Sylvia's Journal

Today is the Queen’s Birthday, Koninginnedag, again. I think I wrote about this before. It is not really Queen Beatrix birthday but her mother’s. Beatrix was born on a cold winter day, not a good day to go out on the streets and celebrate. So the government made April 30 the forever Queen’s birthday.

But today is different because Queen Beatrix vacated the throne in favor of her first born, King Willem Alexander. His name makes one think of Russia and England, two nations once intertwined because of royal and imperial blood relations. I can’t remember the Dutch role in all this, but here he is, our new King. Axel was the first to tell me this morning. I am still a happy carrier of a Dutch passport, so I have a king now. Amazing, after three generations of Queens.

Our new king is married to an Argentinian. His mom, his aunt Irene and his grandma also looked for mates outside our borders. In the olden days of kings and queens and emperors, this made sense because such unions created or tightened strategic alliances. I don’t think these things matter much now. I presume she will be our new queen (not Queen).

A glorious weekend; if last week there were days that felt like November, this weekend was more like June. The birds are everywhere, trees are in bloom, tulips and daffodils are out. I biked to Quaker meeting where the messages were about peace, the following of an inner voice and the creativity and openness to the world of young children. I biked back full of energy and open to the world, noticing at least 50 cents worth of beer cans along the road. I used to stop and pick them up, but today I was in a hurry to get back to Lobster Cove.

Axel had gotten up early to see if the mussels we transplanted last summer had made it through the winter and the many storms that badgered Lobster Cove. The tide was so low that he could walk to the mouth of the cove – we can’t remember it being this low. He was happy to report most clumps were still where he’d put them and Roger brought a few more clumps from Ipswich – they are taking well to our waters.

He discovered a few oysters that had settled on a pipe that once wounded Sietske’s belly when she swam over it at low (but not low enough) tide. Our friend Jan, with snorkel on, sawed the pipe down. Now it is an oyster farm. But having oysters in Lobster Cove is not necessarily a good thing. We like them but they shouldn’t be here. They like warmer water than mussels.

I replaced the dead blueberry bush with a new one, full of blossoms. Now the surviving blueberry has a mate again and cross pollination can take place. I covered the raspberry and asparagus beds with shredded hay to keep the weeds down. Axel leveled the garden and covered it with black plastic to sanitize the soil. One more nice day like today will do the trick. Then we can put in the kale, beets, fingerling potatoes, leeks and coriander.

I have gotten into the habit of drinking hot water in the morning, and even all day long. There have been days or even weeks when I didn’t touch coffee or tea. It’s good to know I can easily drop these addictives. I learned to drink hot water from a friend who hails from the Far East.

But this morning I decided I wanted some coffee and picked, from the array of cups for the Keurig machine the Dark Magic. It promised spellbinding complexity and a deep, dark and intense experience…as if I was in the Far East. Given the tasks I am working on it seemed a better choice than the Kenyan AA which promised only sparkling freshness. Despite its promises, the cup of coffee was a ‘meh’ experience, and so I went back to hot water.

Faro gets in hot water all the time, now that he is totally mobile. Our derobed living room has lengthened the time between interventions from one second to ten – when one of us has to get up and take something out of his hands that shouldn’t be there, or drag him back from wherever he is going. He is liquid, like water, or maybe mercury, moving fast over surfaces, easily moving over obstacles now. It’s nice to be a grandparent. I can feel useful (to the exhausted parents) and also withdraw without asking permission when I have enough of this policing.

With Sita, Faro and Jim camping out at our house a lot (because of Sita’s gigs in Boston), Axel has been our designated chief cook and bottle washer. He is getting better at remembering to have a meal ready when I come home, exhausted from 12 hours away from home, filled with office work that is at times creative or dramatic. He made nearly all the recipes from a Weight Watcher’s power foods cookbook, a daily treat with few points. He got it at his weekly weigh-in, where he competes with Gloucester women on how to get the most weight off. He has been doing well, with a few lapses. These lapses come from watching MadMen. The series stimulate the consumption of (strong) alcoholic beverages. We are now in season 4, and that habit is still strong. The formula is: Make sure you always have a bottle of something strong at hand. When there is trouble, a difficult moment or conversation, pour a tumbler, empty it in one gulp, then sigh! At least we are resisting the lighting up. I know from my past (smoking) life that watching such actions make you want to do the same – it is highly contagious.

