Sylvia's Journal

My internal alarm appears to be set at 6:30 AM and so I wake up no matter what. Luckily it has a snooze button. I could sleep in because I did not have a flying appointment with Bill today; he’s off showing the famous New England turning leaves to friends. I suppose I could have gone off on my own but I did not reserve a plane, since it is broken. Looking up at the bright blue sky, noticing the total absence of wind, I now regret I did not organize something. Instead Axel and I will go to the Topsfield Fair and see what’s left of the flower and vegetable displays, swing by the rabbits and livestock and look at the 4H exhibits. Axel’s father and his uncle Phil used to have a large display at the flower pavilion and my very first memories of a New England fall are intimately linked to the Topsfield Fair.

I had a fairly productive day at work at home yesterday, staying in my pajamas till about noontime and picking away steadily at the tasks to be accomplished before I leave for Tanzania later this month.

During my lunch break I made my second batch of Christmas mustard, a now traditional Christmas gift for which production starts early fall so that I have enough small jars to give away come Christmas. It makes the house smell wonderful (except at breakfast says Tessa). It is also an activity that allows for creativity as I ignore prescribed steps and quantities and experiment with substitutions. Somehow the mustard always comes out well; I have never had to throw a batch out.

At the end of the day I went to see my surgeon to get the stitches removed from my wrist. It feels good to be free of the stitches that felt very tight. The cut has healed nicely and I suspect by next week you cannot even tell anything was done to my hand. I can pick up heavy things again and sleep through the night without waking up because of tingling hands. Even my fingers on my left hand, without treatment, seem to be fine again.

When I came home I found everyone sitting by the cove on this balmy late afternoon. Woody had joined us for dinner and Axel was in charge of the kitchen. Axel’s day had been interrupted by two more therapies, EMDR and physical. He was happy to announce that the end of PT is in sight (2 more visits) which leave only the EMDR and the vestibular therapy in Boston. He admitted that if he’d do his eye exercises, homework for the vestibular therapy, more regularly he would probably speed up recovery; but then again, he has still so many exercises he has to do at home. I admire his discipline, as I have long ago stopped doing any of mine.

After everyone had left Axel and I watched a wonderful movie, The Band’s Visit, about a fading Egyptian police band that is supposed to play in a cultural center in one town in Israel but ends up in another. It’s a movie about loneliness, and getting lost as well as community and finding oneself again. It is also filmed like a documentary with some fabulous camera work. I loved listening to the sound of Arabic, a language I always regret I did not learn well enough while living in the Middle East.

I now have 35 dollars worth of maps in my car, an impulse buy after getting lost, once again, in the corridor between routes 93 and 1 North. I had planned to ‘swing by’ a colleague to see her and her new baby, on my way home yesterday. A distance of only 7 miles from my office, this seemed like a good idea. Once again the Google map showed an easy and direct route. This time I printed out the instructions, though not the map. One hour later I gave up, after several wrong turns and missed exists and endlessly waiting in rush hour traffic for countless red lights. Once back in familiar territory I pulled up at the first gas station and bought a collection of maps. I think I will stay out of that corridor for awhile.

Tessa and Steve got on the right but later train and arrived home in the dark. They found dog Chicha and grandma next door where Charlie was celebrating his 86th birthday. This feat earned him a big lick from Chicha, who had, grudgingly, interrupted her Frisbee game for this social call.

We ate a hastily prepared meal and caught up on the latest work stories. Every days Steve is doing more real work rather than waiting and observing. Yesterday he handled more mice. Steve is not really supposed to talk about his job but since Tessa can also not talk about her job, being with the competitor, what else can we do?

Even though Steve is brand new in his job he is already being pursued by the lab across the street where they do experiments on primates with deadly viruses (as in Preston’s Hot Zone). They offer better pay and more excitement and the chance of personal encounters with microscopic but lethal enemies like Ebola and Anthrax. He has agreed to go on an informational tour. Tessa and I think it is way too exciting and hope the informational tour is not like the kind they do for time share condos, making offers that seem too good to refuse, and which are usually too good to be true. The idea to be only one person away from things like Ebola and Anthrax gives us the creeps. So far it also gives Steve the creeps. We hope it stays that way. Good pay is hard to resist for a 25 year old who has not had any income for several months.  

