Sylvia's Journal

The quiet fog of yesterday morning created the perfect condition for rowing in my ocean shell. I haven’t used it much because the water is seldom flat like a mirror. Axel had walked around the loop and reported he saw another rower on the water. This was all I needed to put my boat in as well. I rowed around the point and to Singing Beach. As it turned out the water wasn’t as calm as it looked from the shore, no waves indeed, but the swells were slow and broad. On the way back I practically surfed into the cove.

Kairos, the brand new bridegroom of two days ago, looking smart in a suit, smiled at us from the front page of the Boston Globe Magazine while we were having breakfast. As Boston’s chief planner, he is presented as the visionary of Boston’s future urban landscape. With one degree of separation we are proud to be associated with such talent, and such vision.

From Friday’s Chinese/Japanese wedding we moved to another cross cultural life stage marker, a Canadian/Brazilian christening. We drove to Worcester, passing exit eleven which takes you to Umass Memorial’s Trauma Center, one of many reminders that are beginning to wash in over the transom. We met with part of Tessa’s in-law family and watched Steve act as godfather in his crumpled white shirt.

The ceremony was conducted by a priest who might well be a stand-up comic the rest of the week. We could not decide whether his stunning irreverence (“you may ask why we don’t use beer, like a Bud Light, or Coke, for the baptism..”– we had not) was because he was trying to make the service palatable to a group of people that included many who, I suspect, were feeling a little out of place in a church.

The entire ceremony lasted about 30 minutes. We were let go with a reminder not to be ensnared by Satan with his tricks and empty promises. After the ceremony, on a hot deck with a thunderstorm brewing in the far distance, we were fed a combination of American and Brazilian goodies and mingled with friends and family. Escaping from the heat into the air conditioned home, there was no escaping the giant media center (this is beyond TV) that dominated the downstairs. It included a Wii Sports system that I had heard about but never seen. Soon I found myself playing a virtual tennis game, with a remote control as racket on behalf of a little virtual creature names Christian. He or I, or we did the most awesome backhands and tired ourselves out quickly. You cannot be a couch potato and play tennis, in case you did not know. I could have chosen to go bowling or golfing without ever having to leave the pleasantly air-conditioned room. With the gas prices going up and up, I wonder how many people are retreating into their media centers.

And then it was time to head to our next social engagement. My colleague Edith, actually the boss of the boss of my boss, is heading home back to Belgium. We had hoped to have one more dinner together at Lobster Cove before her departure. The weather and the theft of some checks messed up our plans. Instead of a cookout or dinner we witnessed what it takes to report stolen checks, inform the police and manage a helpful but berating husband (“how could you…?”). By the time the thunderstorm and police had left it was too late for dinner and we headed home to find Sita and Jim returned from their trip to and through the insides of America. Sita’s slideshow stood in sharp contrast to the picture album Edith had made of her two-year stay in New England. If you ever had any doubt that there are at least 2 Americas, we have proof.

Yesterday was a dreary day full of fog. We were both in a funk. We tried to do things to get us out of our dreariness, like sewing curtains or trying to do (income-generating) work, even reading a book but everything turned out wrong: the curtains are slambanged together (they hang), the work created more work or rework and the book (Strange Loop) has gotten incomprehensible now that the author is explaining some basic principles about mathematics to get to the title of his book. Both of us fell asleep over our reading material.

I don’t know why the expression ‘being on cloud nine’ is so positive because being on nine, or surrounded by the other eight clouds, is not pleasant at all. I had hoped to go flying with Bill, once more to Owl’s Head but we would go anywhere if the weather would let us. But at 11:00 AM all the airways out of Beverly airport where closed to pilots with my level of skill. I hung out for a little while with the other stranded pilots and admired the two gigantic airships, each advertising for something we ought to have in our life, that were using up considerable real estate of the airport. With their noses tied to a pole they are like giant windsocks, putting the tiny orange sock temporarily out of business.

