Sylvia's Journal

A thick layer of saturated air hangs above the ground, obscuring the cove. Every 15 second the foghorn sounds its mournful warning to ships approaching our coast. It brings back memories to my first stay in this town and house, some 30 years ago. Then the foghorn startled me; now it is one of the most familiar and dearest sounds I can imagine, as it signals home.

I followed the elections in Afghanistan as best as I could on the internet. It was hard to gauge the overall success or failure. The stories put on blogs in and in the media, the photos and the videos were inspiring and heart breaking. Nothing took away from my determination to go there and contribute whatever I can. Axel was not fazed either.

The day started badly and unfolded badly for awhile: first a rear ending, some 15 minutes into my commute, when I stood on the breaks for a truck that swerved for a tractor trailer that pulled on to the highway without much of a stop or concern for the traffic in its lane. This led to a pile up behind me. I was the least impacted and only our car’s brand new bumper was scratched. It was my luck that a Toyota was in back of me, about the same size as our car; the lady in back of me was rear-ended by a large pickup truck that smashed up her entire backside. The two culprits in front of me drove off into the distance without a worry in the world, maybe even oblivious to the mess they had created behind them.

So we sat by the side of the road, exchanging information while the flashing blue lights of the police cruiser made everyone slow down and caused a rubberneck traffic jam on both sides of 128. Not a good start but then again, I was OK and so was my recuperating shoulder, on this first commute in after my surgery.

After a delightful lunch outside with my French speaking colleagues (our monthly dejeuner francais) I was stung by a wasp which produced a pain so piercing I was not able to walk any longer. Debbie, our receptionist, put my foot in a basin with water, then produced ice and about 20 minutes later I could walk again. Now, the next day, it is still hurting and itching a lot.

My departure date to Kabul was changed once again, just when I thought everything was settled. I am now leaving on the 21^stof September, mostly to avoid the slow weeks of Ramadan and the festivities at the end. My new boss insists on me having as much time to recover here and the professional attention of well trained and experienced physical therapists before I transfer to such care in Afghanistan. He has a point and everyone was relieved. Still, as per September 1 I will be considered permanent staff of the Afghanistan project, even though I am still formally based in Cambridge. The latter arrangement will last (even though after September 23 I will be physically in Kabul) until the project extension contracts is signed (October? November?) I am trying to sort out the implications of this organizational arrangement and its effect on my allowances and taxes; this is a bit of a research project.

I attended a few meetings and many more celebrations of birthdays and people departing, all accompanied by cakes and snacks, bringing everyone together; a slow work day one could say, but socially quite nice. I also cleaned out the last pieces of my office so that Joan can now sit at my desk and most of the physical traces of my 22 years of work at MSH headquarters are now gone: thrown out, given away or packed up.

Back at home Axel had blown a fuse, a combination of project management overload (still a result of the brain injury), the consequences of sending out mixed messages to the girls and the oppressing heat. It made me want to delay my return home, a selfish strategy of avoidance rather than rescue.  It was easy to let the celebrations take their course; as a result I left too late to avoid traffic and inched my way home. By the time I got home Axel had cooled off a little. We decided against cooking our own meal and instead drove to Gloucester to have dinner at one of our favorite restaurants there, The Rudder.

That’s when our luck turned. We were seated at the edge of the water, overlooking Gloucester’s inner harbor amidst countless holiday makers who were all vying for a seat on the terrace. Steve and Tessa, also in traffic, also hungry, pulled off for dinner on their way home from Boston. By the time we came home everyone and everything had cooled off and we were able to have a family meeting about supporting one another, chores and cleaning up our communication signals. Just as in Afghanistan, good and bad stuff intermingled to create an intense day for all of us.

I continue the half day of work and half day of rest – that is just about right. Today I am going to drive myself into work, very very early before there are too many other drivers on the road. I have done some test drives around town and as long as I don’t have to buckle and unbuckle myself a lot, or move the gear shift from drive to reverse I am doing OK. I am getting quite handy with my left hand and arm.

Since I could not take Reinout and Maurits up in the skies over Essex County myself, I outsourced this to the Beverly Flight Center and went along in the back seat to make sure they got the royal treatment (they got more than that!).  I had arranged for a scenic/introductory flight and Maurits was put behind the controls in the left seat. He was going to take us up in the air and down again, coached by veteran flight instructor John.  