Ha, this zero mailbox thing is working, everything under control so far as I do periodic sweeps through my Outlook and process each email – yes, the magic word is process: delete, reply, forward (and delete or task) and file. I felt on top of my (empty) inbox world till about 4 PM when I joined the rush hour traffic and inched my way over the Tobin Bridge squeezed into the few open lanes. Somewhere along the way Axel and I crossed paths, he on his way to class, but I don’t know where. Back home the dog was anxiously waiting for company, attention and exercise. I selected the ‘catch-the-frisbee’ game which gave her all three, tiring the dog without tiring me; I’d had enough exercise for the day.

I was waiting for Steve and Tessa to pull into the driveway and take over the Frisbee game but I heard the train pull in and out of Manchester station, without them. As it turned out they had hopped onto the wrong train. Tessa had been so engrossed in her book (and Steve, being from Canada, cannot distinguish Haverhill from Rockport, yet) that she did not notice the stops were not in the same places as usual. After a rude awakening in Melrose (ring, ring, Tessa where are you? Uhhh, in South Melrose, what the f…, ohh shit, more bad words) and a calculation of how long it would take to get back to North Station and then back out again to Manchester, I offered to get them. Little did I know!

It took some work to figure out where they were, a place I had never heard of (Greenwood). According to Tessa and Steve they were in the middle of nowhere, no town, no shops, no gas stations or bars. Even when I was close to Greenwood, as I later discovered, no one seemed to know the place. The Google map had given me a false sense of confidence. The route to Greenwood had looked so obvious on my computer screen that I had not bothered to print it. That turned out to be a mistake.

It took me over an hour to find them after I had driven the entire length of 129 up and down, east then west and then east again; over and under highways, retracting my steps, asking people – funny how only numbnuts and foreigners seem to be out on the streets after 8 PM – retracing my steps again. I was so disorientated by the time I found them that I would have taken 128 in the wrong direction (back to work) had I be in the driver’s seat. I asked Tessa to drive us home because my foot was hurting from so much driving. By the time we got home playtime was over and it was off to bed for us early risers.

At first I told Tessa she owed me big time for this rescue mission. She agreed and offered to cook everyone their own separate private dinner for penance. But now I realize that last night was nothing compared to the rescue mission Tessa and Sita, and their men, undertook on our behalf after our accident. I think the owing will forever be on our side; so we will continue to cook the dinners.

All day yesterday the Charles River looked very enticing, with many people practicing for the Head of the Charles but I could not join them. Holding a grip with my right hand is for now out of the question. This means that this season I will only have rowed about 6 times. With a 500 dollars membership fee for the year, the cost of each rowing outing comes to about 85. I am glad I enjoyed each as much as I did.

Everyone was back in the office and we had a full house; even Nuha showed up as an intern. I had not seen her since the end of the BU course on August 1. We have both traveled a bit since then. Nuha will work with us a few hours each week before she heads back to Saudi Arabia in January. I told her about the mishap with the deer and the plane but she is not fazed and we will fly before she leaves.

I have brought my sister into the Facebook community and I can tell she is having as much fun with it as I do; she is retired and so she has more time, and she already discovered another Vriesendorp on Facebook I don’t have in my collection. We posted dueling ‘self with giant snake’ pictures; mine was taken at the Python temple in Ouidja in Benin. I don’t know where hers was taken. Her snake looked so much bigger and better fed.

I picked up Steve and Tessa at North Station on my commute home. Steve actually got to handle animals (they are all mice) in his lab. Since mice belong to my least favorite category of animals (rodents) I could only stand so much of the details about handling mice. He described them as ‘popcorn’ mice meaning that when you open the cage they come popping out. The thought alone made me shiver. He is not allowed to use his hands and has to pick them up with forceps. This is tricky because you have to pinch them exactly at the base of the tail. “Otherwise you de-glove them,” he added with a grin. De-glove was the word used to describe the condition of Axel’s head after the crash, and the word gives me the willies each time I hear it; visualizing a de-gloved rodent is just as scary. I decided I can stand to hear only so much about Steve’s work, not my kind of job. Tessa’s job is more my line, even though we will not talk about it to preserve the honest competition between our two organizations.

