Volume 44, Issue 1

Volume 45, No. 2

September 2011

The magazine about Yale

and New Haven

September 2011

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Publishers Madeleine Broder, Jimmy Murphy Editors-in-Chief Max Ehrenfreund, Jacque Feldman Managing Editors Juliana Hanle, Aliyya Swaby Photo & Design Editors Brianne Bowen, Susannah Shattuck Senior Editors Jessica Cole, Helen Knight, Sara Mich Production Manager Andrew Calder Business Director Whitney Schumacher Research Director Nicholas Geiser Associate Editors Eli Mandel, Emily Rappaport

The New Journal www.thenewjournalatyale.com To write, design, edit, draw, or photograph, e-mail: thenewjournal@gmail.com

Chief Copy Editor Heeseung Kim Copy Editors Ava Kofman, Justine Yan Staff Writers Laura Blake, Rachel Lipstein Members and Directors Emily Bazelon, Roger Cohn, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Tom Griggs, Brooks Kelley, Kathrin Lassila, Jennifer Pitts, Henry Schwab, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Thomas Strong Advisors Richard Bradley, Jay Carney, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin Friends Michael Addison, Austin Family Fund, Steve Ballou, J. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Anson M. Beard, Jr., Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Martha Brant, Susan Braudy, Daniel Brook, Hilary Callahan, Jay Carney, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, Jonathan M. Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Court, Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, Sherwin Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina Kelley, Roger Kirwood, Jonathan Lear, Lewis E. Lehrman, Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean O’Brien, Laura Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Josh Plaut, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Fairfax C. Randal, Robert Randolph, Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W. Hampton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simpson, Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, Thomas Strong, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Wilson, Daniel Yergin and Angela Stent Yergin

Cover: Tom Stokes

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The New Journal

The New Journal The magazine about Yale

FEATURES

Vol. 45, No. 2 September 2011

and New Haven

16 Waging War

After a fashionable downtown restaurant closes, workers claim unfair treatment and pay.

by Jessica Cole

24 Bathing Mrs. Wolfson

Opponents of looser hospice regulations say they’ll mean the end of good care for those nearing death.

by Katie Falloon

STANDARDS 4 Points of Departure 10 Snapshot Renewal

by Clare Sestanovich

32 Personal Essay Research

by Jesse Bradford

34 Snapshot Horse Sense d

by Cindy Ok

37 Critical Angle Ten Years

by Sanjena Sathian

39 Endnote

by Laura Blake

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2011 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editor in chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Four thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $18. Two years, $32. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven.

The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

September 2011

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POINTS OF DEPARTURE

“Sorry, officer, I thought they were my American Spirits.” Carrying the wrong kind of cigarettes last spring meant a one thousand dollar fine, possibly jail time, and certainly a misdemeanor on your criminal record.

Caught again? Try a felony.

On June 7, the Connecticut House of Representatives gave final approval to SB 1014, a marijuana decriminalization bill that reduces the penalty for possession of less than half an ounce of cannabis (about fifteen cigarettes) from a misdemeanor to an infraction. A firsttime offense now carries only a $150 fine while a subsequent offense rises to five hundred dollars. For the most bullish reformers, however, the bill is a mixed bag. Cannabis remains illegal on the books. An offender under 21 may now find her driver’s license suspended for up to sixty days. And a three-peat at any age now results in automatic enrollment in a drug treatment program at the offender’s expense.

The law only applies statewide, and marijuana remains a Schedule I drug—illegal to manufacture, distribute, dispense, or possess—under the federal Controlled Substances Act. Actions of state lawmakers also caution against interpreting the bill’s passage as a sea change in values. By the time the State House of Representatives acted, the State Senate had already moved on to two separate bills. It approved by a vote of 34-2 a moratorium on new hookah lounges until Jan. 1, 2013, when the Connecticut Department of Health will release new, stricter regulations. Then it unanimously set the penalty for the possession of any quantity of synthetic pot at one thousand dollars and/or one year in jail.

“For the life of me, I don’t know how I’m going to explain to my constituents one penalty for the fake pot and another for the real pot,” State Senate Republican leader John McKinney said.

Marijuana reform advocates agree

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that decriminalization is a step in the right direction. But decriminalization is also an awkward middle ground.

Only full legalization, advocates say, can eliminate the stigma associated with marijuana use and take cannabis off the black market. In some ways, decriminalization is the least satisfying option to both prohibitionists and reformers—decriminalization preserves a taboo in name but reduces punishment to a slap on the wrist.

The new law’s mixture of reform and prohibition reflects its contentious path to the governor’s desk. The State Senate deadlocked 18-18 over the final bill, requiring Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman to cast a rare tie-breaking vote. The bill’s opponents accused Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of supporting decriminalization out of “personal interest” for his son, who had been convicted of selling cannabis in 2007 and robbing a Darien man of his pot at gunpoint in 2009.

The bill’s vocal detractors included senators and assemblymen from conservative Fairfield County. But their familiar refrain of “What will we tell the kids?” didn’t provoke comparable moral urgency from the bill’s proponents.

Those in favor of the bill cited the cost of criminalization to the state rather than ideas of personal liberty or opposition to a “prohibitionist” attitude.

Malloy repeatedly characterized the bill as “common sense reform.”

“We are not making marijuana legal,” he clarified after the Senate passed the bill. “We are not allowing people who use it and get caught to avoid the repercussions.”

Criminalization of small amounts of marijuana simply “does more harm than good,” he said.

Advocates for decriminalization bills often cite the social stigma of marijuana possession. Police arrest about seven thousand people every year for possession of less than half an ounce, and many of those arrested do complete programs to wipe their conviction from their permanent record, according to the legislature’s Office of Fiscal Analysis— but removing the more private effects of arrest proves more difficult. Connecticut lawmakers, however, cited economic arguments before worries of social stigma. They kept a narrow focus on the harm a criminal record can do to “future employment prospects.”

Proponents’ lack of vigor can be forgiven at a time of slender budgets, underfunded courts, and over-crowded prisons. Each dollar in the $900,000 of estimated savings from the bill is a dollar not taken from libraries, school lunches, and winter road maintenance. And fewer incarcerations means the lives of two thousand more men and women will be uninterrupted by the blunt instrument of prison.

Malloy has promised to introduce legislation in the coming year to protect medical cannabis users, and legalization advocates have the demographics and momentum for legalization on their side. The question now is whether legalization in Connecticut will happen for the right reasons. If this summer is any instruction, when legalization comes to Hartford it will be wearing a business suit with red ink on its mind.

But its pocket square could be hemp.

—Nicholas Geiser

A Birthday Gala “Theater is about connecting,” Mary L. Pepe, the former Chairwoman of the Board of Trustees at the Long Wharf Theatre, told an audience of 250 gathered on Friday, June 3. The night’s event, a gala fund-raiser for the nonprofit theater, was also a tribute to The New Journal

Katharine Konietzko

Out of the Weed

Join the distinguished ranks of TNJ alumni: Daniel Yergin Pulitzer Prize winner

Katharine Konietzko

James Bennet Editor-in-Chief The Atlantic Jay Carney White House Press Secretary Louise Endel. According to New Haven Register reporter Randall Beach, Endel is “the woman who connects more people than Facebook.”

A rare New Haven socialite who holds the city’s record for number of community boards served (fifty-six over fifty years), Endel is at the crux of countless connections between the public service and social worlds. She takes particular interest in theater and currently serves on the board of the Elm Shakespeare Company as well as the board of the Long Wharf Theatre—and on the boards of LEAP (Leadership, Education, and Athletics in Partnership), Friends of the New Haven Free Public Library, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, and the advisory board of All Our Kin. Endel’s surprise ninetieth birthday party took place on Wednesday, July 1. On Thursday, the Elm Shakespeare Company held a dinner in her honor.

On Saturday, another dinner party for Endel followed a daytime picnic for her family and close friends. One of Endel’s friends hosted a birthday brunch for her the following day. Friday’s gala, open to the public, featured a performance by the Midtown Men, on a special tour reuniting four members of the original cast of Jersey Boys.

“The running joke is that when it’s

September 2011

all over she’ll be the last one standing,” Patty Endel, her youngest daughter, said.

“We’re all going to be exhausted, and she’s just going to be asking, ‘When’s the next party?’”

The biggest and most profitable of the celebrations, the gala was itself a series of parties.

The first was a silent auction. Prizes ranged from a weekend in a country house worth four thousand dollars to lunch with New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik, starting at five hundred.

Rounds and rounds of drinks were served alongside miniature foods like quarter-sized cheeseburgers and pinkysized kabobs—perhaps to make guests feel like giants before they wrote checks to the theater.

The auction room led into the main ballroom where a bell curve of number and gleam of sequins worn versus age was the law. Except for a few very old and very young guests, all in attendance glittered.

The guest of honor wore a fuchsia blouse in rose print with flower brooches.

She tapped along with her feet when the Midtown Men brought her onstage— after sets of songs of The Beach Boys, The Jackson 5, The Temptations, and The Beatles—to serenade her with “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” and invite the audience to sing along.

Andy Court Producer 60 Minutes Richard Bradley Editor-in-Chief Worth Magazine Dana Goodyear Staff Writer The New Yorker Emily Bazelon Senior Editor Slate Magazine Daniel Kurtz-Phelan Senior Editor Foreign Affairs Steven Weisman Chief International Economics Correspondent The New York Times www.thenewjournalatyale.com

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Senator Richard Blumenthal spoke on tensions in New Haven and Endel’s characteristic ability to transcend them.

“She shows us that there is no limit to the good you can do as long as you don’t care who gets the credit for it,” he said before he presented her with a certificate of honor from the Senate, which was, he joked wearily, “not doing a lot these days” in the midst of budget negotiations and nominations.

Though it is highly unlikely that Endel connects more people than Facebook, she can be compared to Long Wharf Theatre as a gracefully aging city fixture. She was born in St. Louis, grew up in Westchester County, N.Y., attended Connecticut College, and married her late husband, Charlie Endel, at 22. When they met, she was working at Kreary’s, a store in New York, and he was in the Coast Guard. They moved to the North Haven house where Endel has lived for 56 years. Endel founded and served for twenty-five years on the Panel of American Women, a national advocacy group that addresses prejudice. She recently served as Vice President of the Urban League and helped in the creation of Creative Arts Workshop, a nonprofit center for arts education.

“My mother speaks only in superlatives,” Patty Endel said.

“Everybody is the best person, the greatest, the most interesting. At the surprise party it was so confusing for us to be in a room with two hundred people who were all the best.”

Louise Endel is busy, and runs on the adrenaline of constant and forceful engagement with the people in her life, many of whom gathered for the buffet dinner at standing tables to celebrate her landmark birthday.

After a few minutes, Blumenthal ended his short address.

“Last night at the Quinnipac Club, I was coming down, and Louise was there celebrating her birthday,” he said. “The people she was with said ‘Louise, we have to take the elevator,’ and she was already halfway up the stairs, looking back.”

—Cindy Ok 6

No Book, Feeling Blue On the train back from Bulldog Days, the whirlwind weekend tour of Yale for admitted students, one of my high school classmates pulled a thick blue book out of her bag to leaf through. Wide-eyed, I asked what it was.

“Yale’s course book,” she said. “I think this might make my decision for me.”

I was given to poring over Yale’s promotional materials, so I knew the school offered over two thousand classes, more than seventy-five majors, and was basically a nerd’s heaven on earth. Still, having failed to pick up a copy of the Yale College Programs of Study myself during Bulldog Days, I felt a bit cheated.

I knew I was missing something.

When my first Blue Book arrived in the mail a few months later, I did what any over-eager pre-frosh (or,

really, any Yale student) would do: I dog-eared, Post-It-noted, highlighted, and circled before starting to make my lists. I still have that first Blue Book, and my second. My classmate chose Yale.

This September, newly appointed Registrar Gabriel Olszewski will decide with Dean Mary Miller when to discontinue the Blue Book, YCPS managing editor Laurie Ongley said. She said they will likely choose to eliminate the Blue Book next year or in 2013. Yale’s course catalog, first printed as a pamphlet in 1715, will be available only online.

Yale students have had to preorder print Blue Books since summer 2010 instead of receiving them automatically, with the expectation that some would use the online course selection system exclusively. As soon as the coming semester’s classes go live on Yale Online Course Information, or OCI, students update online statuses with announcements: “OCI is live— don’t go through every department again this year.” Students await with equal eagerness the arrival of print Blue Books in the mail. The verb “to bluebook” is commonly used, as in: we start bluebooking immediately, and we do so obsessively. Words derived from the acronym OCI have been slower to enter the Yale lexicon.