We flew over the waters where Andrew took them by boat the day before and we circled Cape Ann, over the route we had taken a week earlier by car. It was hazy but at 2000 feet everything below was quite clear; this included our house which we circled a few times. At the end of the trip Maurits received a student pilot logbook with his first flight lesson recorded. He also got a Beverly Flight Center baseball cap and a T-shirt. The outing was, no surprise, a big hit with both father and son, but especially with our pilot. What more could a 14 year old want?

Maybe going home, sleep in his own bed, tell his friends and show off his new iPod that looks like an iPhone but without the phone part. In between flying and boating he poured all his energy in getting the gadget geared up for the long trip home, with movies and music that would keep him occupied during the flight.

I made some significant progress on preparations for the Ghana trip. I finally got my ticket and produced a set of facilitator notes and wrote everyone I know there that I am coming their way. My energy level is increasing slowly and I am dosing my work hours so that by the time I land on Monday morning, I will be ready for the intense week of work. I am glad Diane is coming along to share the load.

We had one final American cookout before Reinout and Maurits drove off to Logan. The fresh corn and super hamburgers should see them through till they land in Amsterdam, allowing them to skip the airplane meal in the middle of the night.

While we waited for the hamburgers to cook Sita gave Maurits one last ukulele lessons and he was able to play along with her quite nicely. He is a fast learner in all aspects: bread making, iPod, motor boat, plane and ukulele – such a wonder boy.

Axel and I spent the entire morning at the orthopedic-industrial complex, most of it in the waiting room with all of 5 minutes, a record, with the surgeon himself. He showed us the pictures he took during the procedure, through the scope. The supra and infra spinatus were torn badly. The pictures show something that looks like nylon roping and enormous screws that the surgeon used to pull and coax the ligaments back to where they should have been attached to the bone. The surgeon is hopeful that I will get my full range of motion back. Given the damage this is either a miracle or unlikely. Time will tell.

The rest of the afternoon I tried to focus on work and my departure to Kabul, with the date now set for 9/9/(0)9 , With all these nines it must be an auspicious day. According to some random numerology website, the number nine is about  “a shift from the material to the spiritual. Selfless service and universal ideas become paramount. […] the Nine closes the cycle by returning its love and compassion to higher ideals.” I think that fits nicely with my desire to work in Afghanistan.

But before my departure to Kabul there will be another departure next Sunday for a quick assignment in Ghana, to hand over senior leadership development work to my colleague Diane. I finally got the ticket and it looks like everything is all set to go. For our administrative staff it has been a month-long obstacle course to pull this off and I am grateful for their perseverance and good humor.

In the evening we celebarted Sita and Jim’s engagement  with three sets of parents and two sets of siblings. We were able to seat everyone around the large dining room table. Axel toasted the young couple and some of us got a little teary. As the mother of the bride this is all new territory for me and I spent considerable energy getting the dinner just right, including, as Sita noticed, preparing appetizers with all the things she hates: anchovies, olives, mushrooms and shrimp. I  had to ask myself what that was all about; some sort of unconscious boycot?

Tessa had made the cutest place setting cards and Reinout folded the napkins (where did he learn that?) that I thought should have been ironed but Sita told me not to bother. The wineglasses, table cloth and silverware did not match (who now has 12 of everything?) and everyone brought a few dishes. The arrangement and informality of it all is simply a taste of the what’s to come with the wedding, of the do-it-yourself variety. We will have little to do with the preparations, a little hard from our base in Kabul – but we will be there when it is all organized, and probably write a few checks.

Just when our party was breaking up Reinout and Maurits returned from their boat trip in the Essex waters, windblown faces, bronzed and happy as two little clams. Maurits had captained the boat at dazzling speed in between the red and green lights that showed the way back to the harbor after the sunlight had gone; obviously much more fun than an engagement party with adults he didn’t know. He’s also happy because he has a new iPod that keeps him busy when he is not boating, swimming or throwing sticks to the dog.

I started the day guiding a frustrated Steve to his new job by phone. He got lost in the Fenway around 7:30, not a good place or time. Having two Google maps in front of me I led him all over the BackBay until that big sigh of relief: destination in sight. Then he discovered he did not have to be there until 1 and suffered that most common illness of organizations: a lousy induction of new employees. I hope this does not omen badly. Steve is not doing work because he likes to but because he needs to – all of it a necessary evil until he has saved enough money to buy himself a goat farm. That is the long term vision and he is willing to suffer through much to get there.

