I have just spoken with Paul and asked him if he were getting any exercise. He said, almost none. I also asked if he agreed with me that it was probably not wise for him to go out to exercise alone, given his tendency to have spells of dizziness and falling. He said that he did agree. I then asked whether those who stop by periodically during the day ever take him for a walk and, to my surprise, he said they did NOT do that as a routine thing.
After one of his recent visits to help Paul with his computer Christian Steinhoff remarked that Paul was not getting any exercise and desperately needed to be doing so. I therefore must apologize to all of you there in Berlin for not having brought this need to your attention before now.
Here’s what I’d like to propose.
If you live in Berlin and can commit to doing so, go by Paul’s home on whatever schedule you can spare and take him for a walk while you’re there. He admits to being painfully slow, so you’ll have to take along an good supply of patience and use it liberally. It shouldn’t take the equivalent of the Berlin airlift to organize a dozen or so friends who live close enough to go by for an hour every couple of weeks and get him up out of his chair and walk around with him in the open air for a half hour or so.
We often say, please let me know if there is anything I can do. Well consider yourself notified of how you can help.
If you’d like some compensation for your help, then let me suggest you tell him you’re there to take him out for a stroll down memory lane and allow him to choose the topic he wishes to repay you with. Such strolls down memory lane have formed the bulk of the content of our conversations through the years and those talks are both unforgettable and priceless to me. They are yours for the asking … and the price of going by to take him for a walk.
This is, of course, a limited-time offer as I’m sure you realize.
Please don’t hesitate to comment below and support this effort in any way you choose. Let’s not resort to having to pay someone to do this, when giving a friend a little block of your time returns such psychic benefits and positive karma to the giver.
As you’ll know if you’ve been following this blog and trying to keep up with Paul’s condition, he was released to go home on 20 July but it was only on 25 August that he finally regained connection to the Internet. Since then there have been a few hitches in sustaining his Internet connection, but those are essentially resolved now.
However, given all that he has gone through with the stroke and the resulting memory loss, he is having to start over, almost from scratch, to regain any facility with communicating by email and surfing the web. Since he hasn’t been able to send out much if any email, he reports that he has stopped receiving messages.
I understand that it is difficult to write continually to someone who doesn’t respond, but in this case I’d like to appeal to you to do so. This drop in incoming email leaves him feeling that people have forgotten him. My belief is that this phenomenon can be attributed to his friends not understanding that, though he can receive messages and read them, he has extreme difficulty initiating messages or even replying to those he receives. So my appeal to you is that you continue to copy him or direct messages to him (at Texas.Paule at Gmail.com) as you would have previously, and when you do write, please understand that he may not yet be able to reply to your message.
Since he has gotten back home, I have found it much more difficult to offer him technical help because of his loss of short term memory and his inability to describe accurately what he sees on the screen. He still has some difficulty expressing himself and of course finds that very frustrating. Yet he says that he’s not getting “any” email. I think that is probably an exaggeration, but I also suspect there is some truth to the observation that the volume of email he gets is off considerably.
He is able to receive calls by telephone or via Skype or Google Talk, and he welcomes those calls. Again though, when calling you should be aware that he moves more slowly than before, so please let the phone ring for an above average length of time to permit him time to get everything organized and pick up the phone. For either Skype or Google Talk, he’ll also have to don a headset which takes even longer. He usually naps between perhaps 1 and 3 p.m. so it would be best to avoid those hours if you decide to call.
Whether he will ever be able to be as prolific a communicator by email as he once was seems doubtful to me. However, he is still around and in the absence of this kind of contact with you, his friends, he feels cut off and isolated. Therefore let’s all resolve to revert our former behavior of copying him and writing to him as before even if we don’t hear back from him as we once would have. Perhaps over time, he will be able to develop his ability to reply or maybe not. At this point, I think it is impossible to predict.
I’m pleased to be able to announce that as of about an hour ago, our friend Paul has access to the Internet again. His old email address, texas-paule@t-online.de, is defunct. Please use the name as listed in the title of this post together with @Gmail.com to reach him. From what you’ve said in your correspondence with me, I’m sure you’re ready to be able to reach him directly again, so have at it.
We are still configuring his setup so that he can handle his email in Outlook rather than having to use the web interface, not that there’s anything wrong with that. (Some problems never die; they merely recede temporarily.) We’ll eventually get it to work I’m sure, because I’ve been able to configure my own Outlook 2003/Gmail connection without any problems.
