Sylvia's Journal

Today was all about tendons, muscles and ligaments. It started with a trip to Boston to the top shoulder repairman at MGH. After waiting for nearly 2 hours we got to see a brief glimpse of his majesty. It was billed as a pre-op visit but it was essentially a repeat of a previous visit: the same questions, the same demos. We wondered for what purpose we had driven all the way into the city other than providing billable time to the doctor and his assistant and overhead for an enormous supporting cast. One does get cynical about these things.

Surgery is scheduled for June 14, one day before our trip to the Cirque de Soleil (also in Boston). I bought four pricey seats – mostly a fundraiser for a great food growing program in Lynn. We may need to find a replacement for Axel.

The doctor asked if we had a recliner. We used to. We stupidly gave it away, not realizing that we’d need it again. It is the chair I lived in after my rotator cuff surgery for several days.

The trip to MGH took the whole morning. In the afternoon I had shoulder physical therapy. I walked from home, something I realized I can’t do at the moment. While my shoulder was warming up I asked for an icepack for my ankle which is still inflamed – the cortisone shot did little to relieve the swelling and the pain.

In the evening we went to a lecture about ankle and knee problems given by two orthopedes from MGH. I have made an appointment with the top ankle doctor from MGH for a second opinion, or rather the question, what will help me walk without pain again?

The lectures were excellent and I (re) learned a few things I already knew, but the illustrations of torn ligaments and tendon tears where quite compelling: if it hurts don’t do it; stretch and warm up and keep the joints moving. MGH gave us a light box lunch by way of dinner (the talk was after all from 6 to 8PM) and a (non alcoholic) drink exchange for this very educational infomercial. We noticed the competing hospital is now putting on a similar series. I image there are enough ankle and knee injuries to keep all the north shore orthopedes in business for years to come.

The girls pulled out all the stops for mother’s day. It was a two day event that started with dinner ‘en plein air’ (at Lobster Cove), followed by a concert in Rockport’s spectacular Shalin Liu Performance Center where we enjoyed a wonderful concert by the Parkington Sisters from Wellfleet, violin virtuosae and not unaccomplished on an assortment of other instruments.

Today, on mother’s day proper we had a high tea in Rockport at the Heath Tea Room. I was treated to an English high tea: a pot of Darjeeling, finger sandwiches, a scone with clotted cream, and some other dainties, all presented on a 3-level étagère.

Sandwiched in between those joyful events was another celebration but this one of a life that has passed. We drove to the South Shore to join a few colleagues in expressing our support for our bereaved colleague who lost her second son in three years. Life can be very cruel.

Our grandson-to-be was not delivered on mother’s day – it would have been a lovely mother’s day gift but he’s decided otherwise. He has maneuvered himself into the launch position. His mom is certainly ready to let him go.

We said goodbye at the end of this wonderful weekend hoping for a speedy reunion. Since the future mom and dad were each born 8 days early we calculated that we could be meeting our new grandson as soon as next Sunday.

The girls pulled out all the stops for mother’s day. It was a two day event that started with dinner ‘en plein air’ (at Lobster Cove), followed by a concert in Rockport’s spectacular Shalin Liu Performance Center where we enjoyed a wonderful concert by the Parkington Sisters from Wellfleet, violin virtuosae and not unaccomplished on an assortment of other instruments.

Today, on mother’s day proper we had a high tea in Rockport at the Heath Tea Room. I was treated to an English high tea: a pot of Darjeeling, finger sandwiches, a scone with clotted cream, and some other dainties, all presented on a 3-level étagère.

Sandwiched in between those joyful events was another celebration but this one of a life that has passed. We drove to the South Shore to join a few colleagues in expressing our support for our bereaved colleague who lost her second son in three years. Life can be very cruel.

Our grandson-to-be was not delivered on mother’s day – it would have been a lovely mother’s day gift but he’s decided otherwise. He has maneuvered himself into the launch position. His mom is certainly ready to let him go.

We said goodbye at the end of this wonderful weekend hoping for a speedy reunion. Since the future mom and dad were each born 8 days early we calculated that we could be meeting our new grandson as soon as next Sunday.

I feel like I have been lifted up into a creative cloud and I am happier than I have been in a long time. It has indeed been a long time. For the last few years I have not been very creative (knitting and embroidery doesn’t count as it is done from a pattern someone else created). My poetry had dried up (no new entries for a long long time), and I found myself reacting perversely to all the exhortations to ‘think out of the box,’ by crawling deeper into it.

My facilitation of a virtual course, my work on proposals, my writing of an e-learning course are combining to have a cumulative effect that has propelled me into the kind of creative thinking and exploration I had forgotten how to do. This is the funny thing about creativity (or innovation for that matter): it cannot be harnessed, it cannot be summoned.

Now, with what looks like enough work to fill my eight hours a day, I am released from that anxiety. And without travel on the horizon (not until after the Fourth of July) I am able to plash around in possibilities and ideas, and it changes everything.