Every course catalog since 1715 is documented in Yale’s archives.

Together, they trace Yale’s development as an academic institution. Centuries ago, students could tack electives in math or languages onto a syllabus of Greek and Latin giants and “natural philosophy.” The Manuscripts and Archives collection in Sterling Memorial Library holds the course listings dating back to 1822. The pages are soft and the print, gray. The books have been printed in the font now used since the 1940s.

Yale was teaching literature, history, and modern scientific theories by its bicentennial in 1901. Bacteriology and Military Science became majors by 1939.

Eight years later, the Naval Science department joined their ranks, offering courses like Piloting and Navigation and Amphibious Operations. In

The New Journal

Katharine Konietzko

POINTS OF DEPARTURE

the sixties, the curriculum admitted atomic physics. A 1969 seminar was titled, “Is a Just War Possible?”

Film Studies arrived by the eighties.

“This book represents the heart and soul of what the Yale faculty holds in promise,” wrote Miller in an introduction to this year’s version.

Approximately a third of returning upperclassmen preordered print Blue Books this year (those who didn’t can buy one for five dollars at 246 Church Street). “We’ve been talking for a long time about phasing it out,” Ongley said. “But enough people still use it that we want to be really careful…

We want to continue to print it until we’re sure it won’t be missed terribly.”

Caroline Jaffe ’13 chose to preorder.

Like many of her classmates, she finds the print book is easier to peruse than OCI and has a certain sentimental value. “I’m a bit of a traditionalist,” she said, “and I really love having a tangible volume that I can hold and use and have as an artifact, because I can’t keep and hold OCI as a memory of my college years.”

Though environmental and budget concerns have motivated the transition, its largest driving factor is informational. “Online information is more current,” Ongley explained. “As soon as the Blue Book goes to press, it’s obsolete. We expect that students have a greater expectation for online, current information.” She said that Yale has waited to improve the online system before eliminating its print counterpart entirely.

“Before we remove it, we want to put some really good tools out there.”

Meanwhile, the combination of a print Blue Book and OCI leaves students in an uncomfortable limbo. OCI isn’t always easy to browse, and because course information is subject to change, class meeting times and locations were omitted from the print Blue Book this year.

Jared Shenson ’12 and Charlie Croom ’12 have stepped into the breach by creating a new Web site, yalebluebook.com, which was, Shenson said, “born out of a desire to really make a usable version of OCI.” The site has many features unavailable

September 2011

on OCI and is updated constantly according to student feedback—but its development is symptomatic of the chaos surrounding this transition.

Because it is not linked into Yale’s databases, it also may add to the chaos.

If Shenson and Croom are successful in their vision, that will change.

“We met briefly last week with a lot of people in [Information and Technology Services] in addition to Gabe Olszewski, the new registrar, about how we can work together with them,” Croom said, “and what the future of ‘bluebook’ might look like after we graduate.”

This month’s meeting between Olszewski and Miller will determine the Blue Book’s future form—for a time.

What the course catalog will look like many years from now is anyone’s guess.

—Victoria Sanchez

Welcome, Class of 2015!

To write, design, illustrate, or photograph, e-mail thenewjournal@gmail.com.

The Transition Michael Cutler, 44, has a leathery face and a limp and comes from the old vanguard of coffee-shop patrons. He believes the shops exist for storytelling and tall, black cups of joe. Most days, he sets himself down at the Starbucks on the corner of High and Chapel streets in New Haven. His table has a view of the entire shop.

The Starbucks that Cutler frequents is half a block from the center of Yale and one full block from the New Haven Green, where many of the city’s homeless population fall asleep each night. It is less than a block from the front steps of the Yale Repertory Theatre, where Cutler spent his first night on the street tucked beneath a garbage bag with issues of the New Haven Advocate and Play for a mattress. Cutler was homeless until March of this year.

Cutler first became homeless in 2004 after losing a job making calls at Lester Telemarketing in Branford. He had lived for a while at Valley Motel on Route 80 in Guilford but could no longer

TNJ pay for the room. He bought a tent at Walmart for twenty dollars with his first unemployment check and pitched it in East Rock Park for two years.

In 2006, Cutler served three months in Bridgeport Correctional Facility for failure to appear in court on larceny charges. (He says he was house-sitting for a friend whose credit card was stolen by another friend he invited over.) He spent the following years living with family and friends and did mandatory volunteer work at a furniture co-op.

September 2010 found Cutler on the street again.

“Most people are just a paycheck away,” he said.

Last winter, Cutler participated in a program called Abraham’s Tent.

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Columbus House, the city’s largest homeless shelter, developed the program in winter 2010 when it filled its beds—100 shelter, 110 overflow, thirty-five temporary—and still had men and women lining up outside.

Abraham’s Tent was designed to aid twelve homeless men, chosen for work ethic and cooperative behavior, in the transition to independent housing. For each of the coldest sixteen weeks of the year, a different church or community group provides the men with food, shelter, and the company of volunteers.

“This was about a very safe space for the participants to do what they need to do—get a job, meet other people,” said Columbus House director Allison Cunningham. “Last year, we made it a clear part of the program that we don’t want them back.”

Cutler’s, so far, is a success story for the program.

Yale students hosted Abraham’s Tent this February 21 through 27 at Christ Church on Temple Street, in a large mint-green hall. Evenings that week, Cutler played gin rummy, chatting with the volunteers and looking occasionally at his hand.

The other eleven men of Abraham’s Tent nicknamed Cutler “Mom.” He has

shoulder-length brown hair and plays cards by the rules.

A friend of Cutler’s, also in the program, was called “Dad”—Cutler’s counterpart and an avid cook. He kept one bag with him at all times. Besides folded socks, underwear, and an umbrella, it contained a pepper grinder, an ice cream scoop, homemade Cajun spice, small and large crystallized sea salt, garam masala, and tumeric.

The two homeless men had been friends for years. They met on the New Haven Green. Cutler’s current Fountain Street apartment, his first home in two years, is paid for by a grant arranged by his Columbus House caseworker from the federal Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program (HPRP). The grant will pay his first six months’ rent, until September 30.

After September 30, if Cutler makes six hundred dollars a month, he will be allowed to stay in the subsidized apartment, covering one-third of the rent himself. If he doesn’t make that much, he will lose the funding.

Cutler was recently employed about thirty-two hours a week by Clean Team, which works in beautification projects downtown as part of Town Green Special Services. He was let go a few

weeks ago. He says he called in sick and the company never received his call so held him responsible for missing work.

He now is unemployed again, with his roof once more at risk.

On the day Cutler moved in this March, he went to his usual Starbucks, hopped on the B2 bus and walked to the apartment manager’s office on Fountain Street. Lisa Cuomo, the building manager, jingled a set of keys as he turned the corner into her office.

Cutler sat down, crossed his legs, and leaned toward the lease on the table, reading it eagerly.

Laundry is available on every floor.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Guests must park on the street.

“Yeah, that’s fine.”

No pets.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, nah, I wouldn’t, darling, nah, none of those.”

Later that day, Cutler left his new apartment just as he had found it. He slung the heavy backpack he had brought but did not unpack over a shoulder and surveyed the three rooms with bare walls and empty cupboards. He caught the B2 back downtown and got off a few blocks from his table at Starbucks.

“I’m an addict,” he said. “Ask anyone. I was there at 6 a.m. this morning. I think I need rehab. I think I was there five times.”

Employees at the coffee shop know Cutler for the stories he tells.

While participating in Abraham’s Tent this February, he and others often told a story of a woman passed out on a New Haven street. The story changed with each retelling in the green room at Christ Church. Sometimes the woman was young, sometimes old. She was on a bench or on the ground. The program participants did agree on the story’s end: No one helped the woman, and she was inches from death.

“You come out of the womb,” Cutler said, “and doctors slap you on the butt, and you carry on with as much moral correctness as you can. Don’t hurt women or animals. Don’t be a scumbag.”

—Sara Mich

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The New Journal

Katharine Knoietzko

POINTS OF DEPARTURE

yale institute of sacred music

Performances Art Exhibitions Films and more Presenting

Great Organ Music at Yale Yale Camerata Yale Schola Cantorum and more

for latest calendar information call 203.432.5062 or visit www.yale.edu/ism 409 Prospect Street · New Haven, CT 06511

On July 6, Campus Progress named The New Journal Best Overall Publication among the forty-nine college newspapers, online magazines, and other publications it supports through grant funding. Announcing the award, Campus Progress’s David Spett said, “The New Journal’s storytelling is consistently gripping and touching, proving that sometimes, the best way to change hearts and minds is just to tell a story.”

Campus Progress engages students in national campaigns on critical issues, from global warming to civil rights, student debt to academic freedom.

Visit CampusProgress.org/issues to learn more.

The New Journal thanks Campus Progress for its generous support.

September 2011

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SNAPSHOT

Call to Renew

Nearly two centuries later, a members-only library could once again become the center of intellectual life in New Haven.

By Clare Sestanovich

N

o sign at The Institute Library urges visitors to keep their voices down, but there is little to tempt guests here from breaking usual reading room etiquette. The main floor is empty on a Friday in early August. Each of the oversized red chairs sits vacant in the back room of this second story library—an unlikely and unnoticeable fixture of Chapel Street’s cramped commercial row, nestled between a tattoo parlor and dated pawn shop.

An enormous oriental rug was rolled out beneath the armchairs just days earlier—an invitation, so far unheeded, to venture back into the 10

library and find a seat around its circular central table. Closer to the front, an old wooden card catalogue welcomes visitors (once they’ve rung the library’s buzzer and climbed up the narrow staircase that leads away from the street level’s bus stop bustle). Most library card catalogues are preserved as quaint relics of the pre-digital age, but the miniature drawers at the Institute are still full—and still in use.

Inside, the cards document the library’s inventory (thirty thousand volumes, with more packed and stored away in bags) and history (nearly two centuries of service in downtown New

Haven).

Though you might not guess it wandering among the Institute’s quiet shelves, the library has 345 current members, the most it’s had in fifty years.

Rising membership is a point of pride for Will Baker, appointed the library’s new executive director in February. Just last year, the library faced near certainty of closure: buffeted by the economic

Opposite page: Books piled high for reshelving at the library.

The New Journal

Brianne Bowen

September 2011

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crisis, the Institute’s tiny endowment seemed to be on its last legs. With only 194 members (each paying a nominal twenty-five dollar fee), the library cut its hours drastically, opening for just over ten hours a week. These days, however, Baker is hard at work bringing the bustle back to the library, where objects are meant not just to be touched, but to be used.

Baker’s timing might seem unwise.

Symptoms of a print doomsday are everywhere: shuttered windows at the last-Border’s-standing, publishers struggling to deal with shifting technologies, Kindles and Nooks emerging out of purses and backpacks on the public bus. If the decline of the book is all but guaranteed, how can a tiny library like this hope to emerge from its own near-certain demise?

“If you think about libraries just as repositories of information,” says Baker, “then there is no reason for them to remain.”

The future of libraries, Baker believes, lies in their role as communities, not collections. The key to success is not keeping visitors quiet; it’s getting them talking.

B

aker’s new vision is of “library as place,” a buzzword among likeminded library enthusiasts. “Too often libraries are thought about only in terms of their physical collections: the books, journals, manuscripts, and other physical materials that line the shelves,” wrote Susan Gibbons, Yale University librarian, in an e-mail. “The creation and transmission of knowledge requires conversation and debate, and libraries were designed for that purpose.”

The New Haven Free Public Library hosted over one thousand community meetings last year, and typically offers four to five programs a week at the main branch, according to Cathleen DeNigris, the library’s deputy director.

“We try to offer as many varied speakers, workshops, and film series as we can,” she wrote in an e-mail. “I believe as we enter an age of e-books and instant online information, libraries

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as ‘places’ become even more important.

Human beings are social entities and need spaces where they can come together with others, even if they are not interacting all the time.”

It’s a vision that fits nicely in the narrative of the Institute Library’s past. From its first meeting in 1826, the Library has been as much about

Just last year, the library faced near certainty of closure: buffeted by the economic crisis, the Institute’s tiny endowment seemed to be on its last legs. talking—and sharing—as it has been about reading.

In many ways, the creation of the library was unexceptional. Membership libraries, which require a small fee to make use of their collections, were unremarkable in an era that pre-dated the rise of public libraries. Likewise, the library’s pedagogical mission was also the product of a larger movement: the mobilization of the American middle class to seek out liberal arts education.

Unlike other membership libraries and intellectual societies at the time, the Young Apprentices’ Literary Association, as it was originally called, was created without a jump-start from a wealthy patron and operated without the oversight of any experienced teachers.