To make sure that Axel would be ready for the arrival of three hungry people, I announced the start of our commute by phone as soon as I got into the car. He said “dinner is ready.” When we came home we had a brief exchange about the meaning of the word “is” (just like Bill C. did some years ago) with Axel’s interpretation a little looser than us hungry people had in mind. To his credit he had spent hours in the kitchen cooking us a delicious meal of chard from the garden, rice and spicy chicken wings and it was nearly ready when we walked into the kitchen. For desert we ate the remains of a Dr. Oetker tiramisu (out of a package). Although the tiramisu was something I had never heard of as a child, Dr. Oetker was a familiar brand in my childhood kitchen, much like Betty Crocker is in the US. This is the power of brand recognition; it’s like eating your own memories. We decided that the tiramisu in a box is not bad compared to the one made from scratch, and much cheaper.

We watched the second presidential debate last night. Axel could not help himself making lots of editorials comments throughout. He really got worked up, a bonus feature of this debate (the last one I watched on my own). We were pleased with Obama’s performance and, as usual stunned by how the other side rated its performance. Clearly, there are still way too many people in this country who fall for a doddery elder statesman who say ‘my friends’ all the time. We are not his friends.

We did not have dinner ready when our darling children came home from work; Axel had been with a client all afternoon and I had been digging in my inbox. It is rare at our house that everyone is actually doing paid work, but that’s what was happening yesterday; it interfered with household duties.

Even though dinner was not ready and because a sliver of daylight was left, Tessa, Steve and Axel went for a walk, with Chicha accompanying them happily and pretending it was her first walk of the day. After that we all pitched in and dinner appeared just in time before any system breakdowns.

We sat around the dinner table eating this hastily prepared meal and heard the stories of Tessa’s day (so-so) and Steve’s day. His (first) day had little to do with lab animal husbandry, for which he is hired, and much with HR orientations and paperwork. He is also learning, through trial and error, the lay of the land and of public transport South of North station.

Even though we did not talk much about Steve’s new laboratory work, my dreams were full of lab technicians in white coats and lectures about not contaminating the data.

The dream from which I woke up this morning had nothing to do with labs and everything with large natural catastrophes. I hope it is not one of those predictive dreams. I was in Haiti, sitting on a terrace with friends and colleagues at the bottom of a huge mountain with dark and angry storm clouds overhead. And then all hell broke loose. The storm consisted of boulders the size of a Smart car that came hurtling down the mountain. Everyone else around me seemed to take the storm in stride and not even looking where the boulders landed. I found myself tracking each boulder and actively ducking when one bounced over the edge of the terrace. Thank God for alarm clocks. It was a relief to wake up and find myself safely in my bed and the boulders gone.

I have a sense that this is about the world financial crisis. I heard much news yesterday about the storm it is raking loose in the rest of the world; boulders that can squash you if you don’t watch out. So far we have dodged the boulders and kept from being squashed but we have lost a sizeable chunk of our retirement savings. 

As we drove home from Duxbury I read Axel the chapter in Jerome Groopman’s book (How Doctors Think) called Marketing, Money and Medical Decisions. It showed us why Hillary did not make much headway with her healthcare reform early in her husband’s administration. It also shows why, to this day, no one is making much headway as all the interests and stakes are like one giant Gordian knot.

Last night we saw Anna Deavere Smith’s wonderful play (Let me down easy) in Cambridge. The play is about grace and she gives the audience a view on grace through many windows: clergy, Rwanda, horse-racing and healthcare, acting out the voices of various stakeholders she interviewed; the performance highlighted one facet of the healthcare knot, the book another, and our own experience yet another. There are probably a thousand more and all of them show the same tangled knot. I am glad I can forget about it for awhile, until I get to see the high and mighty top docs later in November.

On the way back from the play I slept while Axel fiddled with the radio to get the latest on the Red Sox. There was no one on the road but us. Sita and Jim were at Fenway Park for the very long time it took to arrive at the game’s disappointing ending. We saw them briefly this morning and heard more wonderful stories about her trip around the world, especially her encounters with Billy Jean King, Sally Ride, Melinda Gates and other powerhouse women. Unfortunately she had to leave early to take care of her bills and invoices. She headed back to their home in Western Mass leaving Jim behind at his dad’s for work in his Manchester office; a bit of a LAT relationship these two have.

Tessa and Steve, even though they live here, we never even saw over the weekend. They left together on the 7 o’clock train this morning like an old married commuter couple, off to their respective jobs in Boston. We get to take care of the dog and wonder whether we can be the kind of grandparents this very energetic and playful creature needs. I took her out for a walk, or rather she took me out, rushing after anything that moved; this included acorns falling from the trees by the thousands, squirrels and chipmunks and even wild turkeys. We were both panting when we got back home.

