Sylvia's Journal

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.