The eight founders, all “mechanics” or “clerks” (catch-all terms for blue-collar workers), pooled their resources—most likely, several good sets of reference

volumes and canonical literature—and launched a quest for self-improvement on their own. At each meeting, members were required to read aloud an original piece of writing, killing two all-important birds (composition and declamation) with one stone. Any lazy student who forgot his homework was fined ten cents.

Within a year, the founders had attracted the attention of educators and financiers willing to pitch in to support their venture. The club took the progressive step of opening its doors to women in 1835 and in 1841 was officially chartered by the state under its new name, The New Haven Young Men’s Institute (which still welcomed women). Within a decade, the library had become a bastion of inclusive and provocative discourse in the city. The intimate “seminars” of the library’s early days were replaced by a selection of three hundred classes. An ongoing lecture series featured esteemed speakers from the national Lyceum circuit, including Henry Ward Beecher, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville.

The library’s heyday, however, was short-lived. Financial woes in the wake of the Civil War weakened the Institute, which found itself on the peripheries of the debates it had once monopolized.

When the New Haven Free Public Library opened in 1886, the Institute seemed destined for obsolescence.

The premise of a membership library became antiquated at best, uninviting and—ironically, given the Institute’s humbles beginnings—elitist at worst.

Under William Borden, the librarian whose hundred-year-old handwriting still fills the catalogue’s most yellowed cards, the Institute turned inward. Many of the library’s most charming idiosyncrasies are the product of Borden’s unusual stewardship from 1887 until 1910.

Contrary to the lofty pedagogy of the founders, he set out to turn the Institute into what Baker calls a “laboratory for library science.” A classmate and competitor of Melvil Dewey, father of the ubiquitous Dewey Decimal System, Borden designed an alternative

The New Journal

Brianne Bowen

Clockwise from top left: Will Baker, newly appointed executive director of the library; original card catalogue with handwritten cards dating from the Institute’s first librarian; the interior of the library.

September 2011

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This page and opposite page: Brianne Bowen

The reading room at the Institute Library. (and, Baker notes, “very problematic”) classification system for organizing the library’s collection. Borden’s system uses a book’s date of acquisition as part of its organizational schema, a design flaw that ultimately discouraged expanding the library’s collection. To this day, it is used in no other known library—a deadend story that befits the library’s own declining trajectory.

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B

aker pictures a “social space” at the Institute, which he thinks will thrive if it is filled with people—not, as Borden evidently hoped, simply because it is filled with books. To be sure, Baker shares much of Borden’s bookish obsession with the library and its collection: he received a Master’s in museum studies in 2004, and worked for William and Reese, a leading rare books

company based in New Haven. Yet Baker is equally committed to what he calls “community-oriented work”—an ethos of literary engagement that sets his own directorship apart from Borden’s model of custodianship. In 2009, Baker enrolled in the library science program at Southern Connecticut University.

That same fall, Baker visited the Institute Library for the first time—brought along by one of the library’s board members. Baker was instantly taken by the rich history of the library, and began investigating the Institute’s past as part of his own research. By the time his two years at Southern were over, he had befriended many of the Institute’s board members and was offered a newly created position as executive director.

As part of his final project at Southern (before his directorship at the Institute), Baker mailed out a survey to all two hundred members at the time.

Part of the fact-finding project solicited basic information: why members joined (everything from encouraging small libraries to “support[ing] Will Baker in all his endeavors”), how often they visited (less than four percent visited once a week or more), and how many books they borrowed (almost half had never checked out a book).

The survey was also forwardlooking. Baker wanted to know what The New Journal

violent disarray, an elderly woman stood up to denounce the young rabble-rouser.

Following her principled lead, a handful of other library members surrounded the man and began pushing him away from the crowd. The old lady, however, insisted that he sit politely through the lecture—guaranteeing that he learn his lesson in the truest sense.

Baker’s anecdote presents a kind of Holy Grail of social learning. The collective teaching of an old lady and a motley New Haven crowd suggests

members liked best about the library— and what they thought stood to be improved. Their answers sounded a ringing note of approval for Baker’s vision of “library as place.” Users cited the literal space at the Institute as its most attractive feature—a “haven,” as one respondent wrote, “where one can focus and be productive.” They eagerly proposed introducing debates, game clubs, and instructional classes. The simple addition of coffee and tea was the most popular proposed change.

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he most worthy spirit of the library, Baker believes, can be found in the run-up to the Civil War, when the Institute was one of the few safe spaces for abolitionists to speak out in New Haven. (Uncharacteristically, Connecticut was a pro-slavery Northern state—the result, Baker surmises, of Southern business interest and the omnipresent legacy of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin.)

Baker has a favorite story from the era. During the 1850s, an abolitionist was invited to speak at the Institute, ruffling the feathers of New Haven’s Southern sympathizers. Determined to derail the speech, one local copperhead interrupted the visitor and began to muster a mob of indignant audience members. As the gathering seemed poised to dissolve into September 2011

During the 1850s, an abolitionist was invited to speak at the Institute, ruffling the feathers of New Haven’s Southern sympathizers. what civil discourse at its best can bring to those who agree to come together and talk together. Indeed, two-sided discourse is precisely what can get lost in an era dominated by the one-way transactions of the technological world.

The legend of the old lady isn’t the only one Baker likes to tell. “There are so many great stories that people have of while doing research in the library, pulling a book out and finding one they wouldn’t have encountered,” he says. “Or backing up into someone, and finding out they are working on complementary projects.”

These serendipitous encounters, of

course, only happen in well-trafficked libraries. Still, while membership has risen under Baker’s tenure, he acknowledges that recruitment efforts alone will not be enough to carve out a new and permanent niche for the library.

The real grist of his agenda as Director will be to introduce new programming to the library—giving new members a real “reason for them to remain.”

In the fall, many of the plans proposed by the library’s members will finally come off paper and into action.

Baker hopes to launch the Institute’s first lecture series, on the theme of civil discourse—as he describes it, “civil discourse about civil discourse.” Book clubs and classes are also in the works, along with eight exhibitions of local artists.

“There’s great potential for the Institute Library to attract downtown people in for lunchtime programs or after work for discussions, book talks, etc.,” the public library’s DeNigris wrote.

Baker has plans for more avant garde performances as well; he hints at the possibility of bringing an old friend, “the last link to the last great generation of sideshow performers,” to put on his famous sword-swallowing act on the library’s second or third floor.

Baker knows he is fighting an uphill battle. He admits that computers, not libraries, are the perfect “portals to information.” But accessing information isn’t the endgame of Baker’s brand of education.

Engaging with information—not just reading books, but truly discussing them—is the far more difficult mission of good libraries and good librarians. The “portal” Baker envisions is more than a few clicks of the mouse away, but still, he believes, well within reach. The question now is whether anyone else is willing to climb through.

TNJ

Clare Sestanovich is a junior in Pierson College.

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Jessica Cole

Jessica Cole

Waging War

After a fashionable downtown restaurant closes, workers claim unfair treatment and pay.

By Jessica Cole

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The New Journal

Astoria couches? A steal at $1,400.

But the one price tag that Aranda will never forget, and the store’s biggest discount of all, was the one attached to herself: “They didn’t pay me,” she says.

“Nothing. Not even commissions.”

Aranda, a petite woman with a straight-at-you stare and a smile that emerges when she’s hard at work, recounts her version of her time at Mario’s while wiping glue off her fingers.

She is busy building papier-mâche puppets for a May Day workers’ march in downtown New Haven; since quitting Mario’s, she works a part-time job that leaves her with time to volunteer. She found that her undocumented status made it difficult to procure another fulltime position. She switches between Spanish and English as she recalls her frustrated attempts to get payment from Mario’s. Like several others interviewed for this story, Aranda spoke through a translator. “I started asking [my boss] about my money. He was like, ‘tomorrow’ and ‘tomorrow’ and ‘tomorrow.’” By the time she quit at the end of March, after four unpaid weeks on the job, Aranda realized that “tomorrow” would never come.

D Above: Protestors carry signs in the streets of New Haven at the march on National Worker’s Day on May 1.

N

ineteen-year-old Anna Aranda knew the price of almost everything in Mario’s Discount Furniture after her month of working there. For eleven hours a day, seven days a week, she rang up purchases and wrote them down. Fifty-inch plasmas? $1,099.

September 2011

iego Castillo worked part-time as a dishwasher at Cafe Goodfellas in New Haven for a month and a half before he gave up on receiving a paycheck. He also worked mornings at the drycleaner across the street from the restaurant during the same time period. The moment that his boss at the drycleaner heard his story, he picked up the phone, called across the street, and demanded justice for Castillo. The owners at Goodfellas refused.

Castillo did not know that others also had wage complaints against Cafe Goodfellas. Between 2008 and 2010, the Connecticut Department of Labor had received ten complaints against the restaurant and had forced Goodfellas to pay a total of $9,527.51 in stolen wages.

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or Neftali Palma, a perfect job involves dough and back kitchens,

desserts and a good dinner. He is a pastry chef by training and has spent twenty-five years pursuing his passion at restaurants in Mexico and the United States. “You make something in food and you make people happy,” Palma says. “When people come in the back and say, ‘This is the best meal of my life,’ that is my payback.”

In 2009, Palma landed a job at Downtown at the Taft, a restaurant in the heart of New Haven that briefly changed its name to Baccus Enoteca before closing this year. Palma thought he had found the best of both worlds: solid employment and a position as head chef of a six-person kitchen staff.

Instead, he discovered that satisfaction would be the only thing that he would earn in abundance.

Diego Castillo worked part-time as a dishwasher at Cafe Goodfellas in New Haven for a month and a half before he gave up on receiving a paycheck.

Palma and his staff filed complaints with both the federal and the state Departments of Labor. According to those complaints, the workers were receiving neither the state nor the federal minimum wage during their employment.

On August 29, resolution was near after

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three months of negotiations with the owners of Downtown at the Taft.

“The parties appear to have reached a settlement,” said Peter Goselin, a lawyer representing the workers. “The details are being worked out, but we are very optimistic that the settlement will resolve all of the claims of the six workers.”

When Palma worked at Downtown at the Taft, he says, the restaurant’s owners gave him a sum of money to distribute to the other kitchen workers. Divided up, this sum was below minimum wage and included no overtime. This forced Palma not only to lose out on his earnings but also to reach into his own pockets to help supplement those of men working under him in the kitchen. When he asked the owners for additional money, they avoided the question. “They always say, ‘Yeah, yeah, tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, next week.’ There’s nothing you can do!”

The increased hours took a toll on his family life, too. As Palma spent between eighty and a hundred hours a week trying to meet his employer’s demands in the kitchen, he saw less and less of his three children, the youngest of whom is just six years old. “I was losing my family; I worked so many hours that I couldn’t see my kids. By the last month, the only way to see my family at all was to call them and have them come for lunch at the restaurant.”

The low wages and lack of time at home led Palma, after nearly two years of working for Downtown at the Taft, to quit. “One night, my daughter asks, ‘When am I going to see you so we can talk?’ I realized that this is not a job, this is a life,” Palma says.

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randa, Castillo, and Palma are three of a growing number of New Haven workers, led by organizers with Unidad Latina en Acción and the New Haven Workers Association, its multiethnic parter, who are seeking justice after alleged instances of unfair compensation. These violations of labor laws, often called wage theft, involve payment below Connecticut’s minimum wage of $8.25 an hour, a lack of time-

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and-a-half overtime pay, or a failure to pay wages at all. Wage theft is a national problem playing out in hundreds of city downtowns. And with the percentage of workers who are union members now at a third of its mid-20th century height, these workers, many of whom are concentrated in the lowest rungs of the service industry and some of whom are undocumented, are among the most

“In New Haven, the only way business owners can survive is by paying less than the minimum wage. That’s the reality of the industry. I feel that’s not right.” vulnerable members of the economy as it struggles to recover from the 2008 crash.

Workers who are illegally employed often have the hardest time coming forward about these violations, despite the fact that certain workers’ rights are universally protected by law. All unsalaried workers are entitled to the minimum wage and to overtime pay when they work more than forty hours a week. All can sue to recover lost wages. Antonio DiBenedetto, the owner of Rocco’s Bakery on Ferry Street, pled guilty in January to holding

six Ecuadorian employees as wage slaves to work from 2000 to 2008. They were eventually rescued by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a raid that, rather than deporting the immigrants, granted them protection from the alleged abuse.

The owners of Mario’s Discount Furniture, Cafe Goodfellas, and Downtown at the Taft did not respond despite repeated and acknowledged requests for comment.

