Sylvia's Journal

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.