I am making some progress in my coaching training. The end of the sessions with members of my cohort (3 one hour sessions a week for 12 weeks in a row) is in sight. By the time I depart for Egypt, in two weeks, some of these weekly requirements should be completed, lightening my weekly schedule a bit.

While many things were out of order the last week, something was very orderly: the first 6 asparagus spears are poking through the soil, the lilacs are budding, the forsythia bush is in full bloom and the trees along the Charles River are full of blossoms. The daffodils that some kind souls or the town planted along the Charles make the walk along Memorial Drive particularly attractive. I remember last year walking that path, taking pictures and marveling at the beauty. I am sad that this year I can’t make that walk anymore – most any walk is now out of the question.

We worked in the yard; burning the winter debris in the garden, pruning the fruit trees and bushes and raking the leaves, exposing the white pips of the lily of the value, poking through the undergrowth. We know the sequence so well, seeing one after the other part of our garden come to life. The blisters on my hands after an hour of raking are also a recurrent phenomenon each spring.

All these new beginnings tried to offset the endings – two funerals took place of people killed in the mayhem last week – but the sadness if everywhere. Testimonials to the young MIT police officer are on buildings, lighted homages he will never read. And then there is the 8 year old boy who was buried today. I can’t begin to imagine the hole he leaves behind.

Sita, Jim and Faro are back with us, transforming our living room into something we vaguely remember from 30 years ago – child proofed, all the tchotchkies removed, empty surfaces; the results of our Brazilian cleaning lady’s efforts obscured before I even came home. It will pass, I think, although I also know this passing will take a while. But we are richly compensated by Faro’s grins and chuckles – he likes being at opa’s and oma’s. He tried his first Marmite sandwich (he liked it) and had a sip of my beer (he also liked it but his mom did not like it that he liked it). He was less enthused about the edamame and broccoli – we found all smooched under his seat , spit out while we were not looking. He preferred the brown rice with Hoisin sauce and left a trail of grains along his feeding trail.

I have been singing Dutch songs with him. He recognizes them now; the one about hand clapping (in Dutch) leads to spontaneous handclapping and the one about how Lords, Ladies and Lads are riding their horses (‘Zo rijden de Heren…”) produces squeals of laughter but only for the Lads part which is the wild ride of course – he doesn’t care about the measured ride of the Lords or Ladies. And then, when he gets cranky and it is time for bed, I hand him back to his parents. Grantparenthood is the best!

By Thursday the more than full work week had started to interfere with my brain. After another long and intense meeting in the morning I had started to be forgetful, misplacing things. My body told me to go to sleep, and if that wasn’t possible, to go home. I did the latter, hoping for a quiet day on Friday, with only a few work-related things to attend to and the rest for rest.

But Friday turned out a little different. While I was in a deep and exhausted state of sleep, things started to unfold in Boston that were eerily reminiscent of Kabul. A 6 AM email from our office manager said ‘office closed, check the news.’ What I saw was beyond anything I’d ever expected to see in Boston – gunfire exchanges, captured on someone’s cellphone. Throughout the sequence I was struck by the barking dogs; animals know when something is amiss. There was mayhem in the animal kingdom and human kingdom alike.

Some of the action was very close to our office and many colleagues were in lockdown. They tweeted and facebooked to let people know they were OK. For people watching from a distance, these social media are a great thing and permitted full audience participation in the unfolding drama. News is no longer news but a series of personal experiences and opinions, especially when factual information is scarce.

We went through the day listening to the radio and watching TV until we couldn’t stomach anymore the guessing games, the rumors and the interviews with classmates who told us the two suspects were smart, wonderful and friendly (‘even aggressively friendly,’ said one – was that a clue?), while we were shown their pictures. Once the older one was dead the 19 year old suddenly looked very vulnerable and wide-eyed in a way I associate with innocence. Of course we knew he wasn’t but I couldn’t help thinking that something had gone terribly wrong in his brain.

I am wondering how he can recover in a hospital where he is kept from people, if even there would be any, who’d want to wish him well, with all the anger of the world directed at him. I am wondering about a thousand other things that will forever be different in the lives of those directly and indirectly affected. We are now in a new normal someone said on the radio. They also said that after 9/11 and they will say it every time something cataclysmic happens here.

And yet such events happen every day somewhere in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Somalia, in the Congo – no longer considered cataclysmic because they are part of the old normal over there. Nothing changes. But here things will change. I expect even more paranoia and efforts that feed into the illusion that, in today’s world, we can be safe. We cannot, no one ever has. It is the price we pay for living.

