A Brilliant Mind dead in a Car Crash Yesterday - My Letter to the Editor "Forever Young" published in the Intelligencer - How many meals can you stuff into one belly

John Forbes Nash, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1994, died yesterday when a taxi he was in crashed into guard rails on the Jersey Turnpike. His driver lost control of the car and killed Nash, 86, and his wife, Alicia, 82. 

They were likely not wearing seat belts and were ejected from their car and pronounced dead on the scene.


Here's Nash when he graduated from Princeton in 1950.

From the Times:

Dr. Nash was widely regarded as one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century, known for the originality of his thinking and for his fearlessness in wrestling down problems so difficult few others dared tackle them. 

A one-sentence letter written in support of his application to Princeton’s doctoral program in math said simply, “This man is a genius.”

Dr. Nash’s theory of noncooperative games, published in 1950 and known as Nash equilibrium, provided a conceptually simple but powerful mathematical tool for analyzing a wide range of competitive situations, from corporate rivalries to legislative decision making. Dr. Nash’s approach is now pervasive in economics and throughout the social sciences and is applied routinely in other fields, like evolutionary biology.

***

Just gobbled down this salad b/c my sugar was low - 44.

My buddy Luke Sanders dropped off this Letter to the Editor. I was happy it made the Sunday Intel as that's the largest circulation.

FOREVER YOUNG THE MOTTO FOR OLDER AMERICANS' MONTH

May is Older Americans’ Month. No one my age — this is the last year I’ll be in my sixties — can believe how fast the time goes by. Especially not my 92-year-old mother. “Forever young” is my motto. My friend, Freda Samuels of Warrington, just completed her memoir. No one would ever know this darling, white-haired woman will be 90 next year. Freda and I are two of a kind. When I visit, her husband, Bernie, cooks the most wonderful meals: salmon, spinach salad and almonds for dessert.

I exercise by walking around the block in my hilly neighborhood with my boyfriend, Scott, waving at the neighbors. I spend loads of time gardening and gazing at the flowers I’ve planted, the ones the deer haven’t munched on. Have you ever seen a variegated yellow snap dragon? Or a pink Italian heather? The hummingbirds love them. I watch the dainty darlings from my living room window.

“High” on life is an attitude I cultivate. I remind this to the members of New Directions (www.newdirectionssupport.org), my support group for people and families affected by depression and bipolar disorder. Join us for one of our Sunday walks. And bring your picnic lunch. Can’t wait to walk through Fort Washington State Park. The lush green trees will cascade overhead, and hawks will dive after live prey. Afterward, we’ll eat in a picnic grove, watch maple seedlings spiral by, and Ada Moss Fleisher will share her homemade brownies with us. Chocolate is healthy, after all.

Ruth Z. Deming
Willow Grove

**

Gotta water my garden every day. My gorgeous pink geraniums from Barb Toohey have disappeared. Either rabbits, squirrels or deer.

Here are some dreadful photos of my night garden

Below are my PURPLE IRIS that I just saw for the first time. I bought them at the now-defunct Wankel's Nursery when I worked as a therapist at the now-defunct Bristol-Bensalem Human Services.

 Here are some impatiens that were waiting patiently for me to plant in the ground, next to the hasta.

Am guessing that these are the most popular flowers planted around here in the summer. A virus last year did them in.

My first activity today was meeting my friends at Fort Washington State Park.  I was an hour late b/c I got lost, terribly lost.

 Brett got his Che hat when he was in Cuba. He's fun to walk with b/c he asks a lot of questions. For example, I said that something was nondescript.

What dyou mean by that? he asked.

Well, I said, it's utterly ordinary, you don't remember it.

I told Brett, who's a Deadhead, that I watched the Netflix original documentary "The Other One" about Bob Weir.

Great flick! Brett has probly watched it by now.

 Jonathan, at table, ate this incredibly healthy salad. He also had two huge bottles of something to drink. One was orange and said it replaces the sodium and water you lose when you're exercising.

Uh, er, why not just drink water? Oh! Because you like the flavor. I see. I see.

Steve and Harriet. I noticed at table what a caring wife she is. They have a g'daughter Charlotte in Pittsburgh.

There were no trash cans at the state park.

Why, we wondered.

Steve ended up throwing away all our trash in the men's room. At least there were baffrooms. 

 I thanked Renu for organizing our walk.