Unlike the day after Tessa’s 21st birthday when I found bodies asleep all over the yard with empty bottles of previously forbidden drinks next to them, this time I found only two bodies in the living room and no shocking number of empty alcohol containers. The party had been small and very grown up, with people talking in soft voices about weighty things. When Axel turned 23 he had already been married for over a year. The kids have become responsible adults. I feel sorry for parents with young kids as I know what is awaiting them in the next 10 years. I am so very grateful for what Tessa and Sita have become.

What finally got us out of the fog was a romantic comedy (Dan in Real Life) that was about daughters, doing dumb things and finally marriage with love providing the force and fuel to overcome the consequences of all sorts of stupidities and mess-ups.

This morning we stayed in bed longer than we usually do and talked about the 14th of July which is coming into view. The closer it comes the more stuff gets raked loose about it. We are not out of the woods yet, especially Axel and we are still getting used to the idea, consequences and impact of Axel’s lingering handicaps. I am starting to relive the run-up to the day and flooded by regrets; the ‘if only’s’ that I thought I had gotten rid off months ago are lined up like gremlins with grins on their faces saying ‘we’re ba[ha]ck!”

I have discovered an outlet that sells the best, very dark, chocolate at very low prices. Yesterday morning I shared my secret with Tessa and Steve and took them there. We bought chocolate for ourselves and for the parents of Steve’s new nephew (his brother and sister-in-law) who will be christened tomorrow. I bought the little boy a handpuppet of Puff the Magic Dragon and then found a wooden sushi play set that I had to buy for Chris as a wedding present. You can ‘cut’ the velcro-ed together sushi roll and, according to the package, it makes real sushi noises. I was very tempted to open the cellophane and find out what these were but I resisted and will go play with Chris at some later time. I packed the presents for Chris and Kairos, the Bucky fruit bowl and the sushi play set, in red paper with red ribbons and a red card, eager to show that we knew red was an auspicuous color for a Chinese wedding. What we did not know and learned later from some of the Japanese guests was that for them red was the color of hookers. Maybe pink would have been a better choice.

Joe left early for Rockport to get himself a shoulder tattoo with hearts and roses and His Sweetness’ name in the middle. Tessa’s friend Val does them and they look very real and stay that way if you don’t shower for awhile. I think Joe wanted to surprise and maybe even frighten Rita just a little bit.

Before he left we sat and talked, looking out over Lobster Cove, about what he had seen in our little family unit as we are learning to live with the reality of Axel’s brain-injury handicaps that may or may not be there to stay. The emphasis was on the words ‘here and now’ as opposed to ‘later, when.’ The shift in word use has huge consequences for how we organize ourselves as a household, how we handle the complexity of our daily lives and retain the ability to show compassion rather than irritation when things are not going the way we want. Compassion was also mentioned at the wedding in one of the toasts as the stance to revert to when the enjoyment of our differences just doesn’t cut it.

After Joe left Axel and I made our way to Cambridge for Chris and Kairos’ wedding ceremony in a lovely little round Chapel on the MIT grounds. It was a Chinese-Japanese event with a sprinkling of Americans, among them Boston’s mayor who is Kairos’ boss. Six or seven teeny flower girls melted our hearts as they preceded the bride, arriving arm-in-arm with her mom. It was a most moving wedding ceremony, officiated by a minister who had come all the way from California. There were lot of tears as one or another spoke about love, faith, hope, patience and all those things that are carrying us trough our rough spots right now. Axel and I sat there, squeezing each other hands, when the bride and groom promised to be there for each other in health and sickness, for richer and poorer. After some 28 years and last year’s mishap we know a thing or two about this.

We killed time between the ceremony and the party in MIT’s student center, snacking and drinking coffee with other wedding guests, an odd grouping of well-dressed people amidst the cell-phone-and-back-pack carrying and poorly-dressed students. The party, cocktails, dinner and dancing, was organized in another MIT building, decorated by friends and family into the early morning hours of the wedding day. They appear to all be gifted designers of one kind or another. 888 of the intended 1000 paper cranes cascaded down from a second-story balcony on white gauzy cloth. Japanese orchids and Chinese red peonies decorated the tables. Surrounding the tables were three food stations offering Mediterranean, Chinese and Japanese food. For us the center piece was a huge ice sculpture with oysters, sushi rolls, ngiri and sashimi tucked into various carved out indentations – and a seemingly endless supply replenishing the items that disappeared as fast as they came in. The Chinese station featured an entire roasted pig(let) with a peony behind its ear, dumplings and steamed vegetables. I never made it to the Mediterranean station. Music was provided by a salsa band. This party was one for the world.

