South Orange

I've always known that the number "11" was my lucky number. In my early years I believed in horoscopes and read everything I could to discover what was in store for me according to the stars. I learned that as a Piscean I was given to mood swings - from the depths of the ocean to the bright light of the noon sun, as the fish swims just beneath the ocean's surface.

After my tumultuous early career years, when my body was in the U.S. but my soul was in the Philippines, I hit my stride only after I had moved to 11 Warren Court, South Orange, New Jersey and started working at 11 Kulick Road for a Japanese company in Fairfield, New Jersey.

My love affair with number 11 started in my 13th year as a student athlete in De La Salle College, a kindergarten to Masters private school in the Philippines run by the Christian Brothers. Having been told by syndicated astrologers that my lucky numbers were 1 and - less so - 2, there was no question that I would adopt number 11 as the number on my basketball uniform at La Salle. On opening day of the Archdiocesan Athletic League Midgets 1954 season, I exploded with 14 points out of my team's total 42 points. It was the highlight of my brief career as a basketball player.

I had dreamed of a career as a basketball star in the Philippines. I played basketball, breathed basketball, sunned my heavily pigmented skin shooting baskets all day in the hot equatorial sun. Basketball was my life.

My parents had other ideas. They took me to three different cardiologists because they wanted to hear from a doctor what they needed to hear: that I needed to stop playing basketball for health reasons. Long story.

I did not know it as deliverance at the time, but my tumultuous marriage fell into ruins while I lived at 11 Warren Court. It was bad for the kids - all divorces are bad for the kids - but for both my first wife and me it was an opportunity for a new beginning. Would I have gone through it all if I had known how it would affect the kids? Of course not. But, what's done was done and we all had an opportunity to move on. Compliments of 11 Warren Court.

The house was 40 years old and in bad shape inside when we bought it. It looked like a sparkling all-brick English tudor on the outside, but it was crumbling inside. I would spend tens of thousands renovating the interior over the years, when $1000 was still a lot of money. The moldy bathroom. The termite infestation. The worn and dirty carpets. The unfinished third-floor room. The unfinished half of the basement.

It felt like home. I had never felt more at home than after I had moved to 11 Warren Court. I remarked to my first wife that I suspected that I might have been reincarnated and that in an earlier life I had lived in that house at 11 Warren Court.

My former next-door neighbor, a guy named Bob Krueger, who had raised his kids at 9 Warren Court, wept when he saw his house a few years after he had sold it. It was the only house he had owned and in his sickly old age he was overcome with deep nostalgia as the memories rushed while he sat in his car watching the old house - the one and only house he had ever owned.

I was afraid something akin to that rush of emotion would await me upon seeing that old house in South Orange once again. It was my son's spring break from April 16 through April 24, and I took him back to South Orange, where he could reconnect with the friends with whom he first saw the world. I had a lot of loose official business to take care of and spring break 2011 was as good a time as any. It was after all my lucky year - the 11th year of the 21st century - so what could possibly go wrong?

Sure enough, the trip went smoothly as son Paul and I renewed our friendships with old friends and former neighbors. Paul and I stayed at the house of long-time neighbors Mike and Carolyn Banks, who had just remodeled their kitchen and bathrooms at a cost of $100,000-plus. I immediately called my wife to tell her how elegant and expensive the kitchen and bathrooms looked.

It didn't start auspiciously though since we went from the brightness and warmth of the Las Vegas sun and 90 degree weather to winter in New York and New Jersey. When our plane touched down in New York's JFK airport at 6:00 a.m. on the 16th of April, it was winter. What about spring? Wasn't it supposed to be spring? It was obvious from the start that the New York area was the land that Spring forgot. It was cold, dreary, foggy, damp, wet and soporific. And I had lived in this neck of the woods for thirty years?

From across the street, on the lawn of 8 Warren Court, our house in South Orange looked small and boxy. The couple who had bought the house cut down the front-lawn tree that had framed the house and made it look like a tudor on the English countryside. Now it sat there on a tiny lot squat and unpretentious, looking like a decorated box. This was not the house I remembered. I had romanticized this house over the past four years. This was the house that I had thought would bring me to tears when I cast my eyes on it one more time - perhaps for the last time before I moved on with finality?

No, this can't be that same house. This house was small, much smaller than I had
remembered. Now I fully understand why some friends who had seen our house years ago remarked that our house looked like a cute gingerbread house, where Hansel and Gretel might have lived.