Reyes Morales, who worked in the kitchen at Downtown at the Taft with Palma, says, “[Bosses] exploit workers a lot. They take advantage of people who are undocumented. Workers are afraid of losing their jobs, so they don’t say anything.” Like Aranda, he had no knowledge of the protections that the United States offers to all workers, regardless of their immigration status, under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

“There is a new slavery in the United States,” said Guadalupe Montiel, who works with both Unidad Latina and the non-profit Junta for Progressive Action. “Immigrants are being treated as slaves.”

Last year, New York state passed the Wage Theft Prevention Act, which mandated that employers supply all workers with salary information at the start of their employment. Activists in New Haven hope to pass similar legislation, and the individuals, both documented and undocumented, who have stepped forward thus far have won important victories. Federal- and statelevel investigations by the Department of Labor have led to the delivery of tens of thousands of dollars in back-owed wages, while public protests and private negotiations have prompted back-door settlements for thousands of dollars more.

But not everyone in the city believes in seeking complete wage compliance.

Some employers see low wages as the only way to survive in a competitive city.

Some argue simply that this problem pervades the entire service industry, making it difficult for individual

The New Journal

businesses to avoid. A 2009 survey of four thousand low-wage workers across Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York found that twenty-six percent of those workers had been paid less than the minimum wage in the week prior, and seventy-six percent of them had either been underpaid or not paid for overtime hours. “If you go to any…place in New Haven, the only way they can survive is by paying less than the minimum wage.

That’s the reality of the industry. I feel that’s not right,” says John Lugo, one of the leaders of Unidad Latina.

Traditionally, federal and state governments have been the arbiters of workplace behavior, regulating minimum wages, investigating fraud, and collecting taxes. But cunning employers have found other ways to skimp on their payroll, banking on the fact that workers are too intimidated or too easily replaced to protest. And when employees do speak up, as Palma did, they are often ignorant of the laws on their side. Since contacting the New Haven Workers Association, Aranda has sent two letters to Mario’s Discount Furniture demanding payment for her back wages. If her claims are true, she is owed for her unpaid work. But when asked if she knew that she had legal rights to compensation and protection in the workplace before she came into contact with the organizers, Aranda fell silent. Her reply was simple, and quiet.

“No.”

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he recent battles for wage justice in New Haven began with a victory in 2007. In January of that year, four years before Palma came forward with his allegations against Downtown at the Taft, members and allies of Unidad Latina sang a modified Christmas carol outside of an Outback Steakhouse in North Haven: Down by the freezer Where the kitchen staff is harassed He said, “Hey hon, why don’t ya give me some Or this paycheck is your last.’‘

September 2011

Customers pulled their cars into the lot, saw the picket, and drove away.

A police officer gave the protestors a ticket and made them move to public property. But after four months of weekly demonstrations, the group won one of its first major public labor cases: the three employees who had been fired from Outback Steakhouse after filing sexual harassment charges were paid a settlement by the national chain.

The case helped to establish Unidad Latina and the New Haven Workers Association as trusted activist organizations within the city, and they began to receive a growing number of referrals for similar cases in other local shops and restaurants. The group has handled hundreds of cases since its founding in 2002. By now, it has a streamlined strategy for responding to complaints. Major cases in the city have included Outback Steakhouse, Rocco’s Bakery, Downtown at the Taft, and Cafe Goodfellas.

The New Haven Workers Association helped Palma, Morales, and their coworkers to file their complaints.

Morales was working sixty to seventy hours a week at the restaurant while being paid less than the minimum wage, with no time-and-a-half for overtime.

Morales, who speaks only Spanish and admits to being undocumented, worked with his fellow complainants to provide information to help prove their allegations: the workers’ stories matched, they had their own records of their pay, and they were able to describe aspects of the restaurant’s operations in vivid detail.

Palma convinced the other men to come forward after first realizing how widespread the problem was across the city and then understanding what his rights were by speaking with the Department of Labor through the New Haven Workers Association. “We’re going to fight for [what we are owed],” he says that he told the workers. “I don’t think I’m a leader, but my guys follow me. I do it because we are human beings, and we are supposed to take care of everyone else.”

After gathering information, the

New Haven Workers Association sends a certified letter to the owner of an accused business alerting them to the allegations and requesting a response by a certain date. Lugo says that about forty percent of claims are settled after the initial letter through negotiations.

The majority, though, are not. “The owners just tried to hide themselves” initially in response to the complaints about the Taft, Morales says. Palma says that he received a threatening phone call from one of his former bosses after he saw Palma’s name in print. But, he says, he also received help because of his relationship with the press: “Every time we go in the newspaper, people call me and say, ‘Ah, it’s true, I remember that happened to me.’”

When owners do not respond to the initial letters, Unidad Latina either works with a lawyer to file a case or puts together a complaint and sends it to the federal or state Department of Labor.

However, the former costs money and can be nerve-wracking for complainants without legal permission to work, while the latter can take far longer than the workers are able to wait. Sheila Hayre, an attorney at New Haven Legal Aid, estimates that the Department of Labor can take a full year to even open an investigation into a complaint, and up to a year more to resolve it. Still, organizers usually take advantage of the free forms to apply for an investigation, knowing that it will often uncover a series of discrepancies in the owner’s bookkeeping. They also, if workers feel comfortable, put them in touch with Department of Labor representatives to help confirm their feelings of being treated wrongly. “We went to the Labor Department, and they explained it to me,” says Palma. “People in those kinds of positions don’t really realize how much they’re supposed to make. You should know you should make more than that.”

But appealing to government channels is merely the first, and quietest, step in Unidad Latina’s support of the workers. They also organize picket lines, host direct actions, and call

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press conferences to publicize their accusations. On December 17, 2010, boycottbaccusenoteca.blogspot.com went live with an entry about a picket line and a phone number to call with complaints. “This restaurant owes nearly $100,000 in unpaid wages to 7 former workers,” read the headline. “Wage theft is a crime.”

Unidad Latina learned from trial and error to hold pickets on Fridays in order to have the greatest effect on a restaurant’s profits and to hold press conferences on Wednesday afternoons in order to draw the largest number of press outlets. The number of protestors varies between ten and forty; workers often bring their friends for support.

The approach has been effective.

Goodfellas, though initially unwilling to negotiate despite orders from the Department of Labor, finally paid its workers the full $23,000 that they had been owed after a large press conference was called and organizers warned of a redoubling of picketing efforts. However, picketers run the risk of alienating the local population—“Glares are the nicest thing they do,” says Chris Garaffa, a cofounder of the New Haven Workers Association and a regular participant in the picket lines—or having run-ins with the police, which can be extremely dangerous for any undocumented workers participating in public action.

It can also take a long time for protests to take effect, and if a restaurant closes, as Downtown at the Taft did, it can be

difficult for organizers to find a place to make a stand. But even with the dangers involved, Lugo is convinced that direct action is a necessary addition to Unidad Latina’s more official complaints. “Many of the big victories in this country, they got won on the streets,” he says.

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or Lugo and Garaffa, undocumented workers are the most difficult to convince to come to public protests.

Sometimes, in those cases, Garaffa offers complainants complete anonymity and lets them miss their own picket lines. “If you work, you deserve to get paid,” he says. “When we talk about a case with the press, we don’t specify whether it involves an immigrant or not.”

Certainly, the workers impacted

This page and opposite page: Jessica Cole

The May 1 march sought to stop downtown New Haven traffic in honor of International Worker’s Day.

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The New Journal

Protestors carried puppets representing workers.

by wage theft are not solely illegal immigrants. Many of them are Latino and here legally; many others are of other backgrounds and are caught up in the same low wage job market as the immigrants are. Erin Talbot, who is white, worked briefly as a waitress at the vegetarian restaurant Thali Too. On her first day on the job during the summer after the restaurant opened, she alleges that she heard her boss threatening to have workers’ wages withheld during future shifts for not setting the table correctly. Rattan Kaul, the manager of Thali Too for the past year, says that he heard no reports of payment disputes from Talbot or other employees, and that the restaurant’s payments are done through a computer system that automatically issues wages by the hour.

According to Talbot, the incident prompted her to quit because she had another job offer, but many others are not so fortunate.

“Especially in this economy, if there are enough people looking for jobs…most people will endure far less than ideal working conditions,” she said in a phone interview. Indeed, part of the purpose of the founding of the New Haven Workers Association out of Unidad Latina was to better represent workers who were not members of the populations with which Unidad Latina usually works. However, that Talbot was confident enough in her rights as a worker to stand up to the manager in the first place sets her apart from most of the undocumented workers who work in the back of the house at restaurants and service shops.

The stereotyping of Latinos across the country makes the public less sympathetic to uneven power dynamics

September 2011

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in the service industry. John Ziebell, a New Haven resident, showed up to the May Day Workers Rally with his 7-yearold son Ben to hold a sign reading, “American Jobs for Americans First.”

He pointed to the three puppets made

by Unidad Latina and the New Haven Workers Association and said, “None of those puppets are white. It’s not fair, it’s not right…It’s taking my job and the job of other Americans.” Ziedell said his own family immigrated to the United States from Germany three generations ago, and he has worked hard to earn his living since then.

But despite the disagreements over undocumented immigrants in all other aspects of American life, laws regarding the workplace and specifically the Fair Labor Standards Act stipulate that, once hired, undocumented immigrants have rights, too. “In the United States, at least in the ideal version of it, we believe there has to be a certain basic floor of standards,” says Hayre of New Haven Legal Aid. Moreover, when complaints are filed, the legal burden of proof falls on the employer, so even undocumented immigrants who have been intimidated out of saving records of their pay are able to file a claim.

Often, workers, Aranda and Reyes included, are surprised to find out how much protection they have without formal legal status in the United States.

But Hayre says that it is not just a matter of workers understanding their rights— even after she holds workshops to explain their rights to them, she receives very few complaints from men and women who are still employed. The job market is too difficult, and undocumented immigrants remain nervous about their status. It is often only once they quit or are fired that workers will show up in Hayre’s office.

“Really what has to change is this climate of fear that surrounds undocumented immigrants in this country,” she says.

It is a justifiable fear. Even with the protections, until a national immigration solution is reached, there will always be some level of risk for immigrants who come forward. While there are cases that establish a precedent for the

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irrelevance of immigration status in claims for unpaid minimum wages or overtime, other cases involving backpay for unlawful termination may require disclosure of a worker’s legal status in the country. Hayre says that complications arise when a court tries to sentence a business owner. If the complainant argues that he or she was illegally fired, normally the court will order the owner to re-hire that person. However, in a case where the plaintiff is not a documented resident or does not have papers allowing him or her to work in the United States, it is equally impossible to order a business owner to break the law again by hiring such a worker. Hayre says that until the threat of deportation fades away, undocumented immigrants will never be able to fully feel comfortable coming forward with complaints about workplace violations. “Who am I to say risk everything [to speak up]? Honestly, I’d probably make the same decision,” she says of the workers who decide to remain silent.

For Aranda, who is undocumented yet came forward anyway, the specter of deportation paled next to her desire for justice. She acknowledges that owners are aware of how much they can exploit immigrants, but says that there should be a level of respect given to all workers, regardless of their status. “I would say to the people who are afraid [of speaking out] that we are human, too. In spite of this little paper…we are human, too.”

“¡E

l pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!

The people, united, will never be defeated! El pueblo unido…” One hundred demonstrators shout together, alternating languages, in front of New Haven’s City Hall. There are not as many reporters present as the organizers had hoped for, but their mission—to stop traffic in the center of the city in honor of International Workers’ Day on May 1—grows more successful with each car that has to detour around the crowds.

The demonstrators march from City Hall to the hospital and back again. They ask for paid sick days, better immigration laws, education reform, and the end to

the Iraq War all in the same breath, which makes one thing extremely clear: despite their vocal support for unity, these activists do not present an entirely united front. They are workers, yes, and they want change; but these are alliances born out of convenience and necessity, not common goals.

These alliances become necessary in a city the size of New Haven. Unlike New York City, New Haven has few worker centers able to pay specific employees to investigate allegations and lobby the government when wage theft cases like Aranda’s arise. This leaves New Haven with a landscape of activism that is far from full-time. Unidad Latina has no budget of any kind; it relies on donations to pay for the occasional rented space, and at the time of these interviews, was two months behind on those sporadic rent payments already. Besides the few nonprofit organizations and public interest lawyers who do exist, the search for justice is an after-hours pursuit. This means that the limited activists in the city unite at every opportunity.