We drove home to Tessa’s birthday party that had been going on simultaneously and found a small group of her friends standing around eating American fare of hamburgers and hotdogs. Among them one couple with a baby; how fast our babies are growing up to now hold their own babies still amazes me. I tumbled into bed, full-stomached from too much food and sore-footed from much walking and dancing. I looked at Axel after he tucked me in and thanked my lucky stars for having found him some 30 years ago and not having lost him a year ago.

I woke up in a sweat with worries triggered by legalese words only lawyers can understand without translation. There is some movement on the insurance/legal front that fills me with anxiety, dread and foreboding; mostly because I am intimidated by words and phrases I do not understand. Paul has stepped up to the plate and is representing us. We trust he will help us make the right offers and choices as we head into this unknown land of laws, legal rights and settlements.

Against the background of all this work continued yesterday for one hell of a long day juggling the continuing computer transfer (I am getting there) and preparing for the back-to-back trips to Ghana and Haiti. Tessa’s birthday party tonight produces some tumult on another part of the stage but the management of that is entirely in her and Steve’s hand. It is bringing another crowd into the house. The bed, still warm from Joe, will be occupied by Roy who is right now sleeping on a bed-that-comes-out-of-a-box in my office. Roy was one of the people who built the tiny ramp out of shingles that allowed me to wheel myself in and out of my sickroom/office on my own, last July and August.

With our offices turned into bedrooms, Axel and I have moved to the kitchen counter where we sit side by side behind our computers. At some level all this is a good distraction. I was imagining what it would be like if Axel and I would be alone in the house and what we would talk about. Life throws things at us for a reason, I do believe, and the current situation is probably exactly what we need.

During my too-long commute home, at exactly the wrong time, when everyone else leaves Boston, I crawled along route 1 North at about 20 MPH. We all converged onto the St. Johns’ house in Essex in our separate cars to celebrate the beginning of Katy Blair’s vacation now that the schools have closed. We admired the boat that Andrew is rebuilding and which is nearly ready for its sail north to Maine. Katy Blair put together a mail made from the leftovers of two households which came out spectacular.

Joe joined us during the cocktail hour, returning from a trip to Marlboro that produced more business for him and an instant proposal developed in a Dunkin Donuts along the way. His trip to the East Coast has been highly successful, both from a social and a business point of view. He is leaving later today on the Red Eye back to His Sweetness Rita in San Diego. It was some ten years ago that Joe proposed to Rita out at the Point, on land that is not ours, from where they were chased as trespassers. This inauspicious beginning did only strengthen the marriage it appears.

Another wedding is on the books for today. After several days of rain, today the weather will be perfect for the wedding of Chris and Kairos. I used to work with Chris and we travelled together to Japan, her maternal country. She took Axel and me on a most memorable tour of the Tokyo fish market before dawn one morning. We tasted fresh tuna caught less than 20 hours ago off the New England Coast and ended our visit with a sushi breakfast that required an hour’s wait in the drizzle and cost about $40 per person. For a once-in-a-lifetime-experience it was worth every minute and every penny. Kairos is an architect from Chinese extraction. Axel bought them a red ‘Bucky Bowl’ which comes as a flat package, and, once bent in shape, looks like an inverted geodesic dome. Red of course brings luck in their ancestral part of the world. Chris and Kairos were part of the community that surrounded us last summer and fall and I remember fondly a four course Japanese lunch that Chris brought me after which I took a nap and she vacuumed the house – something she actually loves to do she confessed, some weeks before Axel got home from the hospital.

Amidst the chaos, the clutter and the coming and goings of our own and our daughters’ friends, I count myself very lucky. We are alive, the sun is shining and I don’t mind at all working from the kitchen counter. This day is about love and great friendships.