I feel fortunate that I do like my work. My attention is beginning to converge on two countries, out of the 10 or so I had something going on in. Now it is just Ghana and Afghanistan. I thought I was all set with my upcoming Ghana trip and discovered only yesterday that the business ticket I had requested because of my arm had not been bought and is now getting too expensive. This is a trip that has been on the books for about 2 months. I am tired of having this kind of stress just before a trip. Five days before departure tickets become hard to get, especially when vacations are ending and I have lost my flexibility of dates and time. The only ticket I can get brings me home 3 days later than I had planned and only one week before my departure to Afghanistan. Not a nice prospect.

Yesterday I learned that my hearing in my right side is bad; a suspicion of this was picked up by my recent physical. The audiologist tested my hearing and showed me the resulting graph: right was a red line, below normal. I wonder if this is yet another delayed effect of the crash. There was no infection and no obvious reason for the hearing loss and so I have to squeeze in yet another visit to a specialist before I go.

Once again it was hotter than Hades. I tried to focus on my work in our non-air conditioned house, sitting right in front of a fan while on the other side of the wall our fireplace is being installed. It required major reconstructive and noisy surgery on the house. Axel rushed to and fro trying to line up workmen and dealing with the fallout of our incompetent electrician who had made yet another mistake. I think we will drop him from our list. In the meantime I can hear the architect and contractor’s cash registers go ‘Gaching!’ with each passing hour.  That is the hole in which I will pour all the danger pay that is rightfully mine for serving in Afghanistan.

We had our neighbors on both sides over for drinks to meet my relatives, something Axel always insists on even though it adds yet another task to an already frantic day.  These neighbors are related to each other and so we had a lot of relatives chatting and drinking in the shade under the maple tree. Andrew and Woody were the only non relatives but they might as well have been:  close and dear friends are family.

Andrew stayed for dinner which consisted once again of lobster and corn. Our Dutch visitors are running out of opportunities to eat this coveted crustacean. Reinout dug the potatoes for our dinner straight out of our garden. Over dinner Andrew hatched a plan for a boat trip exploring the mouth of the Essex River. I could see Maurits’ eyes light up – it sounded so much more fun than an engagement dinner with the new in-laws tonight. I told him we would happily excuse him and his dad because sunset on the Essex waters is pretty neat and a chance not to be missed.

I am licking my wounds, or welts, rather; huge painful bumps on my neck, arms, legs. They are red, sore and itchy, not your usual mosquito bites; some nasty White Mountain insect that preferred me over everyone else.

We went for a swim in the ocean as soon as we arrived home from the long drive back from Franconia. I don’t swim, one can’t with one arm, but made sure all welts were exposed to the salty seawater. It was as warm as Lobster Cove gets and sitting at the beach I was acutely aware that I am going to be away from this beautiful place for an entire year. Some people wonder why?

I went to bed early, as I am still perpetually sleep deprived. I slept a little better because I had an unlimited number of pillows available and the floor didn’t slope me down the bed as it did the previous two nights. Still, it was hotter than Hades for the third night in a row and the little airco we bought some years ago could not produce enough cold air to justify its name. It does wear me down all this not-so-good-sleeping.

Steve’s the only one up this early because he has to start his new job at Merck’s animal lab in Boston. There is  a new commute to check out and you don’t want to be late on your first day of work.

Reinout and Maurits decided to return to Manchester rather than spend the night in Plattsburgh NY after depositing Michiel (David) at his dorm. Apparently the deal was that they would not walk up with him to see his room and literally drop him off at the entrance. And so dad kept his promise. I don’t think I would have made such a deal if I had deposited my child thousands of miles away in a foreign country. I would have wanted to know where he is going to live for an entire year and who is looking after him. But maybe that is typical girl logic, hardly known by this family of mostly boys.

They arrived back home around 11 PM and, unfortunately, brought back most of the junk food we had sent them off with. It has been a week of indiscriminate eating and grazing and I can feel it. We can do better than that, especially now that our garden is in full production mode: peas, beans, tomatoes, basil, chard, potatoes, raspberries, cucumbers and kale.

I am counting the hours until the next milestone in my shoulder recovery: stitches out – tomorrow morning, just in time for Sita and Jim’s engagement dinner at our house on Tuesday evening.

Sleeping is literally still a pain in the neck. I tried to fall asleep without chemical assistance but I can  not get comfortable with the bulky sling and its bumper right on top of me. I toss and turn which then hurts this or that part of my neck and shoulder. The codeine-coated pain relievers bypass this settling in business. I hope this is not the begining of an addiction.