Alejandro Torres ’12, a member of Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlian, or MEChA, at Yale, marched May 1 with signs for the Workers Association and tried to connect it with the experiences of the students around him. “There are plenty of students, especially within MEChA, who have immigrant families, some of whom have been exploited,” he says. Alan Williams, 17, a student at Wilbur Cross High School who spoke at the rally in support of education reform, also agreed to lend his voice to the workers in a similar commingling of causes. “I feel we’re all struggling,” he says. “Workers, many of them are parents, so many of our struggles fall back on them.” “It’s a chain reaction,” agreed Jazlyn Ocasio, a 14-year-old who is also a student at Wilbur Cross.

Members of Unidad Latina and the New Haven Workers Association also joined in on chants in favor of better education and national peace as they made their way through the march, doing their part to contribute to other

The New Journal

causes. Meanwhile, the giant puppets that Aranda had spent hours creating were so large that they needed three people each to hold up their limbs. Their faces—a chef, an agricultural worker, and a construction worker—bobbed and weaved above the crowd throughout the afternoon.

The alliances between New Haven’s limited number of activists also means that the same people show up at very different events. Luis Luna, who hoisted a New Haven Workers Association sign above his head with one arm and pumped his fist with the other, spoke in favor of workers as he marched across the city.

“I think we have to make a presence [in honor of May Day],” he said. “Most employers are paying a couple of dollars less [than they should] to the workers…

They have to realize that workers can’t live on minimum wage.” The last time that he had been quoted by a reporter, Luna was at a protest against police brutality and had filed his own complaint against the department for interfering with his right to videotape the actions of officers.

Garaffa is among New Haven’s regular revolutionaries. He is also one of its many activists with a day job. Garaffa, who showed up in square glasses and a gray striped collared shirt with a phone in his front pocket, earns his paycheck as a software developer. During evenings and weekends, though, he is the leader of the local Party for Socialism and Liberation and was one of the original founders of the New Haven Workers Association. “I write software to pay my bills, but my purpose is activism and making the world better,” he says.

Garaffa was first drawn into the activism community in 2003 when he decided to join a protest against the Iraq War. Garaffa is often the one to give a pep talk to workers within the organization in an attempt to get them to attend a protest on behalf of another set of complainants. “Today we fought for you,” he tells them at the end of every case. “Tomorrow, we hope you’ll join us to fight for someone else.”

September 2011

I

nstitutions engaging in wage theft and illegal employment practices are hard to spot from the outside. Cafe Goodfellas restaurant, for example, received a laudatory write-up for its food and service in The New York Times within a month of the Department of Labor filing claims against its owner on behalf of ten workers who had not been paid properly. The renowned Rocco’s Bakery still has lines out the door when it opens in the morning, despite the owner

Cafe Goodfellas received a laudatory write-up for its food and service in The New York Times within a month of the Department of Labor filing claims against its owner on behalf of ten workers who had not been paid properly. pleading guilty to criminal charges for his employment practices in January.

Hayre, the attorney at New Haven Legal Aid, said, “It’s maddening, because it’s right under your nose.”

But if Megan Fountain, a coorganizer of Unidad Latina, has any influence on the situation, that invisibility

will soon change. She, along with other organizers from Unidad Latina and the New Haven Workers Association, held a press conference at the start of the summer to announce that the organization will spend the upcoming months coming up with a system to publicly announce and celebrate restaurants who do manage to achieve fair labor standards. She wants to prove that the commonly-held view that service industry businesses cannot afford to pay workers minimum wage and remain competitive is a myth. Ultimately, the organizers hope to convince lawmakers to pass a bill akin to New York State’s 2010 Wage Theft Prevention Act. “We are not done transforming the restaurant industry in New Haven. This is just the beginning,” said Fountain.

Palma, who found a new job during his time protesting Downtown at the Taft, now spends far more hours with his family than he used to. He receives fair wages and is able to continue pursuing his passion for pastry-making.

Yet despite his newfound gains, he is determined not to let anyone forget about what happened to him and his coworkers, and what happens to other workers in other places. “We started to find out that it doesn’t just happen to us, it happens to people around New Haven, around the country. It happens everywhere,” he says.

“We are good people. We do the right thing. We have to fight for all of these people.”

TNJ

Jessica Cole is a senior in Pierson College.

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Bathing Mrs. Wolfson

Opponents of looser hospice regulations say they’ll mean the end of good care for those nearing death.

By Katie Falloon

S

usan Wolfson had not had a bath in almost a month. A broken right arm—combined with large tumor masses in her abdomen that were obstructing her intestine, and one in particular that was pressing on the nerves to her right leg, causing her intense pain—meant that a bath was an almost insurmountable task. And for Susan Wolfson, that’s saying something.

Mrs. Wolfson was a lawyer known for getting things done. She began practicing law in 1976, and soon rose through the ranks, becoming President of the New Haven Bar Association, then the Connecticut Bar Association, and finally serving as an officer of

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the national family law section of the American Bar Association. The New Haven County Bar Association honored her with its lifetime achievement award posthumously in 2005. The award typically goes to someone who has been in practice for forty years, and she had worked for less than thirty.

Mrs. Wolfson was an expert at dispute resolution—if there was anyone who could keep clients filing for divorce out of a long, protracted, and costly court battle, it was she. She even helped found an alternative dispute resolution company, a mediation service called StaFed ADR, Inc. “A prominent source of referrals

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Brianne Bowen

for her were spouses who had been on the other side of her cases,” said Steven Wolfson, her husband of fortyfive years. The two met at a party their freshman year of college, when Susan was at Barnard and Steven at Columbia, and they’ve been together ever since.

Even after Mrs. Wolfson was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she continued to work until 2004, when she finally had to retire. And then, after a long, hard battle—she had first been diagnosed six years earlier—Mrs. Wolfson decided that it was time to stop fighting and start living.

By then, she could no longer eat due to the masses that had spread throughout her abdomen. The contents of her stomach had to be continually suctioned out through a special machine.

She couldn’t walk. She was in a great deal of pain when she finally suggested a transfer from Yale-New Haven Hospital to Connecticut Hospice, a facility in Branford devoted to end of life and palliative care, a facility to which Dr. Wolfson, a cardiologist, often refers his patients.

There are four levels of hospice care, ranging from the lowest level called routine care, in which a patient receives support services such as visits from a nurse to their own home, to the highest level of care, in which the patient is cared for in an inpatient unit. The Richard L. Rosenthal Hospice Center in Stamford provides inpatient hospice care but is licensed as a skilled nursing facility, while inpatient services at Middlesex Hospice and Palliative Care are provided on the top floor of Middlesex Hospital.

Currently, CT Hospice is the only facility in Connecticut licensed specifically as a hospice to provide all four levels of care.

Just days after her arrival there, Mrs. Wolfson finally got what she had spent four weeks of her life longing for: a bath.

It took three nurses’ aides to do it, and a nurse about fifteen feet away if anything should go wrong. Together, the three aides used a hoist to raise Mrs. Wolfson up, and then they slowly lowered her into a giant tub filled with hot water, a tub that looked to Dr.

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A statue on the grounds of CT Hospice.

Wolfson rather like a Jacuzzi.

Mrs. Wolfson loved it, and the bath soon became a regular occurrence, with the nurses singing her songs while they bathed her. Their favorite, Dr. Wolfson fondly recalled several years later, was “You Are My Sunshine.”

The melody of the song is simple, and so too is the chorus. First recorded in 1939, it is a song parents still sing to their toddlers as they tuck them in at night. Yet, it seems especially suited not only for those whose lives are just beginning, but also for those whose lives are drawing to a close.

And so as the nurses cleaned Mrs.

Wolfson’s broken body, as they gently scrubbed her with soap and then let the warm water wash over her frail limbs, carrying away the dirt and grime of a daily battle with cancer, they sang: You are my sunshine, My only sunshine.

You make me happy When skies are gray.

You’ll never know, dear, How much I love you.

Please don’t take my sunshine away.

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f course, giving Mrs. Wolfson such a bath once, let alone multiple times, was a very labor-intensive process.

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It meant that three fewer nurses’ aides were available to the fifty-two other patients that CT Hospice might be caring for on any given day. It meant that there had to be a nurse not only on duty, but also available should anything go wrong.

“Standard nursing home levels of care would not have been able to do this, in short,” Dr. Wolfson said.

If Dr. Wolfson is right, many patients like his wife won’t be getting such baths in the future. For the first time since the establishment of regulations governing hospice care, the Department of Public Health has proposed changes that would make the regulations more in line with those governing standard nursing home care.

Regulations for hospice care were first put into effect in 1977, when CT Hospice sought to open its doors. CT Hospice was the first hospice in the country to open, and the regulations were tailored specifically to it. They were especially strict because the idea of a facility devoted to end of life care was so novel and because people feared for the wellbeing of those nearing their final days. Pages were devoted just to the kinds of arts programming the facility would need to provide.

The proposed regulations seek to modernize the delivery of hospice care and increase access. In order to do so, they relax the previous regulations—for instance, an onsite pharmacy would no longer be required. Another change is the replacement of a nurse to patient ratio of one to six with the requirement that facilities have “sufficient” staffing and services. “Sufficient” means there will still be a Registered Nurse present twenty-four hours a day, with additional staff available based on how many patients are at a given facility and what their medical needs are, explains Tracy Wodatch, vice president of clinical and regulatory services at the Connecticut Association for Homecare and Hospice, of which all twenty-nine hospices in the state are members.

Costs were not a major factor in the changes made to the regulations, said Deborah Hoyt, president and

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CEO of the Connecticut Association for Homecare and Hospice. Medicare tends to reimburse patients for hospice care on a case-by-case basis depending on the amount of time they stay and the degree of care they need, she said. Still, some of the proposed changes, such as the elimination of an onsite pharmacy, could save money for facilities and patients alike, Hoyt added.

“With language like ‘sufficient’ staff with no definition of what that means, the whole reputation of hospice care that lets people die with dignity goes out the window.”

Many worry, however, that the relaxation of these regulations, and especially the elimination of required nurse to patient ratios, will be detrimental to the health and well being of the patients.

“The parts that for me are the most problematic are the nurse to patient ratios, and then among the nurses the percentage that are RNs versus [Licensed Practical Nurses],” said Elizabeth Bradley, a professor of public health and nursing at the Yale School of Public Health. The ability of a nurse to think ahead, to anticipate and reason in terms of diagnostics, “makes a huge difference for the patient,” she said, and RNs are more qualified nurses. While RNs need a

four-year degree, LPNs need only about a year of study.

Dr. Wolfson agrees that the importance of set staffing levels should not be underestimated. “The people who are referred for inpatient care at an inpatient hospice facility are not only dying, they’re also critically ill,” he said. “If the goal is for them to die in comfort, then a good staffing coverage level is vital.”

And though proponents of the regulations argue that staffing levels will still be strong, just less strictly managed, opponents of the regulations are far from convinced.

“With language like ‘sufficient’ staff with no definition of what that means, the whole reputation of hospice care that lets people die with dignity goes out the window,” said Luis Gonsalez, director of planning, training, and research at CT Hospice in the John D. Thompson Hospice Institute.

Ronny Knight, the senior vice president of CT Hospice, has statistics that perhaps give credence to Mr. Gonsalez’s assertion. According to a 2007 study by the Hospice Association of America, the average nurse to patient ratio for an inpatient unit was one RN to 8.6 patients, the ratio at a hospice residence was one nurse to twenty-seven patients, and the ratio at CT Hospice is one nurse to six patients, he testified at an April 4 Department of Public Health hearing about the proposed regulations.

In other words, at CT Hospice, nurses are responsible for far fewer patients than nurses at other facilities.

“There’s nothing in these regulations to prevent this minimal standard of care other than a discretionary directive to provide sufficient staffing. This latitude will assure more profit, less staffing and less care as a likely outcome,” he continued.

More simply, some fear that fewer nurses mean fewer chances for patients to feel clean and cared for.

Shatreen Masshoor ’12 has had experience with facilities that don’t have adequate staffing. She hopes to someday become a doctor, and she took time

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off from school to become a Certified Nurse Assistant and work at a skilled nursing facility in Washington state for a little over a year. Now, she volunteers at CT Hospice for three hours once a week during the school year, and she can see the difference in care provided at the two facilities. She remembers coming in to the skilled nursing facility one day and finding a patient who hadn’t been checked on all night. The patient had multiple bowel movements and a wet bed, something she has yet to see at CT Hospice. And while patients at the skilled nursing facility in Washington state were only washed a couple times a week, at CT Hospice everyone gets at least a bed bath every day, she added.

“It seems like they’re pretty on point about it,” Masshoor said.

of the proposed changes, Wodatch said.

The new regulations are more patientbased, focusing on quality outcomes rather than specific guidelines, she said.

