Sylvia's Journal

I discovered how easy it is to get a lot of hits on your blog site – if that is what you want. The entry from January 1, which was named after a famous playboy and had a picture with his name embedded, kept getting hit all the time, with a record number of entries and new visits every day. It shows the power of the search engine. Apparently, anyone googling this gentleman who-shall-no-longer-be-named was led to my blog. I have removed all references to monsieur and I hope that with this, the hits will stop and I will discover the real size of my faithful readership.

I woke up to a fiery pink and orange sky this morning. The landscape outside is bleak and uninviting despite the bright colors of the morning sky. Looking out onto the yard between us and the Hoopers there is a strange design in the remaining snow. It looks like one of those mysterious patterns in cornfields or forests that you sometimes see in documentaries that prove that not everything can be explained by science. Our pattern is random, circular and frantic. From the second floor it looks like the drawing of a child that has just learned how to hold a pencil and knows about circles and lines. The pattern is probably made by moles or voles running in tunnels underneath the snow. The paw prints of a fox would explain the franticness. It is actually quite beautiful. The artists in this family are enthralled with it; the ones who believe in plots and conspiracies even more so. It does make us wonder, however, if the presence of these small rodents also means there are grubs for them to eat in this lawn that was newly seeded last summer at some expense. Why else would they be here now?

Yesterday was the 14^th and signaled the 7^th month post-crash. It seemed a fitting day to shed yet another doctor. I bicycled to the doctor’s office to see my ankle orthopedist. He gave my foot a last check up, made some remarks about the remaining swelling and tendon pains (normal, good pains) and let me go. No follow up appointment required. Now all that is left is the massage therapist, who I don’t ever want to let go. There is of course still the issue of the ‘debris’ in the right breast. The report from the ultrasound and mammogram, done last month, indicate ‘not cancerous,’ which is what I had expected, but a relief nevertheless (although I don’t understand how they know from looking). However, the nurse practitioner wants to watch things closely so she asked me to schedule another mammogram and ultrasound in a couple of months. This turned out to be a bit more complicated to organize than I had thought for the simple reason that my two breasts have different diagnostic codes for the referral. My insurance company is OK with re-examining the right one sooner but the left one has to wait until after April 9, when it has been one year since the previous (routine and bilateral) mammogram. The breast doctor wants to see both side by side. It took a couple of hours of phone calls and inquiries to get the green light from Blue Cross to admit both breasts into the X-ray suite.

The girls celebrated Valentine’s Day by going out for dinner, Sita and Jim close by and Tessa and Steve in distant London (ON). Axel and I had a simple dinner in front of the fire, watching Hercule Poirot. The Valentine part of the meal was a ‘mousse au chocolat’ that was as rich as mousse can be, including whipped espresso cream on the top. Life is good!

I woke up to the sound of the snowplow, scraping. I remember now that I heard something about another snowstorm in the middle of the night. But we paid no attention. We should have turned the cars around so the exit is easier. I have to shovel a way to the car before I can leave. Snow plows have a way of digging you out and at the same time hemming you in. And all that at some ungodly hour in the morning, while everyone is still asleep and it is dark as the night. The winter here is getting awfully long.

I am in another set of marathon days, partially because I have been taking on some extra curricular activities. I keep thinking that this too will pass. But it is a bit like the email coming in over the transom. Things do pass and then other things come along.

This is why I felt a little anxious last Sunday when Larissa, the daughter of my old schoolmate Xandra, knocked on our door for a visit in mid afternoon as she was showing some schoolmates around the area. Larissa is about Tessa’s age and has been studying English in Boston for a while now; not that she needs any English but because she fell in love with Boston and she keeps coming back each time after she renews her visa for another series of courses. She has, in the meantime progressed to the higher levels of the course but, despite her chatter in English, claims she is not done. Larissa is a citizen of the world. Born in Sri Lanka, raised in Holland, I don’t think I have ever seen her in the company of someone who looks, speaks like her or has her nationality. This may have been her third or fourth visit and each time she comes with at least 2 other nationalities. This time she brought Columbia (Pablo) and Sweden (Lisa).