It may not only be the work conditions that are responsible for this change. I have started to make a habit of doing a 15 minute silent meditation early in the morning and it is starting to have its effect – 15 minutes now passes by very quickly where at first it seemed like an hour. I can actually silence the verbal chatter. The visual chatter is still there but I can even shut that out for a few minutes at a time. I can slow my breath (and heartbeat to follow in tandem) and when I am done I feel like I can take on any challenge in the world with a calm intentionality.

On Sunday we skipped Quaker Meeting and went instead to the Gloucester Democratic Committee’s annual breakfast. Most of the speakers were women, strong and articulate women like Elizabeth Warren, State AG Martha Coakley, State Auditor Suzanne Bump, State Rep Anne Margaret Ferrante. I was so very proud of how these women presented themselves and their platforms so well. The fact that the women outnumbered the men, both in speakers and in the audience, didn’t go unnoticed.

But the rah-rah speeches don’t get me to stand up and cheer rah rahs back. I can’t stand the simplistic rhetoric of polarization – good versus bad – which is why I would never be a good politician.

After having done our democratic duty we devoted the rest of the day to our garden. The beets and chard are in, the snap dragons, the primroses. Axel was responsible for the vegetables, me for the flowers.

Axel caught an asparagus beetle which he promptly scanned and crushed under the scanner cover. We have to be very alert as they can do much damage to our precious crop. Sunday’s and Monday’s sunshine brought forth another whole meal.

Friday and Saturday evening Axel and I presented a slide show of our time in Afghanistan. Friday’s event was for our Quaker Friends.

We showed up in our Afghan outfits. Axel in his embroidered white tombon peron with waskot. He had already worn this as the father of the bride at Sita and Jim’s wedding. I wore a dress that Razia Jan had made and Axel had gifted me for my birthday in Kabul – black with red and gold embroidery. Underneath I wore the lace-edged pantaloons that S. had made for me to go underneath the burqa. I did bring the burqa but didn’t wear it. It would have created a bit of a stir on this quiet middle class Beverly street.

Each time we present about our experiences we realize how constricted and negative people’s image is of Afghanistan. A word association game would probably always yield words like Taliban, violence, war, guns, corruption, Karzai.

On Saturday evening we presented the same slides to our closest friends and realized how little we had talked about our time and work in Kabul. When we came back we re-integrated rapidly into the old life of our friendship. Or we told stories without pictures, a very different experience.

In between these two events Axel perfected his meditation technique – meditation having become easier since he got off much of his medicine. I travelled south to pick up Nuha at the airport. She was my student at Boston University some years ago and is now a PhD student at Johns Hopkins after having returned to her native Saudi Arabia where she is a public health lecturer at a progressive university where men and women study together.

I had seen the start of her blossoming into an assertive young woman, a process that has continued over the last few years. Although she hasn’t reached her thirties yet she now comes across as very mature. And she is even more assertive. The coffee shop where we had our tea provided our drinks in paper cups. She walked up to the counter and demanded real cups, since we were consuming on the premises. I don’t think she would have done that when I first knew her. Although she didn’t believe me, I noticed how her English had also improved as she provided me with breathless updates about her life after BU and now in Baltimore. When I called her to say that I was nearing the airport and that she should wait on the curb she texted me back ‘what’s a curb?’ At least I taught her one more word.

This was the happy-sad-happy week sandwich week.

Although I am no longer actively celebrating the (Dutch) queen’s birthday on April 30, this day has the fondest childhood memories attached to it. There was the excitement and anticipation of the march (in my girl scout uniform) before our town fathers and mothers (which in some years included my mom). They stood on the elegant balcony of the town hall, waving at us, the children of the town, marching along behind a flag or a sign that explained who we were.

It was always a holiday with much to do. There was the fair and the guilder and riksdaalder (now together the equivalent of a euro and change) we got from our parents and grandparents to spend on anything we wanted: rides, cotton candy, sweet cinnamon sticks (zuurstokken).

On May 4, 1958 my baby brother was born which means the week got extended with another exciting event. As the older sister, I put myself in charge of his parties and felt big and important. I also was his teacher, confidant and little mother.

Then in 2001 something very sad slipped in between these two happy events. On May 3 Sita’s best friend, a spunky, slightly older girl, we were all very attached to, died of an overdose. It was probably the scariest day in our life. The memory of that phone call, the rush to find out if Sita was OK, the confrontation with the reality that we would never see Jennee again is as deeply etched in our brains as the plane crash that was to follow a few years later. We planted a beach plum for Jennee. It flowers every year on May 3, even after having been uprooted for a new septic system.

Simmons’ College’s Center for Gender in Organizations puts on wonderful programs and whenever I am in the country I try to attend these sessions. And so yesterday, with a couple of colleagues, we traipsed off to the school of management over lunch time.

We were treated to a wonderful experiential session about the multiplicity of identities and power we hold by taking a closer look at ourselves and the dominant identities we have taken on or were born into.