I was told by the physician’s assistant that the doctor may let me sleep without the sling in another two weeks, if all goes well. It is something to look forward to. After that it will be another 2 weeks when I can be free again.

I am still trying to nail down my departure date but it remains elusive, partially because of the political calendar in Afghanistan and partially because I have no idea how much physical therapy I should have before I go.  I have now decided to wait settling on my departure date until Tuesday when I see the surgeon and get my stitches taken out. We’ll ask the doctor about his opinion. I suspect he may ask, ‘do you really have to?’

I worked for at least 4 hours nonstop on an Afghanistan related writing project that left me exhausted. It is the first intense thinking and typing work I have done since the surgery and it is clear that I am still in convalescence mode and that this was all I could handle in one day. Luckily I have able colleagues in Cambridge who caught the not quite completed assignment and will complete it.

In the afternoon I found the boys back at the beach stoking up the fire that had not really gone out during the night and morning. Because of the high heat it had also produced quite a bit of charcoal, which we were able to use for last night’s beach cookout. A new fire pit was added and we had dueling fire pits, keeping all three very busy stoking again.  

In between these pyromaniac activities I took the boys on a tour of Cape Ann to see the Gloucester Fishermen’s Memorial, Gloucester’s Town Hall, and Motif #1 in Rockport. We drove along the Cape Ann coast until we arrived back where we had started.

In between we stopped at CVS where our new college student got his basic supplies while I started an impulse buy for all the CVS articles that I imagined hard to find in Kabul. I have never spent that much at CVS. It was the first time the move became more than something that will happen the future.

While we were eating the expertly cooked hotdogs and hamburgers, the mosquitoes were eating us; still we persisted and sat by the fire until it got dark. The nephews went for a swim in the dark while Sita and I played the ukulele – She brought one for Axel so that we can perfect our duets during our evenings in Kabul – I still have a long way to go.

It was an all day overcast vacation day for our Dutch visitors. This did not keep them out of the water and finally, I believe for the first time this summer, our various boats were used, including my Alden shell because Reinout and Maurits actually know how to row with a sliding seat. For Chicha it was a day full of balls and sticks and Frisbees that needed to be fetched, over and over again.

I tried to make it a work day as good as I could. My energy level is beginning to rise and I put in about half a day, mostly focusing on how to describe our past and future work in Afghanistan in ways that is aligned with the new US strategy in Afghanistan. This is still new territory for me.

I am teaching my youngest nephew how to use the bread maker since the consumption of bread and cheese has gone up fivefold.  This morning he also learned how to make pancakes and later today we will expand his repertoire with brownies.

Axel spent the entire afternoon walking across the estate with Chuck the septic system engineer to make sure we are putting the new system at the right place. We are getting some new-fangled experimental system; one part of it will look like a Jeu de Boules court I think. It’s very ingenuous and complicated, with fans and pumps inside it; as a result it also costs a lot. But the engineer claims it will outlive us and seems to know what he is talking about; his confidence is contagious. There are many approvals to get, a lengthy process he will lead and that starts this week.

The promise of a fire on the beach produced a surge of activities in preparation: raking the seaweed on big piles, collecting the wood, digging out the fire pit. The anticipation was hard to contain and before we knew it we had the largest roaring fire ever seen on Lobster Cove beach. This should not have surprised me since Reinout’s is the pyromaniac branch of my family.

Our parental home burned down in 1964, when Reinout was 6. The fascination with fire has stayed with him. When there is the promise of a fire he turns into that little boy again and so we had 3 teenagers ‘tending’ the fire instead of one adult and two teenagers. The dried seaweed was particularly attractive because it cracked and sparkled like Chinese fireworks, letting out enormous clouds of thick white smoke. I was surprised the fire brigade never showed up to berate us.

The fire was too big and hot to cook on and besides, the mosquitoes were everywhere, so we cooked and ate the lobster, clam and corn dinner inside. Axel was the lobster dismantling teacher, his every move closely followed by the three smoky boys. For Dutch people lobster is a delicacy they hardly ever eat and it was wonderful to watch everyone enjoy the meal.

After dinner we returned to the beach where the fire was still huge and hot and more seaweed fireworks were produced, mostly by Reinout who was having too much fun to let his sons tend the fire. I introduced them to s’mores, blending melted sugar, chocolate and cookie crumbs with mosquito repellent and sand.

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.