My workday at home was productive if you can call it productive to get a phone mess cleared up and achieve ‘zero email’ at the end of the day without indiscriminate deletes and actually reading, responding and forwarding emails that required reading, responding or forwarding. I used to have an empty inbox at the end of each workday until we fell out of the sky. It has taken me 14 months to get back to where I was on July 13, 2007. There is actually a video about this idea (Inbox Zero). I think it is a movement of some sort.

Under a bright blue fall sky we sat in a circle in the yard of Cedar Hill retreat center in Duxbury. Our Quaker meeting goes there every year for its annual fall retreat. I have missed the last four or five years because of travel; being in town this year, I signed us up and Friday night’s internet adventure was only the prelude.

Everyone had brought something to share. It was an interesting mix of pieces: quotes, poems, stories from the bible and less famous books, some familiar and some not. It was like a potluck of food for the soul. We read, recited and listened to all this while the sun was shining, the birds chirping and the wind blowing through the tall trees around us, with an occasional small plane overhead or boat out in the bay. It can’t get more peaceful than that. Maybe for that reason, for the first time in years, the muse was with me; two small poems emerged spontaneously, one about the crabgrass that was the predominant groundcover on the expansive lawn, pockmarked by paw prints of small animals rooting for grubs; the other about the colors you see behind your eyelids when you close your eyes against the sun.

Between the end of our soul potluck and dinner Axel and I walked the shore of the estate, along Duxbury bay, looking for objects on the beach that would make good water color subjects; and careful not to touch the very abundant poison ivy that was as lush as we had seen it in Maine. I have been told poison ivy thrives when the environment degrades and that, eventually, even goats could not save us from this very invasive plant (they would eat everything else too, facilitating a comeback). When I first came to the US I had never heard of poison ivy and had a hard time recognizing it; I would have been seduced by its vibrant fall colors and berries had Axel not held me back. Along the edge of the low woods surrounding the beach the ivy’s flaming red and orange colors burst through the green of the trees; foreground, not background.

Dinner was a wonderful noisy affair with 19 people and a baby, sitting around two tables shoved together. After dinner we brought out the art supplies, part of the very loosely designed program, and musical instruments, to accompany the creative extravaganza. The musicians outlasted the painters and more and more people joined the singers. It reminded me of our Dakar days when we used to spend entire Sunday afternoons sitting in a circle, outside or inside, singing and playing familiar bluegrass songs.

Axel and I had picked the small front room of the old and creaky colonial retreat house as our sleeping quarters, sort of like the concierge’s space, right by the front door. Two old twin beds, placed at an angle, filled up most of the room; mine high off the ground and slanted to one side which made staying on top of it, in my slippery nylon sleeping back, a bit of a challenge; it required a few adjustments during the night.

A small crew of men woke up early in the morning to make us an elaborate breakfast of scones, home fries, crepes, fruit and scrambled eggs. We ended our retreat with our usual meeting for worship, sitting in a circle, in this funky and wonderful place, a silent hour that felt like 15 minutes; then a concerted attempt to return the place to the state in which we had found it, and out at noon exactly, to return home.

Last night, down at the beach, a bunch of 25 year olds celebrated a birthday around a fire, with beer, hotdogs and hamburgers, like a summer barbecue except that we are at the edge of winter, it’s fall already and it’s cold. I did not last long and wandered inside. I needed some quiet time to pick my reading for our Quaker retreat which starts this afternoon.

I had put a stack of books on my desk: Pendle Hill Pamphlets, Parker Palmer’s To Know As We Are Known, Robert Greenleaf’s The Power of Servant Leadership. I leafed through them but could not find what I was seeking (not that I knew what I was seeking). So I stopped for awhile and checked what all my friends were doing on FaceBook. Olivier from Holland had commented on the video I put there of Jill Taylor, where she explains in a dramatic way what it is like to observe your own stroke. Some (sympathetic?) neuron fired in my head and I opened a folder on my computer labeled ‘spirituality.’ I clicked on the ‘Jung’ file, a document that contained all the quotes that spoke to me as I read Jung and the story of our time, written by Laurens van der Post (New York: 1975, Pantheon Books). Some of the quotes are Jung’s but many are the author’s commentaries on this extraordinary conversation with this extraordinary man.

