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

The boomer senior tsunami: Are we prepared for the coming tidal wave in the senior population?

Story by Chris Graham

Paul Lavigne is one of these baby boomers on the verge of wreaking havoc on the senior-services system as he ages into senior status, at least theoretically speaking. But at 61, Lavigne isn’t ready for the rocking chair on the front porch of the old-folks’ home just yet.

Lavigne, to the contrary, went out and bought a racquetball racket earlier this year, and though he hasn’t started playing regularly, the racket has him at the Waynesboro Family YMCA a few days a week getting in shape for his eventual return to the court. Read more

Home at last

Story by Chris Graham

Lynn DiBiase has been planning for an eventual move into a permanent home for the Staunton Senior Center for what seems like forever.

“We’ve been talking about this for five years. To now be talking about floor colors, about where the ceiling fans and plugins are going to go, that makes it seem real,” said DiBiase, the executive director of the Senior Center, of the move to Gypsy Hill Place on Churchville Avenue that is in the works for next spring.  Read more

Growing pains

Story by Chris Graham

Early 2010 Census projections have more than 20 percent of Rockingham County’s population in the 60-and-over category, a 20 percent jump from the 2000 Census. And it’s not like they all live just outside of the Harrisonburg city limits, either.

“No, they’re all over the county, in subdivisions outside of the city and off little country roads way out in the county,” said Cathie Galvin, the director of senior services in Harrisonburg and Rockingham for the Valley Program for Aging Services, which provides an array of human services to people 60 and older in Harrisonburg-Rockingham and throughout the Central Shenandoah Valley. Read more

Fundraising, awareness key with Memory Walks

Story by Chris Graham

It didn’t use to be the case that we could consider Alzheimer’s a pervasive senior health issue, if only because it didn’t use to be the case that many people lived long enough for it to be an issue.

Which might be why the Alzheimer’s Association is such a relative newcomer to the advocacy scene, founded in 1980 and still learning the ropes in the advocacy game in a lot of ways. Read more

A whole new outlook

Story by Chris Graham

It’s more than a name change. The new Senior Advocacy Commission has a new outlook on senior issues in Waynesboro.

“Advocacy was the word that kept coming up over and over again. We see ourselves advocating for people who are seniors right now, advocating for people who will be seniors in the future,” said Melissa Crocker, the chair of the newly named commission, which replaces the former Commission on the Elderly. Read more

The New Dominion - May 2009 edition

The New Dominion - May 2009 issue

Gotta know the warning signs

Story by Chris Graham

The sensation was like “pouring warm water starting from the top of my head all the way down to my toes on the left side.” And it scared Chris DeWald, but not the doctor who treated him initially.

“They said, Oh, you must be having a migraine headache, and sent me home, and didn’t do any tests,” said DeWald, who was about to turn 50, had just been nominated for a regional award for his work in the Public Works Department in the city of Staunton, and whose life was about to change forever.

DeWald had had a stroke that day, it would be discovered, when he landed back in the hospital after collapsing at home following a second stroke three days later. That was in May 2006. That he’s here three years later is a miracle. “They told me I should have died,” DeWald said, counting himself among the lucky ones, along with Karen Bess of Fishersville, who is four years into her post-stroke new life. Her experience was similar in some ways to that of DeWald - she suffered a series of four strokes that she said she wrote off at first as being headaches caused by stress from a move and then had written off like DeWald by a doctor who misdiagnosed what was happening. Read more

Online Extra | Five Warning Signs of Stroke

Compiled by Chris Graham

Do you know what the Five Warning Signs of Stroke are?

Walk … Is Their Balance Off?

Talk … Is Their Sleep Slurred or Face Droopy?

Reach … Is One Side Weak or Numb?

See … Is Their Vision All or Partially Lost?

Feel … Is Their Headache Severe? Read more

‘I never really gave up’

Story by Chris Graham

I could imagine L.D. Cox as the gregarious 19-year-old who helped deliver the first atomic bomb across the Pacific. “Don’t shoot!” he said in mock surrender as he made his way across the drill field at Fishburne Military School on a sunny late-March afternoon, passing a cannon that was going to be fired a little later in honor of Cox and fellow crewmembers from the USS Indianapolis.

Nine hundred from the 1,196-man crew lost their lives in a July 1945 torpedo attack on the ship that had just delivered the A-bomb used to level Hiroshima. Sixty-four years later, a handful of those pulled out of the water after the controversial five-day delay between the sinking and their sighting still get together regularly to catch up with men closer than brothers and share their stories. Read more

The thing called love

Story by Chris Graham

Larry and Shana Sabourin have been married for going on two months now. And they’re starting to get worried. “We’re still trying to figure out what we’re going to do for the rest of our lives,” said Larry Sabourin, the director of education at the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, to which Shana, a teacher at Wilson Middle School in Fishersville, added, reflexively, “It’s nervewracking, it really is.”

They don’t make love out to be nervewracking in the movies, do they? Love isn’t work; love is, well, a many-splendored thing, whatever is meant by that. We’ll go with the common concept of splendors - the weakness in the knees, the pangs in the stomach, the loopiness in the head, at the mere thought of your honey.

Read more

Weddings 101

Column by Heather Owens

Planning a wedding? If you are, chances are you are encountering higher levels of stress than you even imagined possible. Beyond the traditional wedding stress triggers, such as choosing exactly the right gown and ordering the perfect flowers; new situations, like a tight budget and the politics of extended families compound the possibility of stress overload. Establishing, and sticking to, some simple rules helps in maintaining balance.

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Patience, commitment are their virtues

Web Extra by Chris Graham

They met as college freshmen, but it took 10 years for Dean Welty to ask Janet to marry him.

“I had to work on him,” Janet said, playfully nudging Dean, her husband of 38 years now.

“I had to get over my gunshyness,” Dean said.

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Sitting at the same table

Web Extra by Chris Graham

It took him three years, but he finally asked the question in a way that he thought would harken back to the time that he asked her out on their first date.

Except that Shana closed the card before seeing the hidden panel on which Larry had proposed marriage.

“What I remember is when I asked her on our first date, I had one of the kids at school take a note over to her, you know, those kid notes, Will you go out with me? Circle Y or circle N. So I did this the same way,” said Larry Sabourin, who met Shana when they were both teaching at Stuarts Draft Middle School.

Read more

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