This morning I find myself still in that grey space between computers. I hate being there mostly because it is a huge time sink. The Ghana trip has been postponed one day because of a glitch with the visa office in DC. This makes for an arrival the 2nd of July and a departure the 5th. One more glitch and the trip is off. However it gives me 24 hour breathing space if I don’t hold my breath till my passport arrives, promised to be in my hand on Tuesday about two hours before I have to leave for the airport. The trip is by no means a done deal.

With Joe perfecting CHS’s conceptual framework to my left, I learned about Wikis yesterday from the PBJWiki folks via a webinar. I am a latecomer to this technology in the world but at my place of work I am in the category of early adopters. It is a bit like the graphics: in my family I am at the end of the line but at work I am on the frontlines. This makes MSH sound like a backwater which it is not; more like an oil tanker that doesn’t turn as easily.

The ultrasound of my right breast revealed that the cysts are diminishing in size at a rate of a little less than 1 mm a month. I am released from the quarterly checks and the next one will be in six months. That is a big relief, one thing less to worry about. I watched the ultrasound picture on the screen and it looked a lot less like the debris-strewn beach than it did when the first ultrasound was made earlier this year.

Joe said his farewells at MSH and left our client happy with the result and with many ideas for using the improved identity to clarify other organizational relationships and make the story telling easier. I see a bit more noodling on the horizon but it is good enough for now. It was fun working with Joe and the product represents proof that 1 + 1 = more than 2. I learned a lot from him and intend to sharpen my PowerPoint skills now that I have the new 2007 version.

After a haircut that prepared me for the tropical temperatures of Ghana and Haiti I arrived home to the promise of a cookout, but the meal still in the idea stage. As a result dinner was served rather late with Joe and Axel hustling to get it on the table before my bedtime. Neither one of them had to get up as early as I this morning so I was not happy. Axel made up by having breakfast all ready to go this morning, a faint but sweet smell of guilt hanging over the arrangement. Thank you my dear!

I am posting today’s entry from my new computer. I wrote the piece and placed it in a brand new folder, which reminded me of the first day of class in grade school. It also felt like the first day in a new job with an empty desk and a sparkling supply of new office materials in the drawer, a new notepad on top. I want it to be neat, clean and right. The old computer sits next to the new one and last night I started to undo the back-up mess I created not once but twice in preparation for the computer exchange. I had created loopy back-ups, folders creating copies of themselves inside themselves. Each time I would click on ‘My Documents’ there would be, listed under the M, another ‘My Documents,’ over and over again. The trouble was that the ‘My Documents’ folder also contained gigantic music and picture folders, endlessly copied down to the root. As a result, my already tired and overflowing computer slowed down to a crawl and practically ceased to function. Much of last night was spent deleting folders . Changing computers is always a momentous affair with much hair pulling and deep sighs and good intentions to not ever let it be this difficult.

I have to drive myself to work this morning. Joe left for MSH at 6 AM as we usually do but I was not with him and was still asleep. I have another doctor’s appointment later in the morning. Now, nearly one year post-crash, Axel and I have, together, nearly as many appointments as we had last fall. This morning is for another breast ultrasound to make sure the cysts that were created by the crash are dissolving as they are supposed to and not turning into something nastier. The last check was encouraging so I am full of good hope that I will be released this time for further scrutiny. Axel is about to take off for his half hour session at Spaulding that effectively takes an entire morning if you count the bike ride to the train and the train ride to North Station and the walk to Spaulding and back again. He does understand that it is only a time sink if you treat it like that. So he brings his computer and books and does work.

Yesterday Joe did more PowerPoint acrobatics as we jettisoned the image of a martini glass and worm in favor of a box with flaps that open. Once again, the possibilities were endless and Joe was able to bring many into view on slides that he produced faster than I could type the words. Not having anything to offer in the PowerPoint department, and with my old and new computer in the hands of technicians, I felt rather useless in the office and went for a row on the Charles. I managed to stay just ahead of the threatening dark clouds. I wondered how bad it would be to be caught on the river with thunder and lightning overhead and started to worry. I rowed as fast as I could which turned my leisurely row into a work-out, clocking my fastest time from the Eliot bridge to the dock.