So for the moment Paul will be using Gmail’s web interface to deal with email. Though it may be a bit less convenient than Outlook, on the upside it does contain the addresses he had accumulated up until his recent medical problems. So for now I won’t make any promises about how quickly he’ll reply, but he should be able to receive your messages and read them without any problem at the Gmail website.
Now then, at long last, you may resume your previous direct relationship with Paul and I’ll tip my hat and step back into the shadow. Thanks for all of your help and for your kind words during this interlude. It has been a pleasure for me to get to know you and to add you to those whom I think of as friends.
The other day when Paul and I were talking, I mentioned that I had heard this piece on NPR by Robert Krulwich about the fact that crows apparently can recognize and remember people’s faces and then evidently seek them out for particular scorn. As we talked I reminded him that he had written about an encounter he had had with crows in the park that is just up from his house, and he recalled both the events and also writing about them.
Later I went back and read those several posts again myself, and they are delightful! I mentioned to Paul that such things are really the true value of blogs. Like the cave drawings of primitive man, they leave whatever they contribute for others, whom they may never know, to enjoy or for yourself to review later when you return and re-read them, seeing no doubt all kinds of new things that you never saw before in your own story.
Since Paul is at the moment unable to update this blog and regale us with another of his delightful stories, I thought I’d re-direct your attention to his first post about his encounter with the crows (and the 2nd and 3rd) and then finally to his follow-up post. Enjoy.
I am pleased to report that Paul is back in his apartment as of July 20th and he is adapting to his new schedule and that of the various caregivers who come by as many as five times a day for one reason or another, to bring meals, to do speech therapy with him, to take care of any other needs he may have. In addition. the two Bachmann sisters, who have lived in that same building with Paul since he returned to Berlin and took that apartment in 1995, are also looking in on him and Maxe regularly.
And yes, in answer to the many inquires you have made about Maxe’s whereabouts and whether he and Paule were together again, they are.
There have been some delays in getting Paul’s TV service restarted and during his recovery his T-Online.de account was closed, but Paul told me that Dr. Moeller who visited him yesterday assures him those things are in the works. When he gets a new ISP therefore, he will have a new email address. However, he still has a Gmail account and can at least receive email at Texas dot Paule at Gmail dot com. Be patient if you write him however, since it may be a while before he’s able to answer your messages, and I find it a major challenge to keep up with his email and my own.
I’m cross-posting portions of this entry from my own personal blog to this one because this one has many more readers than mine and because you, the readers of this blog, are the audience that the new FriendsofPaule Twitter feed is intended to reach and inform. So if you are on Twitter and want to receive progress reports about Paul by all means begin following that feed.
I chose the name “Paul’s amanuensis” for that feed because that is the role I intend to play. I will attempt to relate what Paul wants me to convey to the group so that he isn’t burdened with having to learn the technology in order to communicate with you. The following screen shot shows the first few “tweets” in the window of Twhirl, an application I use for logging into and managing multiple Twitter accounts at the same time.
If you don’t know what Twitter is, this short video will help to remedy that.
If you have any questions or comments, please ask or make them in the comments section.
Update: If you’ll notice in the sidebar at the right, you can see the last five tweeted messages from the FriendsofPaule feed here on the blog. Therefore you don’t have to join Twitter, if you haven’t already, just to be able to see this microblogging feed about Paul. Every time you load this page, you’ll see the five most recent tweets displayed right here.
I’m very pleased to be able to announce that Paul is going back to his apartment on July 20th. He is, as you might imagine, quite excited and a bit anxious about the transition. And as I acknowledged to him this morning when we spoke, this is a day that at one point I frankly thought might never occur, so from my point of view this is the best news possible.
Paul believes he will still have the same telephone number as before and he said that he would welcome your calls. If you are a frequent correspondent of his (and who isn’t?), his phone number is listed in his signature on all but the rarest of his emails. I’m not sure yet whether he will be able to connect electronically, so telephone calls rather than Skype calls computer to computer are going to be the most ideal way to reach him. Also it may be a while yet before he’ll be able to carry on email correspondence, though given his progress so far, I wouldn’t rule anything out.
He acknowledges that he is still unsteady with his balance, yet despite that he is planning to have Maxe return to live with him to see how that goes. We discussed that he is going to have to be very careful when playing with Maxe since his toppling over is a distinct possibility. Paul is very aware of that concern so he assures me he’ll be cautious about any rough housing with his friend but just being together again will have to be a tonic to Paul.