Son Paul had the greatest week of his young life. He spent three days with Marshall, his Warren Court friend who is a few months older and with whom he had discovered the hypnotic spell of video and computer games. The two best friends forever never really lost touch because they kept communicating in cyberspace through XBox Live and web cams. Marshall is still a head taller than Paul, but since the two of them move like Thing One and Thing Two, nobody notices the height disparity.

The poignant scenes were reserved for the meeting between Paul and his best friend in school, Sean Taylor. Paul knocked on the front door of the Taylor residence even though the house looked like there was nobody home. I had remarked to Paul that the Taylors were probably not home because it was spring break. "Let's just knock," Paul said.

When Mrs. Taylor opened the door, she was smiling from ear to ear. I sat in the car and observed the scene at a comfortable distance, but it was obvious that she was so happy to see Paul. She called Sean Taylor down and Sean and brother Brian came rushing down the staircase. When Sean reached the fourth or fifth step, he stopped and clutched the bannister and eyed Paul. I had already entered the house and was standing in the anteroom. Paul stood at the bottom of the stairs while Sean had the look of a kid who did not know what was happening all around him. Paul had the same expression on his face he always has. He had the confident airs of someone who knew exactly what was happening because he had made it happen.

Kathleen (Mrs. Taylor) related to me that Sean had often wondered if he would ever see Paul again after we had moved to Las Vegas. Sometimes, Sean would ask his mother to drive through Warren Court just so Sean could see the house where Paul used to live. Paul and Sean were best friends at Marshall School from kindergarten to 2nd grade - both mildly ADHD and both having each other's back as they learned to form alliances on Marshall School's rough and tumble playground.

Paul wanted to see as many former classmates on this trip as we could find. Unfortunately, I had forgotten where his other friends lived. Except Zach Britton, who made a brief appearance at the Taylor residence after hearing that Paul was at the Taylors'.

South Orange in grown-up talk is a disaster. A lot of houses are on the market but are not selling. Everybody we saw on this trip told us how lucky we were that we had sold our house in August, 2007, just before the housing market crashed. Now, every third homeowner in town is trying to sell his house because of the insane property tax system. Property taxes have skyrocketed as the New Jersey state's finances have taken a turn towards possible bankruptcy. The state is no longer there to help the small towns and cities, so South Orange must raise funds by taxing its residents.

The brother of one of my friends in the old neighborhood now pays $33,000 a year in property taxes because his house has been appraised by the town at $1.5 million. Furious, he put his house on the market so he could, like me, become a property tax refugee. Nobody is buying. He is selling his house for $799,000 and still nobody is buying.

He went to the town assessor and argued his case for lower property taxes. He could not even sell his house for $799,000, so how could it possibly have an assessed value of $1.5 million? To no avail.

Some good things - enough to tickle - are happening in South Orange. The old supermarket building in town has been renovated, and new tenants - an upscale supermarket and a swanky restaurant on the second floor called "Above" are the new occupants. The dumpy parking lot of the old supermarket now has a three-story mixed use building, with two floors of ritzy apartments and stores and offices on the ground floor.

On the main street, South Orange Avenue, store owners are fleeing the high cost of commercial rentals, which have been made necessary by the dreaded first-in-the-nation property taxes.

What will become of South Orange as residents flee for low-property-tax areas like Florida, Nevada, Texas and California? For years there have been talk of South Orange and Maplewood merging and becoming one town once again. South Orange did in fact start out as a part of Maplewood, broke off because of concerns about its needs not being met. Now it may be necessary for the two towns to become one once again if those two towns are to have a decent chance to be viable in today's fiscal environment.

The New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, is gutting the state government to force a balanced budget. He obviously wants to set an example for the local governments like South Orange and Maplewood. If Christie's state government is the wave of the future, local governments all over the state will be forced to scale back and pool resources. Public education will suffer, roads and bridges, public safety will deteriorate.

More will be demanded of county governments, as small towns and cities become less independent and more dependent on the counties' meager budgets.

The limits of taxing properties in South Orange have been reached. Unless property taxes are rolled back, few residents would want to stay in that town. We, the Lumbas, fled South Orange in 2007 primarily because of our high property taxes. Others before us and still others after us have done the same.

Paradoxically, a monumental collapse of the housing market may be the only hope for the town's residents because that would force the local government to substantially roll back taxes. This, of course, would be the worst thing for seniors who until the housing collapse had been counting on selling their houses and using the proceeds to partially fund their retirement.

Is South Orange the metaphor for the entire United States experiment?