Joe’s contract was extended by a few days which meant I was able to keep my driver a little longer. I could get used to this being driven to work and arriving home to the most wonderful dinners; Steve is learning the subcontinent’s cuisine this week, discovering spices he never knew existed. We are being served tender and moist chicken breasts, something Sita had trained out of us from an early age. She used to like all her chicken and meat well done (dry) so we got used to that. She is getting older/better now and I think she will like Steve’s cooking.

I had another session with my physical therapist Julia who was pleased that my sacrum had moved only a little from last week’s perfect alignment (she pressed it back into place). She added another set of exercises to my morning and evening routine which is getting rather extensive again. When Iasked her whether these were exercises for life she nodded. She’s also telling me that crossing my legs at the knees is not a good thing. It’s a bad habit I never knew I had.

A telephone call to Washington produced the long awaited permission to travel to Ghana and the ticket has now been purchased. I will thus be traveling on Monday, and thereby miss all the celebrations of the first week of July (Tessa’s birthday on the second, and our country’s on the 4th).

We know about certain principles in organizational consulting, such as talking first with the boss; but there is always this wish that there are exceptions and we could get our task accomplished without it. So yesterday Joe and I, in our consultation to one of MSH’s Centers, realized that there was no exception and that we should have insisted on having that conversation with the boss even though she was not available until we had reached iteration 9. We had proceeded last week in the hope that there was value in iterating an incomplete story. On our way home yesterday we talked about this, asking ourselves why we went ahead even though we knew the most important piece of input was missing. Two things came to mind: (a) there is this chasm between alignment in the abstract and in real life. We do (or do not do) things because something in the context tells us so, suggesting that in this situation, at this time, things are/will be different. And (b), when you work with someone else who you admire you would like to believe they know something you don’t know and all will be well.

And so, finally yesterday morning, we had our conversation with the boss which led us to jettison the clever image that we had iterated more than a few times as the conceptual framework for the Center for Health Services. It had emerged out of circles and rectangles and had taken on the shape of a key and a lock. We had had fun playing with all the associated imagery, words, slogans and possible products while it lasted. We are now on to other images. After our conversation with the director and her deputy I had an image of ‘upward swirl’ in my mind (maybe this was because my mind was swirling at the prospect of starting over again). We played with that on paper a bit and from that moment on Joe has been powerpointing like crazy to make it a serious image that reflects most of what we heard people say, including the boss, especially the boss. The latest version, presented to me just before bedtime last night looks like a snake in a martini glass. I like it because it has movement, has all sorts of possibilities for playing with the imagery, and it reminds me of my sitting by the cove on Saturday, reading a great book and sipping a martini. However, it am not sure that either snake or martini glass goes well with the other corporate frameworks and I have a suspicion that it does not quite fit with the mood and feel of the organization (the snake may be, but not the martini glass). We need something more straighforward, more basic in shape. I went to bed last night hoping that a new framework would reveal itself in my or Joe’s dreams; this turned out not to be the case for me; I have not asked Joe yet.

I had had some hope to go rowing yesterday but the severe weather finally arrived, hosing everything down and churning the waters of the Charles River so that rowing was no longer a good idea. The downpour was good for the plants but for us humans it was a rather dreary day; the kind of day that invites to get stuff done, clean drawers, inside windows, housecleaning kind of things. I might have done that if I had been home but I was in Cambridge, at work, whittling down my to-do list before I head out to Ghana on my way to Haiti, if the US government lets me. This permission has not yet been granted yet and thus the ticket cannot be bought. These are the rules of the game.

This morning I found the B section of yesterday’s Boston Globe open on the article about the rower who wants to row across the Atlantic and is practicing on the Charles River, next to the story about the 73 year old woman pilot who crashed off Owl’s Head in Maine on Saturday, supposedly doing what she loved doing, according to the headline. Those words irritated me; she probably died because she got disoriented in a fast moving fogbank and I can’t imagine she was loving this at all. I was quite shaken by the article when I read it at work during lunch. I have, after all, been trying to get up to Owl’s Head for some months now and have always been thwarted by these same fogbanks. I had decided not to mention the article to Axel. It seems now he found it on his own last night after I had gone to bed. He need not worry. I am only going to fly there if there is no mention of fog at all for hours before and after landing. This may mean I won’t be flying there at all.

