Sylvia's Journal

The codeine coated pain relievers help me through the night but take me deep down into dreamland. Axel appeared in a silky bowling outfit, black shorts with a white stripe, red silky bowling blouse with white piping, quite fetching. In another (part of the) dream he was ready to explain to me the complex arrangement of waterworks in some desert place but the foreman would not let us close enough to the machinery so that plan got aborted. The theme of aborting continued when I found myself going down Manhattan in a throng of people so dense that I went past my destination and could not turn around.

When I woke up, groggy, from my deep sleep, I kept rehearsing the words ‘overshooting the destination’ and ‘not being able to turn around’ in order to preserve the mental images of my dreams.

After a few cups of strong tea the words unhooked themselves from the Manhattan imagery and stood by themselves, turning into a summary of what happened on July 14, 2007. This sudden return to the crash was not a surprise: during the day brother Reinout had received a call from his significant other Joke who miraculously survived a blown tire at full speed on the German Autobahn. She totaled her car after swirling around amidst traffic that moves famously fast. Joke’s last thoughts, as she shared them with Reinout, resembled mine at the moment of surrender to forces bigger than oneself, with the words, ‘this is it…’ (not a question but, as the French call it, a ‘constat.’)

Such images and experiences don’t, as the Dutch say it, ‘settle into one’s cold clothes.’ They stay with you and I talked with Reinout about EMDR. Maybe Joke will need something like this if the images keep coming back.

This miracle put the crown on a wonderful day that started slowly in the morning with the Greek painters putting the finishing touches on the primer layer which now has to dry (in the drizzle) for the next 10 days.

 At the end of the morning we all piled into the car to drive to Cambridge. We dropped our Dutch visitors off at Harvard, always a magnet, while Axel and I were treated to a 20^th employment anniversary lunch at MSH. Seven of us who were hired between 1986 and 1989 told stories about our entrance into the organization which elicited lots of laughs, smiles and expression of horror as we recounted hiring and orientation practices that are now frowned upon. It made us all realize how far we have come as an organization. It was a wonderful lunch and I felt very fortunate to have entered this place all these years ago.

After lunch Axel joined the relatives for the Boston Duck Tour and a visit to Boston’s Apple store while I went from one meeting to another trying to fall back in an old work pattern that now seems very alien. My desk has already been taken, my stuff put away in boxed marked with my name. In between meetings I felt out of place as if I am no longer working there. It is amazing how quickly you go from being an insider to an outsider. Everyone was busy and my role in all of it that does not concern Afghanistan is fading quickly.

I was driven back to the North Shore by Barbara who moved, last December, into a beautifully restored and stately old house in Salem that once belonged to a wealthy leather importer some centuries ago. Axel et al returned from the Apple store and picked me up. We ended staying for a pizza dinner served on the beautiful porch until it got dark. When I my nephews no longer participated actively in the conversation, and I watched their eyes glaze over it was time to go home.