Sylvia's Journal

When I am on the road and staying in a hotel I always have a hard time going to bed because I watch TV in a way I don’t when I am home; mostly because these nights on the road there is an abundance of time. I went to bad too late and slept through my alarm. It’s rush hour now; none of this abundance left.

We biked into town yesterday morning for the various Memorial Day ceremonies that are acted out, each year in exactly the same way, in our small town. The only thing that was different this year was a woman among the 5 people that do the gun salute at each cemetery stop. I have difficulty seeing someone with a skirt and nylons shoot a gun; a sign of women’s liberation taken to its absurd extreme. I am also, every year in the same way, annoyed about oratory that glorifies war. As on cue I whisper my annoyance to Axel and every year he shushes me with the same look that separates Europe from America when it comes to war, especially those of the last 30 years. Axel is moved more than I am; none of these were ‘my’ wars; I missed WWII by 6 years and everything that followed were America’s wars, ordered by Presidents for reasons that have more to do with interests than ideals.

We biked back with our across-the-cove neighbor Bill. Back home we resumed our garden work. Axel rototilled, using both hands – the good and the bad – with tremendous dexterity and at some cost, as we discovered later when the muscles started to complain. We did get the tomatoes and basil into the ground; the beans placed around two poles; the lettuce and spinach seeds put in straight lines, the onions in a crooked line. I put the potatoes in using the entire back and claiming one third of the garden space. Finally I scattered flower seeds helter skelter in places that looked like they needed some color.

It was only with great difficult that I extracted myself at the end of the afternoon from all this garden work. Axel took me to the airport and Comair took me to Washington. After I had worked with my colleague Kristen on our workshop design and met a few friends I withdrew to my spacious corner room and watched TV. I caught the tail end of a dramatization of Bush’s stolen election in 2000 and then a documentary of soldiers who came back from Iraq as amputees and/or brain damaged and/or suffering from severe PTSD. It consisted of a series of interviews with very young people who escaped death by a hair but came home seriously damaged in a variety of ways. It was about the gory side of war rather than the glory I heard earlier this morning.