My anxiousness about work completely and quickly vanished in the company of these young people. Although she promised she’d call next time, maybe this spontaneous visit was better. If she had called I might have said we were busy. Her visit reminded me of my student days in Holland and later in Senegal when no one ever called before showing up (in Senegal we had no phone and it was long before the appearance of cell-phones). I remember missing these unannounced visits when we moved to the USA and we were suddenly in the grown up world in which people went about their own lives and visits required appointments ahead of time. As it turned out Larissa’s unexpected visit was wonderful. This is how we fool ourselves about having no time and long lists of ‘have-to’s and ‘must-do’s. Axel made a big pot of tea and we sat around the table talking about everything and nothing while outside the sun and blue sky looked down on the newly dusted white landscape left after a squall had moved through the area. I appreciated Larissa taking us away from our studies and computers and serving us old fashioned great conversation with wonderful people. Keep coming Larissa!

Yesterday, after work, we celebrated the departure of one of our colleagues to Guyana for a stint of about one year. Maryellen came to MSH as a temp wanting to do simple work that did not require much stress or responsibility. See where that got her…now, six years later, she is off as our country representative in Guyana on an HIV/AIDS program, having to deliver results to the US government that pays for her and her colleagues to do work there. Her departure brought back together a bunch of people, some of whom are no longer at MSH, having moved out voluntarily or involuntarily in the great shake up of last summer at MSH; I was there for the lead-up but mostly missed its execution which took place in July 2007. It was a joyful occasion to see old friends and find out that, in general, they have been faring well. They had another sort of awakening from their ‘must-do’s and ‘have-to’s.

This morning when I woke up I had part of my daily journal already written in my head. This is what the daily practice of journaling has done to me; when I wake up I am already writing in my thoughts and the writing occurs while I notice things around me. Maybe that is one thing the crash has changed in me: I am more observant than I was before. I suppose that observation becomes a matter of survival when your world has shriveled up to a very small view, as it did for a while.

So this morning when I got up I noticed the wind whistling through the cracks of our house; I noticed the exquisite and delicate ice flowers on the windows and the sun in the blue winter sky. I also saw the dust bunnies under the bed (and left them where they were – waiting for Axel to find them and do away with them, as his tolerance for dust bunnies is so much lower than mine). But as soon as I sat in front of my computer the workday started with a vengeance that never let off. It is only now at the end of an intense and very long day that I get to do my morning write. Of course the journal entry written in my head some 15 hours ago has vanished and I have to make something up all over again.

It is therefore no wonder that, once again, I found it hard, this past Sunday, to settle down and center in my Quaker Meeting. It took me most of the hour. Once in that state of ‘expectant silence’ I could have stayed there for hours but the agreement is that after one hour we get up. I have come to regret the words that break the silence. I wish I could get into that state of suspension faster. But that wish by itself appears impatient and is emblematic of my hurried life.

Once home (Sunday), I found Axel where I had left him, in his jammies on the couch, totally absorbed by his new library book, a detective that takes place in the Turkey of the mid 1800s. He managed to stay in that place (Turkey and the couch) most of the day and finished the book in what appeared to be one long reading sweep.

I was a bit jealous because I had to do work. I have started to facilitate a virtual leadership program, taking over from my colleague Morsi, and will be on facilitator duty for the next two weeks. There are about one hundred participants in this course from Yemen, Egypt, Kenya, Uganda, Mexico, Tanzania and South Africa. Since the Yemeni and Tanzanians are eight hours ahead of us I have to do my daily posts (another sort of daily journal) before I go to bed so that they find something in their email boxes when they start their workdays long before I do. But in order to write my message to them I have to do a lot of reading on the site in a place we call the Café. The Yemeni and Egyptians are particularly chatty and the task of reading up on two weeks of chatting took a good chunk out of my Sunday.