Although hospices would no longer need to meet certain nurse to patient ratios, they still would need to meet quality outcome assessments and standards, she said.

“1977 to now is light years away,” said Carol Mahier, executive director of Hospice Southeastern Connecticut, which last year serviced 629 patients in New London county and is planning to open a new facility under the proposed regulations.

In addition, according to the latest data from the National Hospice Palliative Care Organization, nearly one

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he proposed changes in the state regulations were prompted by changes to federal standards, Wodatch said. All hospices must comply not only with state standards but also with federal ones, specifically the Medicare Conditions of Participation, which were updated in 2008. They must also comply with Connecticut Home Health Care Regulations.

The Department of Public Health is currently in the process of reviewing the proposed changes, spokesman for the department William Gerrish said.

Twenty-eight hospices in Connecticut support them, and CT Hospice opposes them. The hearing April 4 was held so that the Department of Public Health could hear testimony about the regulations, and over fifty individuals spoke.

After reviewing the testimony and making any changes it sees as necessary, the DPH will send the regulations to the attorney general’s office, Gerrish said.

From there, the regulations will go to the regulations review committee for final approval. The regulations will be implemented upon the approval of the committee, he said.

Modernization, streamlining care, creating a more home-like environment, and improving access are the main goals

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in five hospice agencies in the country operate an inpatient unit or facility.

Those numbers mean that out of the county’s five thousand hospice facilities, one thousand have an inpatient unit, Wodatch said at the April 4 hearing.

Only one of those is in Connecticut, she added. That facility is CT Hospice, and proponents of the regulations say that it alone is not enough, even when the two other facilities in Middlesex and in Stamford that have inpatient units but are not licensed as hospices are taken into account. Wodatch pointed out during the April 4 hearing that while the average national time for a patient to spend in hospice is seventy-one days, Connecticut ranks last in the country,

with an average stay of only forty-eight days.

Moreover, the need for hospice care continues to rise. Demand for hospice care is growing at a rate of nine percent per year, Hoyt wrote in a letter to the editor published in the New Haven Register.

“Patients can be placed in a hospital, but that is not where somebody usually wants to die,” Mahier said, adding that a nursing home is also not really a place a 40-year-old who is dying would want to be either. “A residence is what’s needed,” she said.

If the new regulations were to pass, the Rosenthal Center would apply immediately for a new license as a hospice, and Hospice of Southeastern Connecticut and Regional Hospice of Western Connecticut are among the facilities that would attempt to put a freestanding facility up, Wodatch said. The new facilities would mean that patients in counties such as New London wouldn’t have to drive hours to visit loved ones at CT Hospice.

Opponents of the regulations, however, argue that the claim for the need for access is unwarranted. Hospice facilities can offer patients rooms in both hospitals and nursing homes— indeed, CT Hospice has two to three beds in many hospitals on reserve—and so any patient who needs inpatient care can find it relatively easily, Gonsalez said.

In fact, Bradley says there isn’t really an access problem at all. Bradley has done research on hospice care for over a decade, looking at what makes people choose hospice, why hospices are underutilized, and the effectiveness of hospice programs across the country.

Her research has shown that ninety percent of all patients in Connecticut are within thirty minutes of access to a hospice. “For me, I don’t really see the positive of making the legislation looser,” she said.

In fact, her research indicates that Connecticut is one of the four best states in the country for hospice care. Connecticut exceeds the federal Medicare standard, she said. “It’s really

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a flagship.”

In addition, staff members at CT Hospice argue that no one is stopping the other hospices from opening facilities under the old regulations if they feel they’re necessary, regardless of what may be written on websites or published in letters to the editor in newspapers such as the New Haven Register.

“There has been misleading media insinuating that Connecticut Hospice has had a monopoly on inpatient hospice care and that in some way we have restricted access to patients and families in Connecticut. Let us all be honest in this room. Every hospice in Connecticut must provide inpatient level care in order to have their hospice license. There is access. Similar to Connecticut Hospice, no one has kept you from becoming licensed under [the current regulations],” said Susan Flannigan, director of hospice at CT Hospice, at the April hearing. “No one has denied the patients and families access to this level of care except your organization.”

For Dr. Wolfson, this particular part of the debate is in many ways not relevant. CT Hospice is about a twentyto thirty-minute drive from his home.

Still, he considers quality of care to be worth more than any commute.

“I would’ve gone three hours if it had been necessary,” he said. iana Stoianov ’13, one of the more than five hundred volunteers at CT Hospice, began her weekly shift as a volunteer by stopping in to check on a group of patients. At CT Hospice, four patients usually live together in one room, though any patient with an infectious disease is transferred to a private room to avoid contamination.

Three of the four patients in the room she was checking in on were sleeping.

She could hear them breathing with a death rattle—a gurgling, choking sound dying patients often make as saliva begins to accumulate in their throats— but that wasn’t what surprised her. After almost two years of volunteer work she was quite accustomed to that sound.

What surprised her was the fourth

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The wooded entrance to CT Hospice. patient in the last bed on the right, who was sitting in a chair watching the news on TV not in the hospice gown but instead in ordinary clothes. Stoianov was not used to seeing patients who were well enough to get out of bed— usually if someone gets up on their own,

she feels an almost automatic sense of alarm.

The patient was a middle-aged man, and she sat down to talk with him. She didn’t know what was wrong with him— volunteers never are told why patients are dying, just that they are—but they

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connected over a discussion of how ludicrous the news sometimes becomes.

At the time of her visit, the revolution was taking place in Egypt, but the news station was broadcasting another piece about celebrities. They chatted for a while, something she said nurses would love to do with patients but never really have time for. And then it hit her.

The patient seemed to her like a “normal person,” and she was in a place filled with people who were more obviously dying. Across the room were patients struggling just to fill their lungs with oxygen, and she suddenly felt the need to be elsewhere, to be doing something other than sitting and talking with a man who seemed just fine. She turned to the patient, told him it was nice to meet him, and got up to leave.

“It was nice meeting you too,” he told her. “Stop by whenever you have time.”

As Stoianov walked out of the room, she looked back once more and saw the man, sitting in a room filled with people so sick they couldn’t interact with him at all, and she felt a new wave of emotion wash over her. She imagined how lonely and scared he must have been feeling at that moment, and though she continued with the rest of her volunteer duties—washing other patients, stopping to peek in other rooms, carrying out the trash—she couldn’t stop feeling guilty for leaving him behind.

The debate about the new proposed hospice regulations is really out of Stoianov’s realm—volunteering at hospice has been one of the formative experiences of her time at Yale, but when she graduates she does not plan to seek out hospice work. Volunteering at CT Hospice has been a singular moment in her life, Stoianov said, and she wants to do as much as she can in her four years of college before moving on to the next chapter. Part of her doubt about continuing to volunteer at a hospice hinges on the fact that she probably won’t stay in Connecticut after graduating, and she can’t really imagine volunteering somewhere other than CT Hospice.

When Stoianov went back to CT

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Hospice to volunteer again, as coverage of Libya competed with news of the royal wedding, she stopped in on the patient she had once watched TV with.

He was in bed, in the hospice gown, sleeping, and she didn’t disturb him.

She could hear them breathing with a death rattle—a gurgling, choking sound dying patients often make—but that wasn’t what surprised her.

After almost two years of volunteer work she was quite accustomed to that sound.

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any of the arguments against the proposed regulations are emotional ones, Mahier said. People get so caught up, so worried, they don’t think about the facts, she added.

“Everything that’s being said about how these regulations will lessen care, these are all not true. When we meet those negative statements, and when you look at the [Department of Public Health] who wrote them, and the twenty-eight hospices who support them, it is surprising,” Mahier said. “I guess it’s about not having competition.

I don’t know what it is.”

The statements about the lowered quality of care are ones she classifies as troubling. “I’ve done this for twentyfour years. Why would I ever want to do anything less than the best for someone who’s dying?” she said.

Gerard Lamoureux, a certified nurse aide at Regional Hospice, also thinks that concerns about lower standards are unfounded. “People keep talking about substandard care and lower levels of care and all that kind of stuff, and I don’t think Hospice-R-Us are going to start popping up on every corner with this regulation,” he testified at the hearing.

Still, even the most staunch supporters of the proposed regulations are the first to say that CT Hospice is a special place. The facility is, at first glance, undeniably beautiful. It is situated right near the Long Island Sound, and each patient bedroom has a massive glass window that looks out onto the water. There are multiple pianos, and music can often be heard floating down the hallways.

Through a wooden door carved with a tree—the Tree of Life—and down the hallway is a small chapel.

Inside it is a wooden cross, fresh flowers, and pale light brown chairs on which to sit and pray. A large wooden table in the center contains a book filled with long strips of paper honoring patients who have passed away, with their names and words like “Rest in peace” and “We miss you” scrawled in cramped, loving letters.

There is a swimming pool for kids to use in the summertime. Each day, the carpeting of the elevator is changed to display what day of the week it is in bright orange letters.

The words “I love you” are painted onto one white wall of the cafeteria in a myriad of bright colors, over and over again in many different languages.

On another wall, in bold blue letters, is written, “Love matters. Hospice nurses are #1.”

Each patient is given a brightly covered afghan, made by CT Hospice employees, upon arrival, Gonsalez said.

The afghans can be seen everywhere,

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draped across the low sofas that line the hallways, positioned at the end of a patient’s bed, or nestled around a frail pair of shoulders, a brilliant splash of color against pale, translucent skin.

But it’s not just the facilities themselves that set CT Hospice apart; it’s also the services they offer, the care they give to each and every patient.

“CT Hospice has found a way to institutionalize love,” Dr. Wolfson said.

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few hours after her arrival at CT Hospice, Mrs. Wolfson and her husband attended a concert, hands clasped together. That concert was the first of many Mrs. Wolfson attended.

Though her broken arm limited her, she participated in other arts programming that CT Hospice offered as well. Her own rabbi came to visit her often, but she still also participated in the spiritual counseling provided by CT Hospice, lighting Shabbat candles one Friday evening with an evangelical minister after he offered to pray with her.

Arts programming and spiritual counseling will not be as strictly mandated under the proposed regulations. Currently, arts programming at CT Hospice is taken very seriously.

There is a full time director, seven paid staff, including clinical therapists, and forty volunteers, and services are offered every day of the year.

“More and more healthcare organizations across the country are introducing art and music therapies as their advantages become more widely known. In contrast, the proposed regulations make arts therapies an afterthought barely mentioned as a remote option under complimentary therapies,” testified CT Hospice arts programming director Katherine Blossom at the hearing.

Mahier said that though arts programming may not be written into the regulations, it is still an important part of Hospice Southeastern Connecticut.

“We’ve had an arts room where little kids come to work through grief since 2003,” she said. “It’s integral to what we do.”

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But others worry that not every hospice will follow through without a regulatory mandate.

“My experience with regulation— I’ve done other studies as well—is actually if you leave it loose, there will be some providers will go for the low road on that. If you leave it loose, if you say, ‘Oh it’s up to you if [your] patients want arts,’ there will be lot of hospices that don’t do it,” Bradley said.

Physical therapy isn’t mentioned much in the new regulations either, but it too was of great importance to Mrs. Wolfson. Initially, she could barely get out of bed, but after a week or two, she was able to take her first steps again.

Soon, she could walk ten or fifteen feet, with her husband trailing behind her with a chair so she could sit down when she got tired.

“For someone who is clearly dying, this is something that is not necessary, but she felt so good about being up,” Dr. Wolfson said, highlighting what Bradley sees as one of the biggest misconceptions about hospice care.

“A lot of people in the public think hospice is the place you go to die,” Bradley said. “I think it’s much more true that it’s a place to live for the days you have left.”

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rs. Wolfson was in intense pain when she arrived at CT Hospice.

But within a half-hour of transfer, she was very nearly pain free. She was well enough to host three parties, one of which featured a performance of “You Are My Sunshine” by the nurses aides who gave her baths, and she was well enough to spend time with the hundreds of friends who came to visit over the course of her five week stay.

Mrs. Wolfson was given relief so quickly because at CT Hospice, a history is taken and physical completed by a physician within twenty minutes for every single one of the three to four patients that are admitted each day. The new regulations state that the initial assessment of a patient should be done within forty-eight hours.

“I can’t tell you how critical this is,”

Bradley said. “Ten to fifteen percent of patients will be dead in forty-eight hours.

[The initial assessment] should be done immediately. Forty-eight hours of pain when you have terminal cancer? That’s out of control. That’s inhumane.”

When asked, Mahier was quick to point out that the regulations don’t mean patients who need to be seen immediately won’t get seen. “It’s standard wording,” she said. If every patient had to wait forty-eight hours, then the quality outcomes of the hospice facility would be poor, and the new regulations would mean that facility would have to make changes.