In the middle of my notes I stumbled on a reference to a Quaker, Elined Kotschnig. I wondered who she was, and googled her name. She was editor of a journal, the Inward Light, and one of the leading figures of the annual Friends Conference on Psychology and Religion, drawn to the psychology of C.G. Jung because, as she said, he took religion seriously. She wrote: “He invited us to his home. Three cars full of us drove over. We had tea in the Jungs’ garden with strawberries from the garden, and for three or four hours he discussed with us the relationship of Quakerism and Jungian psychology. Jung agreed that the Quaker idea of the Inner Light was real. I remember his saying that if he had had an early choice of Christian communities, he probably would have picked Quakerism.“

Curious about this Inward Light journal, I continued my search until I found something I did not have to buy. It was a piece from another person I had never heard of, Edith Sullwold. In ‘Mysteries of Change’ she describes how a group of people came together and made a decision that she did not think possible at first. What she really describes is the creative group process, and I felt I had come home. Edith ponders the ingredients, asks the question, what just happened? Her keen observational skills pointed out that “[…] there was an acceptance of the sense of order and lawfulness of spirit. And there was amazing patience with an acceptance of the individual, giving the persons and the ideas a large, unjudged space in which to exist.” I knew what she was talking about. I have experienced what she describes, when the chatter stops and the right brain takes over, as Jill Taylor would say.

And suddenly I see myself holding this bunch of strings in my hand, strings blown together by the internet winds: psychology, religion, Jung, Quakers, brain anatomy and physiology, creative group process. What now? I still did not have my reading.

I felt as if I was running, breathlessly, a treasure hunt, picking up gems left and right. I took a break and watched Jill’s video again. When she talks about her right brain I understand Jung and religion in a different way; not psychology and religion but physiology and religion. She knew the quiet mind, when the left brain chatter has stopped, the still place in which everything is connected to everything and energies streams across what we usually call a boundary (even though science tells us such boundaries are an illusion). Something of what Jill describes reminds me of descriptions of early Quakers and how they experienced the silence in meeting. It was a different silence than the one we usually get. Our brains must be different than those of our ancestors. Could it be that the left and right hemispheres were more balanced, more in harmony with one another?

As a child psychologist I learned that early brain stimulation was good for children but maybe, in this century, we produced hyper brains that cannot help themselves as they think, analyze, project, deduce, judge, especially judge to the point that there is no more stopping them; overdeveloped left brains that are too clever for us; that created a costly financial crisis simply out of ideas and cleverly packaged transactions few of us understand (Axel sent me a left-brain piece about the financial crisis that left me breathless). Our brainy hard disk brains whirr and whiz making ever more noise, trying to keep up while no one is feeding the right side. I think that is the message I get from Jill Taylor. It was also the message I got from Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth, Power of Now) a book that Joe gave us and that, at first, I could not (under)stand. But then I got it and I realized he was talking about exactly the same thing as Jill was, as Jung was, and as the Quakers are, and what I see when the creative process is really (really) working or when they are sitting silently in Meeting for Worship.

At one point in the video (and in her fabulous book Stroke of Insight) Jill describes that moment when she was either going to slide back into life or forward into death, while she was rushed to the hospital. It was the same eerie silent space that I remember from when we entered the actual moment of the crash and I thought everything was over and I surrendered because there was nothing else to do. Nothing else to do was also the signal that Jill Taylor received…when there is nothing else to do the left brain is of no use anymore and stops its chatter. Most of us never get to that place and so we have no idea. I glimpsed it and it was beautiful. But how to resurrect it without endangering your life?

I think I just wrote my reading.

Last night was about multiple meanings of stitches – knitting, a debate that would have us in stitches and stitches in my hand – yes, no and mostly itchy rather than painful.

My hand is healing so fast that I was able to knit again last night, while I watched the vice presidential debate. Tessa sat with me for a while and then got so bored that she went to bed; everyone had such high expectations about the debate, sparks, blunders, but none of that happened, no one was in stitches. So I knitted and listened and decided that Sarah Palin didn’t do as bad as people had predicted and Tina Fey has to make up another act. And as for the stitches, this morning I took the bandages off, observed that the cut had already healed and was nicely pulled together by three tiny knots, took a shower and went on with my life.

Today is Steve’s 25th birthday. I asked him last night about quarter-life crisis and how he felt about this quarter century milestone with a new job starting next week, a solid relationship of three years, a dog, a car and living with his in-laws. Not bad.