Today my father would have become 92 had he not died in 1985. His birthday is forever associated with eating the first cherries of the season (in Holland), like Ankie’s birthday on the 5th of June is forever associated with eating the first strawberries (also in Holland). I still miss him and wished he could see his granddaughters, all grown up in this world he would hardly recognize.

The alarm this morning dragged me into Monday morning from a far off place that was all about art and creativity. I got all tangled up in writing a sentence under a painting I had done. The painting itself I cannot remember; only that I could not type the word ‘social’ without maken a mistake, in spite of trying it over and over again. It was the kind of mistake that comes from being too fast, rather than from not knowing.

The art and painting dream was probably triggered by Axel’s first attempt at painting with oil. After a swim in Lobster Cove he set up his brandnew oil painting kit that Sita had given him for Father’s Day. Everyone was pleased with the result.

We were all very busy relaxing this weekend. Sunday started with a wonderful and meditative bike ride to Quaker Meeting which was silent for the whole hour except for one message about serendipitous encounters and bad things sometimes bringing unexpected good things along. This was hardly something we needed to be reminded of after last year’s summer. We know it is a universe sort of (universal?) thing. I was also reminded by one of the Friends who believes in such things, that it is Mercury Retrograde time again (so watch that car, bike, computer, plane from messing things up).

The severe weather predicted for the weekend stayed to the west of us, allowing plenty of time for swimming, reading and gardening. At the end of the day Joe, Axel and I celebrated our collective accomplishment of not doing much with a lobster and corn dinner.

Now that Tessa and Steve are here we have become puppy grandparents; so we are also first in line for dogsitting. Tessa and Steve left Chicha with us for a day and a night. Chicha was not happy about that at first. When she discovered that I could throw sticks really well, the sadness of seeing Tessa and Steve leave was quickly gone.

We discovered that she understands English quite well; when Axel got up and told us he was going to check on Sita’s two cats, the puppy immediately ran across the driveway to the door of the studio, waiting to have some fun. But Cortez and Mooshi don’t believe in fun with dogs, no matter how bored they are without Sita and Jim. Their displeasure about their parents’ absence is manifested in much cat poop outside the box and other signs of mischief. Axel comes in like a beloved grampie; he grumbles a bit and then talks and plays with them as if they are his best friends. They have bonded, unlike me; even though I grew up with cats, these two creatures are unintelligible to me; I bonded instantly with the dog.

I was woken up this morning by the twitter of a thousand birds at a very early hour, sunrise probably (4:06 AM, early indeed). The twitter is amplified by all the little baby birds that are beginning to leave their nests and join the chorus. One such nest is just outside Sita and Jim’s door to the studio. Of the three robin’s eggs two hatched. One stuck to the mother’s wing as she was startled when the door opened, and it fell out, the embryo visible, not ready to be a bird. The remaining sibblings survived the constant coming and going into the barn, raised by an increasingly neurotic mother. You could see their heads sticking out of the nest with beaks wide open, squeaking and begging for food. Of course while we were standing there contemplating the feeding regime, the upset mother was waiting at a distance with dinner dangling out of her beak.

Yesterday I dropped Aimee off at Harvard Summer School with hundreds of parents and nervous teenagers from all over the world. Harvard has mastered this annual ritual into a seemless drill, staffed with hundreds of peppy young girls wearing colorful T-shirts like camp counselors, their heads full of knowledge. There was much walking between the various buildings near Harvard Square and the Radcliff Quad (her dorm) where this or that part of the registration routine was completed. As the papers had told her, there was not much in the dorm except for a desk, chair, bed and pillow. We had augmented this with some overflow from our house which is entirely at the other end of the clutter spectrum. It occurred to me we could do a thriving business setting up a roadside stand with stuff that is missing in the dorms and redundant in our house.