Sweet Bird of Youth

About a month ago, I took a sabbatical from this blog to view my blogging from a distance. Was I writing useful stuff? Was I helping anyone? Was my blogging centered in people's needs and interests and not merely my attempts to prove I had something to say?

A part of me knows I have something important to say, yet another part of me says that I delight in appearing knowledgeable, smart and sometimes witty. A part of me wants to write for the sake of writing. It's akin to arguing for the sake of arguing. You hear people say all the time, when they interject a hypothetical, "Arguing for the sake of argument."

A little more than a week ago I was introduced to a book that could possibly change my life and perhaps other people's lives.

The book, called "NO More Heart Disease," traces the author's life's work to Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. Nobel, as almost everyone knows, at the end of the 19th and dawn of the 20th century packaged powdered nitroglycerin mixtures in dynamite sticks that revolutionized modern-day living. Through Nobel's invention, mountainsides have been blasted to make way for roads, mine shafts and tunnels have been built, neighborhoods have been demolished to make way for shopping malls.

Nitroglycerin, invented by a chemist in 1846, is a substance that has been around for more than 150 years. Nothing new with this product, which is even used to treat angina pectoris, or chest and other pains. Exactly how nitroglycerin works to ease the pain was not widely known during Alfred Nobel's time, and that is probably the best explanation for why Nobel himself refused to be treated with nitroglycerin for his cardiovascular disease, even when all other treatments had failed. He died of complications of that disease.

Nobel, against his doctors' advice, refused to use nitroglycerin for his ailment because he did not want a substance used in producing dynamite, or its by-product - nitric oxide, which comes out of automobile tailpipes - to enter his blood stream. To him, nitroglycerin was simply a product for the sewers, not his body.

A Brooklyn boy with a prodigious love for chemistry, Louis Ignarro, was so fascinated by Alfred Nobel's life and dynamite itself that he soon found himself devoting his scholarly energies to a greater understanding of nitroglycerin. His research took him to the study of nitric oxide, which most assuredly comes out of cars' tailpipes but is the primary substance in nitroglycerin that treats angina pectoris.

His interests led him to a career in pharmacology. Through collaborative research with other medical scientists, he learned that there was a silver bullet in the treatment of atherosclerosis - hardening of the arteries - and arteriosclerosis, the clogging up of arteries. It was nitric oxide, but he did not know this at first.

The enormity of the subject transfixed him. It was well-known that the average human body has 80,000 miles end to end of arteries, veins and capillaries. Every cell in the body needs oxygen and nutrients, and the body's infrastructure of arteries, veins and capillaries are the conduit for the blood that oxygenates and feeds the cells in our bodies.

Heart attacks and strokes are the result of blood vessels no longer functioning at optimal levels or are clogged up, depriving organs - especially the heart and brain - of oxygen and nutrients. His life's mission, he felt in his gut, was to find ways to improve the functioning of the blood vessels. His medical research and experiments led him to an amino acid known as L-Arginine. This protein would prove to be effective in repairing the endothelium, the one-cell-thick lining that protects the blood vessels' interior walls.

Ignarro knew that the interior walls had to be protected, otherwise the vessels would harden, a condition known as atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis or hardened arteries, makes arteries inefficient conduits for blood.

Ignarro knew that the key to delaying, even reversing aging was the proper functioning and health of the blood vessels. In fact, 75% of aging is caused by damaged and worn-down blood vessels.

His research revealed that a substance, which he called "endothelium-derived relaxing factor" or EDRF, was produced by the endothelium and was the body's defense against harmful molecules and substances that damage both the endothelium and the blood vessels' interior walls.

It took years before researchers discovered that the substance was nitric oxide, the very substance found in nitroglycerin and auto exhausts, and which substance the human body produces in sufficient quantities in youth but in ever-decreasing quantities as we age. Nitric oxide, chemical formula NO, or one atom of nitrogen and one atom of oxygen, is secreted by the endothelium in much the same way that the linings in our mouths produce saliva. Nitric oxide protects the endothelium from free radicals and bacteria.

Once this relationship between the health of blood vessels and nitric oxide was established, one would think that it would all be downhill from there. No such luck.

As we age, the endothelium is damaged, veins, arteries and capillaries are blocked all along the 80,000 miles of blood vessels. Because the endothelium is the main source of nitric oxide, not enough NO is produced, and eventually the blood vessels harden to the point that organs no longer get enough sustenance, leading to disease and eventually death.