Usually the narrative about women is about subordination. What I had not realized is that we, women and men, have so many identities, some we were born into (race, skin color, size and body type, sometimes religion), some we become automatically (older) and some we acquire (education, sometimes religion). The first task was to write down, without thinking too much, the identities we have and then see which jump out, and make them bold. Just realizing that this one is a dominant or subordinate one can be startling.

I wrote: grey-haired white female of Dutch descent, married, mother, nearly grandmother and then some smaller identities. The grey-haired jumped out and I got to explore a bit more about why it did.

In an paired sharing with someone we didn’t know we were asked to talk about an identity (or bundle of identities) that is/are dominant, how we felt when we didn’t get the entitlement we deserved, when we were called on being dominant. It brought back some painful but life changing experiences from an NTL course many years ago. And from my partner, a tall black man I learned something about profiling.

The exercise was both refreshing and a little sobering. As women (or any other minority) we are used to emphasize our subordinate identity. The presenters made a surprising statement: no matter how subordinate you feel in your life, everyone has at least one dominant identity – an abused wife still has dominance in her relationship with her kids when the husband is not around for example.

After work and picking up Axel we drove to Newburyport to see our friends Anne and Chuck who returned from a 5 week tour of friends, many of them Peace Corps buddies. It was their homage to 50 years of Peace Corps.

We attended a small fundraising event for a scholarship fund for Mexican kids and I ‘won’ a gift certificate for the restaurant in which the auction was held, which we used right away.

Our friends run a B&B in Newburyport and we got to stay in the Sorrento room, looking out over the Merrimack River.

The cortisone effect on the shoulder is not obvious, ‘pas evident’ as the French would say, but I am told to wait patiently – it takes a few days said today’s doctor, another one.

Last night we attended a lecture about the Manchester public library. Everyone there was over 50, maybe even 60 – I belonged to the younger crowd. We learned a lot about the library from a friend who picks stock during the day and is an architectural historian for fun in his spare time. He called our library ‘maybe the building with the most historical value in time.’ Such statements do open your eyes to things you took for granted.

Commissioned in the late 1800s by Jefferson Coolidge as a memorial to Manchester men who died during the civil war (a lot), a place for the survivors to rest their crutches and tell stories and a library. He told the stories about love lost that were hidden in carved and other details of the library that we had never paid attention to.

During the after-talk-social we learned of another library story about a marble bust of Lady Liberty that an electrician has put in the crawlspace underneath the library, so commanded by the then chief librarian. It’s a valuable statue, as it turned out when it was discovered when new wiring was put in place. The chief librarian wanted to get rid of the statue because youngsters kept putting gum on the exposed nipple and she was tired of cleaning it off.

Today I went for a very long walk along the Charles, having missed yesterday’s due to the rain. I was carefully observing how the pain in my ankle moved around the ankle, experimenting with walking on asphalt, grass and more uneven terrain, inclines up and inclines down.  When I re-counted the pain pattern under these various circumstances later to the foot doctor he said he wished he had an intern by his side – I had produced a teaching moment.

He showed me the osteoarthritis at my ankle joint on his computer screen (this is a doctor who spends as much time with his patients as is needed), the resulting inflammation and treatment options (not many). In the end I got another cortisone shot, this time in the ankle joint. We keep our fingers crossed that this will give some relief and reduce the inflammation.

The rains have driven many new asparagus out of their dark holes, enough to produce another dinner again this evening.

My last window for travel before grandbaby’s arrival remains open despite a few nibbles for trips to places as far apart as the Ukraine and St. Vincent. But preparation time is running out now and with this week being a short one in many countries of the world I am afraid the window will stay open until it closes on May 18.

Sita seems to be carrying a bit lower but that may be wishful thinking – although she did admit that breathing has become a little easier. She and Jim played with the rest of the Bunwinkies in Portland and Belfast – baby coming or not, the band plays on.

I spent a good part of the morning watching lots of videos of health leaders from all continents and both sexes, young and old, speak about their leadership journeys. I had been searching for clips that would be a good alternative to middle aged white American males speaking about leadership to people who looked very much like them. I found this wonderful collection at a website a friend pointed me to.

In the afternoon Axel accompanied me to see the shoulder doctor.  We are making a habit of going together to see doctors as we discovered that together we understand more and ask more.  The doctor nixed the calcific tendonitis hypothesis (already disproved by an X-ray) because the tendon in which the calcification would have happened is no longer attached to the muscle (or rotator cuff?) – a miracle the doctor could not accomplish then and not now. My rotator cuff will remain traumatized until he does something a lot more drastic. He agreed that I was too young for that and sent in his assistant to give me a cortisone shot. I am still very sore but was told to expect that as such shots tend to make things worse before they get better. I am expecting another bad night that will require the help of some chemicals before being able to move my arm freely and painlessly again.

We ended the day with another Flemish asparagus meal – a Dutch variation with American asparagus that has the wrong color. The new shoots keep coming up fast and furiously. Today we harvested 20  and another 10 or so are already waiting in the wings. The asparagus bed was a gift from friends right after we crashed; a gift that has been giving ever since.