Aimee’s roommate is a Chinese girl from California who was clearly prepared for managing the stark dorm experience with a huge suitcase full of stuff. Two parents had accompanied her and were busy settling her in. This reminded me of us settling Sita into her dorm room in New York, now eons ago. I think that there is an element of parents vicariously reliving their own college experience. Of course I had never had a dorm living experience because when I studied in Holland there was no such thing as a dorm. I only knew about dorms from American movies; those were either frightening or romantic experiences, many with bad endings. My only dorm experiences now are those that occur during the annual OB Teaching Conference, but that is only for a week at the most. At least at Babson we had a wastebasket, which came in handy when I was sick. Harvard does not provide these, so plastic shopping bags will have to do for Aimee, sick or healthy.

From Cambridge I rushed back to Beverly to talk about money with my plane co-owners. We are finally out of the enormous debt that had accumulated relentlessly, starting before the accident and not helped by it. The new plane is beginning to generate some income for us that then gets spent on maintenance and repair. It’s not a money making enterprise by a long shot. I was reminded again that flying it an expensive hobby and that the hobby may need to end when my mother’s inheritance has been eaten up. The bottom is beginning to show. After our meeting I flew for about an hour practicing my landings in increasingly windy conditions. Suffice to say I landed 8 times on the correct runway; sometimes I hoped nobody was watching.

The rest of the day I worked in the garden with Joe, hilled the potatoes with straw, added several wheelbarrow loads of soil to the asparagus bed (4 spears are up) and then cooled off in Lobster Cove with the children of visiting friends. The little boys thought they were in heaven (I know we were) and did not want to return with their parents to hot Cambridge and some boring adult party. I was very conscious of our luck to be able to stay. I spent the next few hours alternating napping and reading that I Am A Strange Loop (Hofstadter), while Axel and Joe were preparing dinner in the background. This included a striped bass that had been swimming happily somewhere off the Rockport coast only a couple of days ago. Hofstadter would not have approved, but I was in heaven.

The summer officially began yesterday, precisely at 1 minute before 8 PM according to Tessa; she knows about such things. At the moment supreme we were sitting on hard benches waiting for our table at the Fish Shack in Rockport. That included Joe who had returned from a pharmaceutical company retreat in Worcester which had ended with 450 employees drumming to experience alignment with each others’ and the universe’s heartbeat, or something like that.

We let the coming of summer pass unnoticed. We had nothing to toast with. In Rockport’s restaurants you can only order alcohol after you have placed your meal order, and you can only do that when you sit at a table. At any rate, Aimee who is 19 years old, would not have been allowed a drink even though in Holland she is considered old enough to have a glass of beer or wine.

Yesterday was a workday for all of us except Steve and Aimee. While Steve slept to recover from his drive down from London, Aimee explored the neighborhood which included the experience of being envelopped in a fogbank, alternated with bright sun and rain. She also checked out the bike that she will take to Cambridge and which blew a tire, as on cue, on her way into town to the bicycle repair shop. Later in the afternoon I did spot her bike by the icecream store as I drove out of town for an appointment.

That appointment was for my last acupuncture session. The sessions come in fours and we are going to let the chi work its magic for awhile without needles. John, the acupuncturist, is still trying to sort out what is happening in my right foot. It is getting increasingly sensitive to the needles. This time I even asked him to take one needle out because it hurt too much. He considers this a good thing because the abnormal sensitivity of my foot (I still feel like I walk on a wad of cotton balls) is one of the presenting symptoms. He believes that most of the rest of my symptoms were/are related to the misaligned sacrum and the PT’s work will take care of that. I sure hope so.

Sita called from Kentucky where it is raining all the time – they are on the outer fringes of a series of weather calamities hitting parts of the central United States. They are lucky to have a cabin but their travelmates have a tent. There are some tensions and dynamics in the traveling foursome and I have a feeling that the best part of the trip is coming home. This, of course, is no news to me.

With the summer weather arriving the memories and images of last summer are bubbling up from the recesses of my mind. Soon, every day will have a corresponding day and memory from last year, when the universe was both limitless (in its grace) and tiny because of our restricted movements and preoccupations. Part of me is dreading this daily comparison that I expect to start on the 14th. Part of me is celebrating. During my acupuncture session, when I usually fall asleep, I had this expansive feeling of joy, gratefulness and deep gratitude that envelopped me like a blanket and that stayed with me throughout the rest of the day, all the way into summer.