Ignarro knew that to delay aging and prevent strokes and cardiovascular disease, the key was to keep the blood vessels young and healthy. To accomplish this, the endothelium needed to be repaired.

His research introduced him to an already known protein called L-arginine. That protein was found to repair the endothelium, bringing it back to health and appeared to reverse the hardening of the arteries and other blood vessels. It also appeared to melt away the plaque buildup in arteries, sending the liquefied plaque to the kidneys for disposal.

The problem with L-arginine, however, was that its effect lasted only a few seconds. Hardly the kind of treatment that anyone would be interested in. Through his many experiments he found that L-citrulline, another protein, when combined with L-arginine, worked synergistically with the latter to encourage production of nitric oxide by the endothelium for 24 to 36 hours. This pharmacological breakthrough eventually won for Ignarro the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1998.

Ignarro was almost home. Since much of the damage to the endothelium is caused by free radicals (oxygen atoms missing one electron) he knew instinctively that the mixture of L-arginine and L-citrulline had to be combined with powerful anti-oxidants to do the job. Determining sufficient quantities of antioxidants was the next big challenge, which Dr. Ignarro was more than equal to.

Ignarro was at Nice (France) airport in 1998 when he retrieved his voice mail and heard his friend in the U.S. tell him that he had won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his successful research into the cocktail mixture of L-arginine, L-citrulline and antioxidants to combat atherosclerosis and arteriosclerosis. He got the call on April 1, so he assumed that it was an April Fool's joke.

When he arrived at his destination - Naples, Italy - some journalists and photographers greeted him as he alighted from the plane, walking down the metal staircase. He looked behind him because he thought that a celebrity was closely on his trail. There was nobody there.

When his Italian friend, a pharmacology professor, handed him a copy of a press release announcing Dr. Ignarro's Nobel prize, Ignarro fell to his knees on the tarmac, overcome with emotion.

It was as though the decades of hard work and disappointments typical among researchers looking for that proverbial needle in the haystack - all those years of not being taken seriously by the medical community - had melted away. History, of course, is replete with examples of announced breakthroughs that in the end proved to be worthless - even harmful - junk. So how does society know that this time, this discovery is for real? Society only knows after the fact.

The book, "NO More Heart Disease," is a runaway best-seller at amazon.com. It sells for $10.87, with free delivery.

More importantly, the book has encouraged medical researchers to conduct parallel research on the effectiveness of nitric oxide treatment on cardiovascular and other diseases. A brilliant researcher, Dr. Joe Prendergast, has confirmed not only that nitric oxide treats and repairs the endothelium and interior wall of the blood vessels, it also acts as a signaling agent for the maintenance of the vessels.

A substance that is present in dynamite and that comes out of auto tailpipes - nitric oxide - is our own bodies' defense against degenerative diseases of the organs, the blood vessels themselves, cellular damage, and even microbes and other harmful substances that invade the blood stream. In fact, Ignarro and others discovered that our white blood cells repel invaders by producing nitric oxide and using that gas as an important weapon.

And because nitric oxide, through continued and prolonged use and in sufficient quantities, cause normal functioning and regeneration of blood vessels, the effects of disease and aging are known to have been reversed. People who were on the waiting list for heart transplants in the High Desert Heart Institute in Victorville, California (Dr. Prendergast's study and treatment, not Ignarro's) recovered and were taken off the waiting list. Thousands of Dr. Prendergast's diabetes patients recovered from the organ damages that the disease had wrought on those patients.

Because blood vessels tend to become new again when sufficient quantities of nitric oxide are used in treatments, physiological aging stopped for most patients, and in many cases there was evidence that aging was reversed, meaning that people actually got younger.

The excited buzz among the researchers is that because aging is caused primarily by blood vessel decline and because nitric oxide repairs, regenerates, makes supple and softens blood vessels again - to the point that old people eventually become physiologically young again - theoretically people's life expectancy could someday increase to 150 years, instead of today's 79 years.

Has modern medicine found the fountain of youth? I certainly hope so. If man can build robots that think, look, feel and fall in love like humans, why can't man discover a way to doubling his life expectancy?

So far, only man's optimism is eternal. But, in the not-too-far distant future, maybe man himself will be close to being eternal.

(Disclosure: I am involved in the marketing of a product that uses Dr. Ignarro's discoveries to treat cardiovascular, diabetes and other diseases. The product, which increases blood flow as one of its primary effects, also allegedly treats some forms of male impotence. I can't vouch for this personally because this claim is based on theory and not on actual testimony of the product's users.)