I know you all join me in breathing a sigh of relief and feeling very good about Paul’s progress. I’ll leave it to you to tell him yourself when you find it convenient. I assured Paul that I would be happy to post a note here to ask you to stop calling if and when that ever becomes a problem.
Dr. Charles E. McClelland of the University of New Mexico is working at the University in Berlin this summer and graciously reported on the gathering for dinner on June 17 of the Berlin circle of Paul’s friends who have been helping him since his stroke.
Paul seems to be recovering nicely from the stroke. I spoke with him as recently as earlier today and his speech has definitely improved, though his problem with balancing himself with which he was troubled even before the stroke resulted in his taking a nasty fall backwards down some stairs. He has, fortunately, almost fully recovered from that mishap. Though still unsteady, he does seem to be improving as time goes on.
Here are a few of Dr. McClelland’s comments.
As promised, here’s a little report on Paul and the dinner in his honor last Wednesday (17 June).
To my surprise Paul himself appeared in the Restaurant Entrecote, a nice French place that happens to be just around the corner from where I live in Mitte. There were over a dozen people present, and the meal (and Paul) lasted about 3 hours. I am attaching a few photos I took.
Paul’s friends at the dinner ran the gamut from people who had only recently met him and were looking after his dog Max to old fraternity brothers. One of these, Gert Dyckerhoff (who lives in Bavaria and travels a lot on business), hosted the dinner. I gather he, Dr. Moeller and the lawyer Ms. Salein (who were not present) had gone out to visit Paul earlier in the day and decided to work toward getting Paul back into his apartment, with appropriate look-in help, in maybe 6 weeks. I think that tells you a lot about the visible progress Paul has been making.
I learned a few tidbits about Paul’s biography I had not known. When he was a student in Munich (long before I was!) he had been one of the first Americans to be invited to join one of the exclusive duelling fraternities! As a university historian I am aware how important these are, but I had no idea (as one of them explained over dinner) that theirs has a fund to help out “brothers” in difficulties. There were in all four of his “brothers” at the dinner. That is very reassuring to me.
Charles, I know I speak for everyone who depends on this blog for news of Paul when I say how much I appreciate your report and your sending me the pictures.
Today Dr. Helmut Möller replied to a request from me for information about Paul by saying that he had picked up some of Paul’s things from his apartment and taken them to him at his new location earlier in the day. He commented that Paul’s walking was much improved and that he would be participating in speech therapy from today forward. He promised to let me know just as soon as there is a phone number for Paul. And of course, once I’ve learned that number, I’ll share it with you as well.
On a personal note, let me thank you all for your comments made to Paul on this blog. I do try to convey them to him whenever he and I talk. And also I’d like to thank you for your expressions of appreciation to me for my effort to keep you up to date at this stage. I am only doing what I would hope one of my friends would do for me if I were in Paul’s predicament.
Because Paul has so many of you out there across the globe who care about him, this blog probably provides the best way for me to reach out to that considerable network of people. I encourage you, if you wish to, to talk to each other in the commentary section and discuss your concerns, suggestions, hopes and fears for Paul so that this blog becomes not just a place to hear about Paul, but also a place for you to share your input and thoughts. Maybe together we will stumble over a way to do more than just spectate and instead contribute in some meaningful way to his recovery.
I’ll let you know the crucial details of how to communicate with him as soon as I know them and I can conveniently do so. Of course if he tells us he’s getting too many calls after the phone is installed, we’ll just have to get him one of those 900 numbers and charge an exorbitant fee to talk with him and then we could apply the proceeds to help pay for his care.
Today I heard from Dr. Helmut Mõller that Paul has been moved to his own room in a new location where he can receive all the physical and speech therapy that he will need. Although I don’t yet have all the details of where he is or how to communicate with him in writing, Helmut says that during the 10 days that he (Helmut) was away in France, Paul’s “language and his walking have very much improved” to the extent that Helmut described himself as “astonished!” He hopes to provide Paul with his television and a telephone in the “next (few) days” “and also perhaps his computer.” This, as I’m sure you will agree, is very good news, yet I have to keep my own hopes in check since during my last conversation with him Paul was telling me about how frustrating he found it that he couldn’t even manipulate the remote control for the television very well. It will probably be a while therefore before he can type again, but this move definitely signifies a very positive step in the right direction.
I will close with the Helmut’s own words which I find very encouraging. He ended his email by saying “then there is much hope he can get back in his own apartment.”