I talked on the phone with my colleague Hare Ram in Nepal on the eve of the Hindu festival of Vijaya Dashami. I had received a greeting card from Nepal with a picture of the goddess Durga slaying two bad looking guys with horns, with the help of a lion. She has 10 arms, and while one is spearing the bad guy the other carry stuff like food, something that looks like a twirling CD, other weapons and whatnot. I asked Hare ram to explain the imagery to me. The good conquering the evil was obvious, but what about the 10 arms? Oh, he said, that’s about women being better at multi-tasking than men, and about woman power; this is certainly true in my house, he added with a chuckle. Happy holidays to all my Hindu friends!

Talking about powerful women who have their many hands and arms stretched far and wide Sita has seen a few, as per her Facebook entry: Martha Steward, Sally Ride and Billy Jean King. She’s canvassing them about Sarah Palin and is getting, not surprisingly, both the thumbs up and down. I wondered if they all watched last night and what the commentaries were. We are looking forward to see her and get the stories. I am sure she will be happy to be among ordinary people again, the folks who live on Main street.

My surgery was swift and efficiently handled at a brand-new day surgery complex in Danvers. About 6 professionals attended to me during the various phases of the process, most wearing colorful cloth caps rather than the usual light blue disposable ones. My surgeon had one made of African cloth, the anesthesiologist a calico one that matched her outfit (not blue). I am sure all these changes came from focus group research and a serious intent to serve the customer well. I felt very well served.

I was wheeled into the OT already drowsy from the drug they were slowly dripping into me, and welcomed by blue grass music which the people who were operating on me discussed during the procedure, a conversation I followed and wanted to take part in but my mouth would not let me. I could not see the handiwork because of a drape that shielded me from my operators. I thought they were still arranging my hand in the right position when the drape was pulled away with the words “we’re done!” It felt like only seconds had passed. I was wheeled into the recovery room, given a choice of muffins or raisin toast and a coffee which I savored in small bites and slow sips while waiting for Axel to come and get me. And that was it, 8:30 in 10:30 out. On the way home I picked up some videos expecting to be lying low the rest of the day, a light and unknown Robin Williams (Licensed to Wed) and Persepolis.

And with that I became a temporary lefty, an very underdeveloped lefty at that. Witness my (left) handwritten and unintelligible source reference for a quote (“Medicine involves “thought-in-action,” unlike, say, economics. Economists work by first assembling large body of data, then analyzing it meticulously, and only then […]”). It should read ‘How doctors think by Jerome Groopman, M.D. It is good I still have the book around because I could not decipher my scribbles this morning.

When I woke up this morning my hand no longer felt like the prosthetic with rubber fingers that it did all of yesterday. This short unpleasant experience gave me a little better understanding of what Axel suffered for more than 6 months while the nerves on his left arm and hand were incapacitated. It is a strange sensation when you look at an extremity that is yours but cannot will it to do what you want. With the muscles and tendons that control the extensors of my fingers temporarily paralyzed my hand looked like a claw; I could not straighten them fingers.

I did some work on my computer and then facebooked a little so see how all my friends, scattered around the world, are doing. I found Nicole home-sick for colorful Vermont in faraway Nepal, chatted with student Brianna in Haiti and explained to Suzy in Virginia what action the Sarah Palin action doll actually engages in (shooting from the hip with her tiny holstered plastic revolver). I ordered the doll on request from my sister from a website that offers to create an action doll of anyone you wish.
I could also have gotten Obama, McCain, Elliott Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a host of others, including Pez dispensers with Obama or McCain heads (for a steep price, but hey, it may be an investment that the great-grandchildren can sell on E-bay light years from now for a good profit).

Tessa came home from another long workday and train commute in and out of Boston and found this rather unusual vegetable that we had displayed on the kitchen counter. Her eyes nearly popped out (as they do in cartoons) because at first she thought this was how big the foot long beans (kouseband bonen in Dutch) that I planted can actually grow. I had several times lectured everyone in the household that they weren’t picking the beans and that they were missing out on this delicacy. She thought for a moment that the vegetable in front of her was a bean left too long on the vine. It’s actually a Sicilian squash gifted to us by Ted’s brother Gerry. It would take them weeks to eat it. We’ll get going on it tonight.

And while we are looking at squash, Sita is scribing Warren Buffett and the most powerful women in the world in Southern California.