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Dear Gin and Pete, I'm so pleased that you've joined this group. I've been wanting to tell people about us: How we had been neighbors for eight years on Slab Creek Road. How you stayed in that most beautiful corner of the Oregon Coast's rainforest when my family pulled me away to Los Angeles 13 years ago. How you gracefully wove the news of Ginny's PD into a Christmas letter. I was devastated and avoided writing back, afraid that I'd say the wrong thing. I didn't really know what PD was. A few years later I was weaving the same news into my own Christmas cards. After the two of us "got" PD, the neighbors up and down Slab Creek Road were of course wondering who would be NEXT. Had the logging companies' herbicide campaign drifted that terribly into our neighborhood? Had there been something toxic in our drinking water, even though we drew ours from different sources? Both your Oregon neurologist and my California neurologist belittled the idea that there was a common cause, and shrugged it off as a coincidence. Gin, the number of coincidences in our two lives has been very funny. Many of them relate to various theories about the cause of PD. Toting up the statistically insignificant, completely anecdotal evidence: We lived in rural areas (yours in Oregon? and mine in Pennsylvania) when we were young children. There is a five year difference in our ages. Still it was in general an era when DDT was routinely sprayed everywhere including on screen doors within reach of small hands and faces. I think I can remember the taste. We lost our fathers early and traumatically. We were both eight years old. We grew up as the "afterthought child", alone with our widowed, strong, stiff-upper-lip mothers. The older three children had grown and gone. Was a "Parkinson's personality" developed by that kind of childhood? As high school seniors, we applied but were both rejected by Stanford! -- probably more of a blessing than a trauma, since we went on to other schools and spent part of our college years studying in Europe. We married men who had both been reporters for the Portland Oregonian. (It would be a real stretch to correlate that with PD!) They were also active in building our houses at the Coast when we became neighbors. We may have had some exposure to toxins in solvents and wood preservatives then, even in that "back to the land" period. And there were herbicides sprayed in nearby forests. We both experienced mild syptoms of PD for a long time. It was only after our mothers died that the symptoms became so strong that we had to seek help. That happened dramatically, within a few months of their deaths. Of course there were many differences in our lives. These odd touchpoints probably have no significance. Our "weird" coincidences only help me to appreciate how complex the search for the cause must be. I suspect that the cure or at least better treatment will appear almost as if by chance. So many breakthroughs could never have been predicted -- such as MPTP leading to better animal modeling. Wasn't L-dopa itself developed as a flu medication that "accidentally" helped someone with Parkinson's? I don't mean to downplay systematic research. It's heartening to see the many different angles being taken. The surveys being done such as the one from the Parkinson's Institute in Sunnyvale give me hope. They're asking questions about us as whole people, not just as collections of of symptoms. It's a pleasure to be your "neighbor" again via internet. It can't substitute for the Christmas gift you once gave me -- a hike to your favorite high hill in the rainforest, with a 360 degree view, and a detour by a waterfall on the way down. Still it's comforting to have you "near". Mary Yost 47, diagnosed 1990, 2x25/100 sinemet, 2x5mg eldepryl, 75mg pamelor, Tai Chi, singing, daily bellylaugh & dram of sherry, quasi-vegetarian, Belgian-American