My feet were hot in my pink diabetes socks and sneakers, not to mention long pants that my 92-yo mom with arthritic fingers hemmed.

Ruthie, what does a pig say?

Oink oink.

Good job, Ruthie.

We spotted two widdle piggies ... one was your regular pink color, the other a shiny black.

I wonder, said Brett, if they know they're gonna be somebody's dinner. Read the E B White book "Charlotte's Web."

I said this reminds me of a home for the mentally ill.

Why, asked Brett the asker.

Reminds me of the Vikas Home in Ambler, I said, and wondered if we were in Ambler. We were actually in Flourtown. I'd visited Vikas on behalf of a private therapy client I had been seeing for five years.

She ended up living with her therapist Rosie and Rosie's husband.


Then I drove home w/o any problem and took a little nap on my couch.

At four I went over to Dan and Nicole's for my next food orgy.

I took home the leftover hot dogs and cheeseburgers.

Their friend Sara brought her home made Strawberry Rhubarb Pie, which she heated up and served with home made vanilla ice cream.

Words cannot describe how scrumptious it was. (Allen Heller tells me I use the word 'delicious' too often.)

   I got to hang out with all these amazing kids:

Kenny a red head who lives on Guernsey Road - I told him guernsey is a kind of cow

Hunter who lives in Elkins Park and has a 4-mo bro named Jackson.

I pushed them on the swings, along with Grace and Max, my grands.

Claudia lives right around the corner from Dan. To help her remember the name of my grandkids, I said,
What's the name of the place where Elvis lived?

And harder was, "What kind of coffee is good to the last drop?"

Claude and I talked for about an hour in her glorious back yard. Her husband Barry is a talented gardener.

Barry told me that a couple of eagles were contemplating building a nest in his tall conifer but decided against it. They didn't have access to the kind of food needed for their offspring.

Behind him is his packysandra garden.

 You know my nail polish fetish.

Barry had BBQ'd an entire chicken he bought at Trader Joe's. Cooked it in olive oil and salt and pepper.

Claudia and I agreed that the prepared food at Whole Foods is terrible.

Brett wanted to know what Adirondack Chairs are. When Claudia and I sat on them, our heads were bent way backward.

Claudia, a cabaret-style singer, is one of the best storytellers I've ever heard. She uses different voices.

We should write a play together, I suggested.

I gave Claudia and Grace a NYC High Line magnet.

  When I goggled this, mine own blog post came up.

Grace liked the Apple one.

I'll end this with two new poems I brought to Saturday's Writing Group.





READING ON THE FRONT PORCH 

“A Treasury of Great Poems”
reads the cover of a book
I have purchased at the library sale
the cover creased like the cheeks
of an old Chinaman

Many of the poets are alive
in this book from 1964:
ee cummings  W H Auden and Stephen
Spencer, their delight in the world
not yet stilled by the vanishing
of the light.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, a
convert to the Catholic faith
has written “Glory be to God
for Dappled Things”
I must agree as
shadows of shirt-waist-white clouds
polka dot my naked feet
and legs.

From the front
step, I watch a determined
wasp sift with elongated
prongs the detritus
sent by the winds and
settled in the huge green
basket of the green hosta leaf.
A tasty meal awaits
this hungry fellow.

I wonder at the minds of
the poets and the wasp.
Precious, all of us,
in the mind of the Almighty.


THE INTOXICANT VANILLA

A ginger tea I’ve selected from the shelf
thrills me not
so without remorse
I pull the Penzeys Pure Vanilla
from the lazy susan
take a whiff and
remember.

Seven years have passed
since she brought it home.
Her Penzeys at New York's
Grand Central is gone. My
bottle only half full has
plenty of this intoxicant
from Madagascar where
dark-skinned men
slave to get the
aroma just right.

She wore that pink dress
I love when she brought it
home, slamming the screen
door on the back porch as
she walked home from the train.

Such as little thing
fragile as a butterfly
carrying a straw basket
and taking over the kitchen
the moment she gets inside.


“You spent this much?” I cry
reading the 14.99 atop the bottle.
“Oh Mom! It’s worth it!” she says
removing the unsalted butter,
the heavy whipped cream and a
bottle of peach brandy “we’ll
put in the cake.”

When it's cooling on the table
she runs barefoot in the back yard
and picks some wild red roses
and lays them along the sides.