Axel was so good to cook diner for his working wife and pulled out the Turkish cookbook, inspired by his reading, and made a wonderful pilaf from leftovers.

And so now it is Monday night and it is past my bedtime. But I needed to download my unwritten journal page to make place for tomorrow’s.

Axel’s OT appointments are coming to an end, at least the regular ones. Betty his occupational therapist who focused on his left arm and hand, is letting him go. He is on his own now to bring his hand, upper arm and shoulder back into full service. It is a matter of exercise discipline. The radial nerve is continuing to regenerate slowly but surely. Yesterday he came back from Abi’s massage in great spirits. He suddenly realized that his hand felt like a normal hand. It certainly looks normal; the skin tone is again the same as the skin tone of his other hand and he can extend his fingers, albeit with considerable effort. His lower arm gets sore after doing this for while but that is to be expected after this long period of inactivity.

I can tell when he gets tired because of his stoop. It reminds me of his dad (he doesn’t like it when I make that comparison). Herman walked like that in his later years, stiff and stooped.

Axel’s scar is healing nicely. When we saw Tim and Rhonda last weekend they did not even notice the scar at first. And Tim, of all people should remember, having seen Axel practically scalped. The only part that has not gotten much better much is the ‘woody’ feeling in his head. His hair has grown back nicely and even starts to curl again. But underneath it is a considerable ditch that crosses his scalp from front to back. We should have drawn the outline of the part with the wooden sensation in permanent ink to see if anything has actually changed. It may be in the same category as my tingling toes – something we’ll have to learn to live with.

I had a long and intense workday at home finally finishing a considerable chunk of a big writing project that has been in the works for months. I took some time out around noon to have my weekly massage with Abi which was, as always, wonderful. She is the one health provider who will never discharge us and that is fine with us. We expect to be needing those massages for a long time to come.

The excitement about the primaries had momentarily made me forget the weather which sucks this time of the year. This is why so many people escape the winter and go south. I drove through freezing rain, braving black ice early in the morning and made it in one piece. On such days I am afraid of getting into a traffic accident. There is not much I can do about it other than driving defensively and complying with speed limits. The chances of a ‘pilot-error’ accident are not as high as they are in the sky but it is so much more crowded with people who are not driving defensively and who are distracted by life. As I am learning more about how our emotional state can drive out critical thought and attention I wonder why there aren’t more accidents.

Yesterday was Super Tuesday, voting day for Massachusetts and many other states. I don’t think Tessa got her absentee ballot in on time and Jim discovered that his voter registration transfer had not taken place as planned. He was not excluded from voting but would have to do it in Amherst. As a result Obama lost two precious votes from our family, much to Hillary’s luck. She carried Massachusetts and many other states. But Obama carried Manchester-by-the-Sea, not just over Hillary but over Republican candidates as well. This is quite amazing for a small town of wealthy people that has been staunchly Republican as long as Axel can remember.

We went to the poll station as a family (a family that votes together…) and we were all surprised to find Axel’s name on the ballot and so we voted for him, as well as for Obama. Finding his name on the ballot for (Democratic) Town Committee is something we still don’t quite get, we didn’t know he was running. I voted for the entire Democratic slate but Sita voted only for those she new and trusted.

We had been invited to watch the returns with friends but Axel was still too punky to mingle with company, planning for a simple meal at home. Instead Sita and Jim took us out to Cala, our favorite local restaurant to celebrate our voting. Sita has discovered ostrich (in Davos of all places) and Cala happened to have it on the menu. It was a high carbon footprint meal with the ostrich being flown in all the way from Australia. We enjoyed four wonderful dishes, by taste rather than sight, since we were seated in an obscure corner of the restaurant. The returns came in too late for me to watch on TV. I got them early this morning instead.