Sylvia's Journal

I woke up with a Halloween ditty that my subconscious had fashioned during my sleep. It went something like this: Long flowing robes/ a dash of purple, orange on her cheeks/everyone was looking/she got the dates wrong/not yet Halloween.

Halloween used to be my favorite holiday that I adopted with great gusto when I arrived in this country. For 15 years, without exception, I used to make an elaborate Halloween display at MSH. But last October I had not fully recovered nor returned to work and my co-conspirator Ann was no longer working at MSH. The tradition was broken. This year I will be en route to Tanzania if all goes according to plan. And so I am in the process of working on my (other) fall tradition and that is the making of small jars of Christmas mustard, leaving Halloween languishing on the side.

After the sweeping vistas over Essex County from 2000 feet up on Monday afternoon, work on Tuesday was at the 5 inch level. I poured over action plans about contraceptive commodities logistics (yup), in French; all this in order to give constructive feedback to teams that have already celebrated the end of a 13 week course. I am temporarily filling in for two absent facilitators. It is tedious and tricky work as I am providing new feedback on plans that others have followed for awhile now. It took me most of yesterday to get my head around the action plan logic of two of the 9 teams and send them my commentary. I have no idea what effect my email will have in Rwanda and Madagascar, which is where the two teams live.

At 5 PM I was happy to turn my computer off. I drove to North Station to pick up Axel who had taken the train in and then back into Cambridge where we attended the opening of an exhibit at the MIT Museum on the development of the Side Scan Sonar. I had no idea what that was, except that it was more or less invented by a distant relative of Axel’s (the person who married the person who used to be married to his cousin); his name is Marty and we are actually much closer to him and his wife than the relationship suggests. He opened the exhibit by telling stories about a heady time at MIT (60s and 70s) when much was being invented, professors and students could do things that would now be frowned upon, and when transistors were the cool thing. It was a time when bulky machines did things that now our cell phones can do. There were stories about famous professors, startup companies that split and produced new startups, hunting for shipwrecks, treasures and even the monster of Loch Ness; when you have a Side Scan Sonar, I learned, you can do those things and actually find stuff on the bottom of oceans and lakes. On the bottom of Loch Ness, instead of finding the monster, they found a more or less intact world war plane that is now sitting in some museum. They also found the Titanic and many other famous and not so famous shipwrecks, in seas near and far.

Marty ended his stories with an impassioned plea to young people to become scientist and explore the oceans. I think that if I had been a student I would have been hooked right then and there, vowing to get the kind of grades that would get me into MIT, especially as a girl. I noticed that the only two women in Marty’s story where his mother (who helped finance some of the projects) and his office manager (who ran the business), all the really creative and inventive work was done by guys.

And so that is how we discovered also the MIT museum. Aside from Marty’s side-scan sonar story you can see cancer research (women-led) via zebra fish and models of low carbon footprint city cars. I want one of these. Their bodies slide up so they can press together in stacks that refuel when not in use (like one’s electric toothbrush) and even give electricity back to the grid. I am so impressed when I see all those inventions; this is a kind of creativity that is beyond me (as all of Marty’s work was – imagine making and using a fax machine before they even exist!).

We completed our (school) night out on the town with a hastily consumed meal in a noisy bar on Mass Avenue and then headed back home, sliding into bed half an hour after bedtime. As I drifted into sleep the images came back from the crash, as they sometimes do when I am very tired; this time with a question, what if we had crashed and no one had been around to pull us out? I got no answer (but could guess) and then woke up with this Halloween ditty. The mind is a mysterious thing.