Wodatch added that the facility has forty-eight hours unless a patient, representative, or physician requests an expedited time frame, and said that immediate needs would also mean an immediate assessment under the Medicare Conditions of Participation, which all hospice facilities across the states are required to follow. On the other hand, if a patient is not in great need, such as a patient living at home who would like some hospice assistance, an immediate assessment would not be necessary, she said.

Another component of hospice care that was extremely important to Mrs. Wolfson’s well-being in her final weeks was the availability of an onsite pharmacy so that medications could be quickly and adequately administered, Dr. Wolfson said.

Proponents say that just because there isn’t a pharmacy onsite doesn’t mean hospice patients won’t have access to medication right away.

Robert Tendler, a consultant pharmacist employed by Omnicare Company, the nation’s largest provider of prescription medications to patients in long-term care settings, said he has attended 1,200 inter-disciplinary hospice team meetings, and simply doesn’t see the need for an onsite pharmacy. “I believe it would force the cost of maintaining inpatient services to skyrocket without a realistic benefit to the patient,” he testified at the April hearing.

Mahier doesn’t think they’re

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The gate to CT Hospice bears an image of the Tree of Life. necessary either. Hospice facilities are dealing with a finite group of symptoms, she said. “This is what we do every day.”

“How many nursing homes do you know that have a pharmacy?” she added.

But James Proto, the head of the pharmacy at CT Hospice, said at the hearing that he can’t imagine care without one. He said he is an active member of the interdisciplinary team, doing rounds daily with nurses, something he wouldn’t be able to do if he weren’t onsite.

And Joseph Farricielli, who was involved in the passage of the original regulations and says he himself is quite familiar with how regulations get written, asked those at the hearing to consider that changes made today “under the best of intentions” to improve access may destroy the “high goals that were set in motion thiry-two years ago.”

“There’s an analogy about regulations. Once you take away something or you reduce it sometimes it’s hard to bring it back.” he said. “It’s like a chair that has a short leg. You can’t

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add to it, you have to cut the other legs.

And so as we start to eliminate or hack away at the regulations we may generally reduce the level of care.”

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rs. Wolfson’s last bath took place at 2 a.m. the night before she died.

After five weeks of controlled pain, her symptoms had begun to return, and CT Hospice upped the level of her narcotics. For the last two days of her life, she slept.

“I think in almost any facility other than CT Hospice they would have done that to her at the beginning and we would’ve all missed the opportunity to say goodbye,” Dr. Wolfson said.

But instead, after five weeks with her, Mr. Wolfson and his two children— both in their forties, one living in California and working as a Hollywood producer and one finishing her doctorate in theater studies—took turns spending the night with her those last few days.

And then one night in June of 2005, as the nurses’ aides made their

usual late night rounds, they asked Dr. Wolfson if he thought Mrs. Wolfson would like a sponge bath. He said yes, and at their encouragement he helped them bathe her. During that bath, the nurses saw signs that the end was near, and they gently informed Dr. Wolfson.

He called his children and they came to CT Hospice to be with her.

That morning, as the sun slowly rose in the sky, orange and welcoming, and broke out across the water of the sound, turning it sparkling and new, the 67-year-old Mrs. Wolfson quietly passed away.

On a morning last April, approximately six years later, Dr. Wolfson rose to speak against the proposed regulations to hospice care at the public hearing. “I urge you not to do this,” he testified.

TNJ

Katie Falloon is a senior in Davenport College.

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PERSONAL ESSAY

Rese

Ali Abarca

arch

Hallucinating terrifying new worlds in a schizophrenia lab.

By Jesse Bradford

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ights pulse in my peripheral vision. My eyes invent blobby white images, reluctant to give in to the darkness. No sound. Cold skin.

Suddenly a wave of sensation, a slow prickling sweat that creeps through my torso, my face, my scalp. Then the nausea hits. I feel I’m going to retch, but at the same time I don’t know what part of my body I’d retch with. My only awareness is discomfort. As the sensation slowly disappears, so do I. I experience death in a small, gray cubicle on the ninth floor of Veterans Hospital in West Haven, Conn. Nurses watch me through a video monitor; they shuffle papers and take notes. A blood pressure cuff squeezes my right arm and a pulse oximeter hangs from my left index finger. One of my IVs draws blood samples while the other drips saline solution and drugs into my veins. I 32

see dull fluorescence when the blindfold is removed. I hear beeping machines when my earplugs are removed.

I still feel like I can’t quite…I don’t know how to look at…

Yeah, I can stand I think but I’d rather…sure, yeah I can answer the questions…

The researcher is cute. She recites without looking at her clipboard.

“Did you have any strange or unusual experiences?”

“Um, at one point I thought I was dead.”

“Did that worry you at all?” Her expression is a mix of surprise and concern.

“No, not really. The worst part was that I started singing a little song to myself, and then I thought, ‘Oh no, I’m dead but I can still think! I’m going to be stuck repeating this stupid song over and

over forever!’ That worried me a little.”

She makes a note.

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am a human guinea pig for a schizophrenia research lab. In the last year I’ve been injected more than twenty times with different experimental substances: Salvinorin, THC, Canabidiol, Amphetamines, Iomazenil.

Different doses, different combinations.

I got into drug studies by a friend’s recommendation and an online search. I figured it was a quick way to make some money, and no scientific or humanitarian aims inspired my first trip.

My part of the job is simple. Take drugs, sit there and ride out the effects, then describe how it felt. The researchers assign me cognitive tasks, like repeating long lists of numbers backwards or pressing colored blocks on a computer screen. Often I wear an EEG cap or a The New Journal

sensory deprivation mask. Always I get stuck with needles. Sometimes I lose my mind.

I’m not always sure whether these drugs might some day be used to treat schizophrenia, or whether they’re meant to induce short-term schizophrenia in a healthy subject who can wake up and tell the researchers what it was like.

It would be easy to say that I continued to do drug studies for the money. I can make over forty dollars an hour to trip. But even the nurses who’ve been working in the lab for years tell me that my desire to come back is prodigious. The drugs aren’t fun, and as I learned more about the debilitating and mysterious nature of the disease, the possibility of being permanently affected by these experiments worried me. A little.

Besides the fact that I like the nurses, the bus ride to the hospital, and the free physicals, I do it for a voice that I miss.

I used to hear it in my head when I was a child; it had a kind of intonation I’ve never heard in real life—a combination of gravel and black tar—a bottomless dark voice that emanated from behind my neck, that wrapped around my skull.

I could understand what he was saying as he spoke, but as soon as he stopped I lost the message, like a dream that instantly fades.

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y nerves light up in an instant, then I savor the slow decline of adrenaline, feel it dripping away throughout my system. “Does that feel O.K.?” the nurse asks me. Sometimes it does, but my veins are tricky. Often the IV doesn’t stick, and I can feel the pressure from the saline solution building up in my arm, filling cavities and tissues where it doesn’t belong. Finally we get the IVs to work, tapping veins on the backs of my hands.

Sensory deprivation again, and this time I watch as the two-dimensional darkness in front of my eyes shifts, gains a third dimension. A silver city appears like fog rolling in. It stretches out in a grid of clear porcelain and stainless steel, and suddenly I’m not alone. I feel

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my companion like I used to feel ghosts as a child, the ones that made me open doors all the way to make sure nothing was behind them, the ones that made me back up into walls just to be sure nothing was following me. But this companion is friendly. We move through the city, punching from point to point on a stiff grid, forward one block, left, forward, forward. We are both in control, we don’t use words.

Finally we escape the reflective canyons and empty streets. We summit a hill. But the world is disintegrating already, burning off into blackness. I feel a touch on my arm, a real touch. It’s time to come back.

I

’ve been fascinated by schizophrenia since I was a kid, listening to an NPR program in the car with my parents. I remember Scott Carrier’s melancholy narration: “A person’s soul should be like an ocean, but a schizophrenic’s soul is like a pool of rain in a parking lot.” He spoke about voices, people believing they are the devil, that all the evil in the world is their fault. Sisters and sons suddenly aren’t themselves, mothers have sex with angels. I haven’t gotten over the sense of wonder I felt, that people could have an idea of reality incongruous with everything around them. And the fear that our minds can turn against us so savagely.

After that I used to wait for insanity, sure it would hit any day. In a strange sadistic way I wanted it to happen. I wished I could sometimes say, “I can’t help it.” I watched kids in middle school who rode skateboards, spray-painted the walls, jumped on people’s backs, screamed in the hallway. They wore spikes and weird clothes, they listened to music I couldn’t understand. Everything about them seemed to be organized by some strange logic that was singularly their own. I wanted a similar compulsion, an inner force that I didn’t understand and was powerless to change. Being a sane, detached observer doesn’t really give you a flavor.

My mind has since hardened. I’ve lost the inner voice from my youth.

Sometimes I don’t even hear the real voices around me. I’ve had friends sobbing in my arms while I counted ceiling tiles. I got a tattoo on my ribs and barely felt it. The world just doesn’t get to me, so I found a way to inject a different one. When I’m there I build cities, I meet people, I am a machine, I am part of it all. I don’t enjoy myself in the schizophrenic state, but I need the time I spend there. I try to find books to better understand what I’m experiencing, but I’m no scientist, so I end up mythologizing it even further, reading the theories of Julian Jaynes, the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and the memoirs of Judge Schreber.

But as with all forms of tourism, what I experience is far from the truth of the condition.

I

finish another of the endless questionnaires and sit in the hospital bed listening to the man in the next cubicle. He sounds middle-aged. As he responds to the same questions I’ve just answered, I realize he must be schizophrenic. I trace the contours of his mind with every detail he gives that seems strange. His answers droop with exhaustion and seethe with characters he can’t escape. I can understand him only when he gets emotional and raises his voice. “…Nothing works for me…bad man in Hamden…I feel worthless…

My brother made it and I didn’t!” He mentions the multitude of voices he hears every day. He talks about them like they exist. He says they hate him.

At the end of the day the man is asked to rate his day on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst day of his life. He gives it a seven. I munch my sandwich and ask the nurse if I can sign up for another study.

TNJ

Jesse Bradford is a 2011 alumnus of Timothy Dwight College.

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SNAPSHOT

Horse Sense

A turn on the newly restored carousel at Lighthouse Park.

Photography: New Haven Department of Parks, Recreation and Trees

By Cindy Ok

Feel free to look any of these sixtyeight horses in the mouth. Each horse is treated, sometimes daily if weather and use warrant it, by careful hands reaching a special solution into the crevices of the body. The horsetails are washed, treated, wiped, and dried individually twice a year, at the beginning and end of riding season.

The carousel currently at Lighthouse Point Park was built in 1912 and installed in 1916 in the white-walled Victorianstyle pavilion behind the historical lighthouse on the beach. The New Haven Department of Parks, Recreation and Trees has operated the carousel

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since 1924 and evacuated the horses due to weather for the first time this August.

As Hurricane Irene approached, the parks department had special movers dismantle the carousel and place the pieces into trucks to move them offsite.

The horses were transported back a few days later.

The city had moved the herd before, in the late seventies, when it could not afford the carousel’s operation.

Unlike other municipalities affected by the depression, New Haven kept the horses in storage. The mayor formed a group in 1980 called the Friends of the Carousel that systematically raised

money to resurrect, repaint, and refresh the carousel. The group succeeded, and the carousel reopened in 1983.

The sixty-eight horsetails are real horsetails, the horses hand-painted tin, and the gold paint 24-carat gold leaf.

Four years ago, the set of horses was quartered and taken out in sections to be refurbished and repainted. The last quarter was finished and placed this April, completing the renovation at thirty-two hundred dollars a horse. The running price for a ride is fifty cents.

In the 1920s, that golden age of radio, sports, and carousels, there were ten thousand carousels around the

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country like the one in this pavilion on the southeast side of New Haven.

Carousels once were driven by steam.

Today, there are fewer than 150 running and open to the public.

The nearest carousel to New Haven’s used to be the one at West Haven’s Savin Rock Park, but that carousel’s pieces were sold in 1971 to Magic Mountain, the Six Flags amusement park in Valencia, California. Savin Rock Park once had seven carousels and was considered the Disneyland of its day from the 1890s until the Great Depression. Upon paying three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the set of forty-seven horses, plus one thousand dollars for shipping, the California amusement park immediately cast fiberglass duplicates of the horses and sold off the originals at prices rumored to be extravagant.

Event and Project Coordinator for the Department of Parks Sabrina Bruno estimates that New Haven’s carousel is worth up to three million dollars postrenovation, or roughly forty thousand a horse. (Even an outstanding Arabian racehorse costs ten to twenty thousand dollars.)

