kind of distracting at first,” Lund said. Read more

The psychology of gifts

Is it really better to give than to receive?

Story by Chris Graham
newdominion@ntelos.net

Leslie Chisnell will never forget the candles that she pulled out of the red box with a satin bow - not so much for the candles, but for who gave them to her.

It was her future husband, Kevin, who came red box-with-satin bow in hand for Christmas dinner.

The box and the bow are still around, as are the candles, “burned down,” Chisnell said, but they occupy a prominent place in the mantel of their Waynesboro home.

Psychologists refer to gifts under the category of flashbulb memories. It can be similar to how you can remember where you were and what you were thinking on 9/11, according to Mary Baldwin College psychology professor Louise Freeman.

“These are memories for special emotionally-relevant events in our lives, events that can tend to be remembered very well because of the emotions that the gift brings up,” Freeman said.

What makes the memory stronger, Freeman said, is how often you revisit the memory. With 9/11, for instance, a lot of us shared our experiences from that day because it took on the life of a mass event, and the more we shared what we were doing and thinking that day, the more the memories seared into our memory banks.

“If it’s a gift you end up using, for instance, if it’s your favorite toy, a doll or stuffed animal that you sleep with for many years, that pair of roller skates that you used until they wore out, you interact with that object many, many times, that memory gets very, very solidified in your brain, so you can remember it years later when you’re a grandmother, and you can remember back to the Christmas when you were 5 years old, and you got that Raggedy Ann doll that you’d always wanted,” Freeman said.

Which is why it’s so easy for Julie Crone of Fishersville to remember her favorite Christmas gift, because it’s with her every minute of every day. She had taken her boyfriend, Gary, home for the holidays to meet her father and grandparents. Read more

Follow the Red Brick road

Arts and culture district holds promise of growth in Staunton

Story by Chris Graham
newdominion@ntelos.net

It’s not the yellow brick road, but Staunton’s new Red Brick District could put the Queen City on a path toward a kind of economic Oz.

“Tourism is a lifesaver in this economy in a city like Staunton right now. A lot of other industries are hurting, but tourism is the one industry here that’s been on the upswing,” said Erik Curren, the director of marketing at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, and the driving force behind the new Red Brick District, a partnership of arts and culture organizations and City Hall that will promote the arts and promote economic development at the same time.

The effort grew out of an attempt to adapt a similar undertaking up the Valley Pike in Harrisonburg to fit Staunton, and it has fit like a glove given the city’s stock of arts and cultural offerings, from Shakespeare to the run of galleries and music venues downtown.

The name Red Brick District is itself distinctly Staunton. “We’ve got the red bricks in the sidewalks that they’ve been laying down in the historic district, and of course we’ve got the red bricks in the Victorian buildings, and that’s something that Staunton is known for. We thought the name Red Brick District would encompass both those things, both capture what’s good about Staunton and suggest that this is the kind of place where you can get that arts and culture atmosphere,” Curren said.

The initial focus of work for District organizers has been on developing and distributing a marketing brochure highlighting the District’s offerings. The brochure is an example of how the District has been from the get-go a ground-up initiative, with the member organizations footing the bill for the development and printing of the brochure, and planning ahead to bear the costs of additional marketing early next year.

“We’d talked about having more organization, an executive director, all of that. I said, You know, we don’t need all that,” said Beth Hodge, the executive director of the Staunton Augusta Art Center, and an early participant in the informal arts and culture council that gave birth to the Red Brick District.

“The reason why I feel like we don’t need that is, even if we had the money, look around this table. These are people who are leaders in this community. They’re volunteering their time. We can get a great deal accomplished without having to have a structure to work under. We never felt like we needed the organization. We just went right on,” Hodge said. Read more