Some New Haven residents remember a relatively recent age of chipped paint and sad-looking horses.

All are invited to the one hundred year anniversary celebration next spring to see the horses show off their new coats.

The anniversary was technically this year, but additional fundraising will necessarily precede the festivities, set tentatively for the first weekend in May. The parks department’s operation is seasonal, running March to October, with about eighty events each year. The aim is to make the carousel and the lighthouse financially self-sufficient, but the bigger goal is to preserve love for these local spots. Some of the history of the carousel is lost already, frustrating carousel aficionados turned scholars like Peter Malia, originally of West Haven, where Lighthouse Point’s horses were hand-carved by two master carvers he considers the Michaelangelos of carousel horse carving.

“People consider them folk art,

September 2011

but you have to go see these horses to understand that these aren’t just folk art. They’re highly sophisticated wooden sculptures, not ones you’d find at a country fair,” said Malia, author of Flying Horses: The Golden Age of American Carousel Art, 1870-1930.

Malia’s is the first fully documented history of carousels in America.

He published the book last year in conjunction with the New England Carousel Museum in Bristol, Conn.

New Haven’s herd is considered one of the best and most beautiful carousels anywhere, Malia said.

The main draw for park visitors, however, is not historical, though Bruno assures that there are and always will be a few carousel buffs. The free parking and use of the park for New Haven residents (and twenty-dollar flat rate per day for other Connecticut residents) bring families, some of whom come weekly in the summer as they try to escape the heat. The carousel runs at ten miles an hour, slightly higher than average carousel speeds, Malia said. Regulations tend to limit speeds at six to twelve miles an hour.

Annette Lilly has lived in New Haven her whole life and visits the 2,200acre park every weekend, sometimes twice a weekend.

“We live in New Haven. Nothing else to do but come here,” she said. She visits with her husband, sometimes her children and her granddaughter. Her daughter-in-law had her baby shower in the park, by the beach. Lilly’s connection to the place stems from ennui for everything else New Haven more than interest in this particular landmark.

“I used to love New Haven,” she said listlessly. “It’s been so many years.”

Out-of-state visitors pay thirty dollars per car for the park’s proximity to the Long Island Sound and the harbor lighthouse (also called Five Mile Point Light for its five-mile distance from the New Haven Green). One family reunion this summer involved almost one hundred family members spread over five generations for a cookout. Elaine Jones and her family drove more than

seven hundred miles from Charlotte, North Carolina, and were glad they did.

“It’s a family-oriented park and it has the water, it has the carousel— everything you might be looking for when you got a lot of little children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren,” Jones said.

She sent off these young family members with a fifty-cent fare and watched them shout ‘Hi, Mama! Hi, Nana! Hi!’ and wave hysterically each time they came around to the front, where she stood and waved and made faces back. As the children got off the carousel, they ran toward her, asking, “Remember when I said ‘Hi’ to you?

Remember? Do you?” and then ran past her.

Carazmia Buonome-Scott, age 4, finds herself absorbed from time to time in the carousel’s spin. She takes a bus with her grandmother and her sister and then leaves them behind to mount a favorite horse she has knighted Bluesy.

“Well, I named him that!” she declares. Bluesy is white and gold, with pink and green trim. Carazmia rides him every Saturday and plays on the playground, a recent addition to the park.

New projects like these are funded in part by events at the park.

A wedding between two Yale history PhD candidates included a history of Lighthouse Point Park handwritten in segments on the back of old postcards with pictures of the park starting in the 1900s, which the couple had collected over many months at old bookstores.

Events in the glassed pavilion often have such themes or motifs.

“We’re fortunate in that people who are looking for a unique venue are also unique themselves,” Bruno said.

“The brides we get may have the same nervousness as other brides, but they have new thoughts, and totally different ideas for their weddings.”

The white pavilion includes a dance floor, a ceiling with delicate paper balls dangling casually across, and round white wooden tables and chairs. And, of course, the carousel.

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Photography: New Haven Department of Parks, Recreation and Trees

Horses on the carousel.

“People come from all over asking us, ‘Do we actually get to ride that? Is that actually going to run for us?’”

Bruno said. “What happens is that they sometimes rent it because they have a lot of children in the wedding party or because they decided to have children at their weddings, and it’s not the children that ride, it’s the adults. Everyone has so much fun.”

The money not allocated for staff salaries goes into a special enterprise fund that supports the constant upkeep of the sixty-eight horses. The park also makes money on an outdoor adventure program, offering activities including canoeing, kayaking, mountain biking, and a ropes course, at subsidized costs, usually about half the costs of private, for-profit programs. The park runs camps for kids all summer in conjunction with this program.

The semi-commercial model is

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unusual and complicated, but it protects the department from budget cuts, which the parks department suffers before most other public departments.

“It’s a labor of love,” Bruno said.

“And it’s all dedication by the people of the city of New Haven, particularly under the stewardship of this parks department.”

And though the carousel’s future may lie in the waving hands of younger generation, its maintenance falls to these staff. “The carousel is really something to be cherished and loved and of course the more children we expose to it, the greater chances that they’ll care the way we have, as we move on and they move up,” Bruno said.

Staff members become easily attached to the park system and to Lighthouse Point Park.

“It’s just a gem, in my own way of looking at it,” said parks staff member

Dean Graham.

The eighty events a year occupy the staff, who wear neon yellow shirts marking them as parks department employees during the day, but white dress shirts and black pants at night, when their pay comes from the enterprise fund.

“There’s always something to do, there’s always something going on around here with all these busy weekends and holidays and family reunions,” Graham said. “We clean up, set up, clean up, set up, clean up again, ‘round and ‘round and ‘round.”

TNJ

Cindy Ok is a sophomore in Pierson College.

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CRITICAL ANGLE

Ten Years A young woman of Indian heritage remembers September 11, 2001.

By Sanjena Sathian

I

knew something was wrong with the way the kids in my carpool looked at the turbaned man behind the counter of the gas station in Atlanta, Ga., my hometown. I also knew he was Sikh and Punjabi—from India, like my parents—by the long, uncut beard and turban he wore and the lively bhangra dance music playing behind the counter.

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He was Sikh, like Balbir Singh Sodhi, who owned a gas station in Mesa, Ariz., and who was shot to death on Sept. 15, 2001. Like Surinder Singh and Gurmej Atwal, two elderly men shot and killed on their evening stroll in Elk Grove, Calif. in March 2011.

I remember smiling at the man behind the counter of the gas station one afternoon in the middle of September 2001. It was a secret smile I shared sometimes with strangers, like the substitute teacher whose shiny black hair and British accent caught the attention of the whole middle school. The smile whispered of wrinkled sari-clad grandmothers and samosas for lunch on Saturday afternoons after long drives to temple.

My carpool companions looked at him flatly. They stared at his turban.

I heard one of them say the date that had been hanging in our minds for a few days, since the morning when a nurse at the orthodontist’s office stopped time for a moment—her hands still groping around my gums—at 8:51 a.m. to tell me what had just happened.

I accepted the extra piece of chocolate he slid me. I imagined a young cousin or grown-up daughter whose smile he remembered in mine.

My classmates bought their gum and smacked it in the green SUV as we headed back to our brick and stucco street and traded 10-year-old knowledge of our time.

“An Arab,” said one. “Like the plane crashers. They wear those turbans.”

I thought of correcting him. But then he turned to me and whispered, like he was promising he wouldn’t tell anyone if I said yes—“Isn’t that where your parents lived? Over there?”

My parents had lived “over there”— someplace, anyway, though not exactly

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My carpool companions looked at him flatly. They stared at his turban. I heard one of them say the date that had been hanging in our minds for a few days, since the morning when a nurse at the orthodontist’s office stopped time for a moment— her hands still groping around my gums—at 8:51 a.m. to tell me what had just happened.

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where this boy thought they lived. My family is Hindu, and the man at the gas station was Sikh. My parents came to America in 1987. I have been leaving America ever since: sometimes to visit family in India, and sometimes to other places.

Nearly ten years later, in the summer of 2011, I found myself again paused in transit, this time at an airport in Frankfurt. I felt a familiar stare from the woman sitting to my left.

The blonde woman was an American, with a German husband.

Her light eyes were roving, taking in the scarf I’d pulled around my hair to help it survive thirty hours in transit.

They saw the New Balance sneakers, the iPod headphones, the small notebook in my hand, filled with looping, foreign script—a weak attempt at practicing writing in Hindi.

A dark woman sat on my other side.

Her sari was pulled tight around her shoulders and she wore a dark silk scarf pulled neatly into a hijab over her hair.

Both women’s eyes missed the blue passport in my lap.

The blonde one spoke in English to her husband: “They’re even trying to dress like us now.” A sniff. Her husband looked up, scanned me, and nodded.

They both came from countries with too many immigrants. They both curved the corners of their mouth in disdain. Her boots were leather—Italian—and her

scarf, I was sure, had a tag declaring it made in Bangladesh or Nepal. She wore the world. But I had the distinct feeling I didn’t belong in hers.

The dark one spoke in Urdu to her children: “Go ask the auntie if she wants a sweet.” Her hijabed teenage daughter and bare-headed little boy offered me a quiet salaam and handed me a strange lumpy orange object. I met her eyes and smiled. She nodded at the strange lost daughter that she saw, thinking me Muslim like her, thinking me alone.

The blonde one’s voice was loud, despite her attempt to whisper to her husband. “Ten years and I still hate flying when I see them.” She was looking at a man walking towards our bench. He was turbaned, like the Sikh uncle who slipped me an extra chocolate once ten years ago. He held his young son’s hand, adjusted his long white kurta shirt.

“He’s not an Arab,” said her husband.

“How would I know?” she whispered loudly.

She did not need to whisper.

TNJ

Sanjena Sathian is a junior in Morse College.

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Ali Abarca

ENDNOTE

Inventory

By Laura Blake

A

friend once told me that she found there to be something “very restful” about a freezer full of meat. Though I am more or less vegetarian, I see what she means. There is comfort in knowing that, come exams, crummy boyfriends, lectures on parasitic arthropods, or Hurricane Irene, my roommates and I still have ample, if not healthful, provisions. If meat is restful, are other foods festive? I’ve been feeling a little down lately, so I thought it might cheer me up to make a list of everything in my refrigerator.

Though we have little in the way of bread, there’s a veritable city of condiments racked on the door: ketchup, Sriracha, salsa and peach jam, apple butter, pumpkin butter, cashew butter, butter. Two packets of soy sauce, four of duck sauce and an equal number of active dry yeast litter the butter dish.

There’s tomato paste and curry paste, a jar of whole grain mustard for when we feel fancy and a bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup for when we don’t.

The vegetable drawer, though more suburban than the condiment rack, hosts

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a stable population of carrots, apples, half a green pepper, broccoli, Swiss chard, thyme, half an onion, one yellow squash, hot peppers, three lemons and a zested lime.

Should we be thirsty, we’re in luck.

Four liters of Canada Dry ginger ale await the Wild Turkey in the freezer (and the following day’s upset stomach).

There’s lemon juice, lime juice, a gulp of Orangina, a sip of Coca Cola and a forty. For the Anglophile, there’s a juice box of Ribena, the famed black currant drink enjoyed hot or cold by generations of British schoolchildren. (Don’t be fooled by its claim to contain four times the vitamin C of oranges, however. Two New Zealand high school students who tested the nutrient levels of the beverage in 2004 found it to harbor a scant 22 mg per 100 ml of the good stuff.)

For those who prefer a Continental flavor, there’s half a jug of Carlo Rossi Sangria for the taking. Be warned, though—that second jug is full of coffee that merely tastes and smells like Carlo Rossi Sangria.

For those who don’t take their

coffee black, there’s a half gallon of Organic Valley two-percent milk as well as an inch or two of whole milk purchased from the Howe Convenience Store one stumbling morning when I discovered that there was nothing to put in my coffee besides my vegan roommate’s soymilk. There is very old cream cheese and very old vegan cream cheese, plain yogurt and plain soy yogurt. We have Asiago cheese for pasta, two varieties of cheddar for sandwiches, and Ski Queen Gjetost cheese, originally for my housemate Rachel’s Norwegian boyfriend and now for mousetraps.

Sometimes I look into my refrigerator and realize it is packed full of absolutely nothing to eat.

Today, however, there is hummus and applesauce, leftover sweet potatoes, a bag of tortillas, a bar of chocolate with the corners nibbled off and, of course, baking soda—for freshness.

TNJ

Laura Blake is a senior in Jonathan Edwards College.

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