We started celebrating our 33rd wedding anniversary on Thursday evening with a surprise ride, at least for Axel, to an unknown destination. I let the GPS do the talking, and so, as we got closer and closer to our destination, first entering Beverly, then Salem, he began to guess. When we stopped in front of the Waterfront Hotel & Suites in Salem the surprise was complete and over.

We checked in and then walked to a restaurant in back of the hotel on Pickering Wharf. We ordered what we wanted without looking at prices, which made the dinner about even with the cost of lodging. The restaurant (‘62’) is an upscale Italian restaurant with a creative bartender, cook and sommelier. The dishes were small and attractively plated. Our desert was accompanied by two tall glasses of Prosecco, compliments of the chef, for our celebration. If my gift to Axel (a night and day out) was transient, his to me was forever, two seaglass earrings from a local artist with small silver dragonflies. From my medicine card days I remember that dragonflies are reminders to tend to oneself. I haven’t done that well lately.

I had taken Friday off so we could sleep in and do whatever we pleased. The weather wasn’t entirely cooperating as we walked in the freezing rain to a longtime favorite restaurant (Reds) for breakfast. The benedict meals we ordered (accompanied by Irish pork and cod cakes) left me without any desire for food until 7:30 PM. We had to buy Tums to help our stomach digest the rather rich fare. At that restaurant one would not know there was an obesity crisis brewing in the US.

We window shopped for a bit which wasn’t all that much fun in sleeting rain and found refuge in one of my favorite yarn stores (Seed Stitch Fine Yarn) where a young mother with her baby, same age as Faro, was tending to her knitting and child, a challenging combination. I bought a knitting bowl, a ceramic pot with a slot of the yarn, to keep it from rolling all over the floor and appeal to cats and babies alike.

Next stop was the Peabody and Essex Museum where we renewed our membership and admired an exhibit about modern Indian art after watching a fascinating video of Nick Cave and his soundsuits dancing on an all white screen, a modern version of African witch doctors.

We ended our 24 hour celebration with a Vietnamese shrimp and noodle meal and watching no less than 3 episodes of MadMen. Today we entered our 34th year of being together, what a ride!

Opa Axel is baby proofing our kitchen. We have one gate (the cheap one) that requires something akin to a PT exercise – leg lifts – if one wants to go to its other side. The gate on the other side of the kitchen has a door which, with some practice, opens easily. It requires a spanner to put in place, a tool easy to loose so we put it in the messy drawer above the gate.

Baby Faro has discovered there is good stuff in the kitchen drawers and would soon have discovered the liquor cabinet if it wasn’t for Axel’s swift response. All morning Opa screwed in plastic devices that have made our life in the kitchen so much more complicated. We can no longer open a cabinet with one hand – it needs two free hands, one to depress a plastic lip and the other to quickly pull the door open. I am not quite used to it yet and somewhat in denial that we have to live with this handicap for years to come.

Faro has discovered clapping his hands, though there is no sound yet, just the motion. He puts them together in a hit-or-miss sort of way whenever one of us starts singing a Dutch children’s song that has a hand clapping suggestion.

He has also discovered pointing, reminding me of Saturday Night Fever. He responds to pa-pa (or daddy) by pointing vaguely in Jim’s direction. He also knows the word plant, both in Dutch and English (like the difference between ant and aunt), and points enthusiastically to the Jade tree as well as other greens nearby. But when you ask where is ma-ma is he comes up short so we have to work on that.

The franticness of last week is over. I arrived back in Boston on Thursday night, returned to Cambridge on Friday where a past CNN reporter and communications director for a congressman coached three of us in public speaking, with or without powerpoint. It was both humbling and eye opening for someone who’s travelled all the way to Japan to do something similar there. Humbling mostly because I learned what I didn’t know I didn’t know. That’s why we promote life-long learning. It had been a good week.

This weekend was our annual Easter or Greek Easter or Pseudo Greek Easter celebration. We pick a random weekend between Easter and Greek Easter and pray for good weather even though we know it is a crapshoot. So we tell people there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing. Our friends know this.

Some 45 people came together, circles of friends which, if not already overlapping, do so by the end of the day. The girls helped out putting together the bunny baskets together. Not baskets really but bags with candy – some leftover Easter candy, some Haloween candy and some generic stuff. The babies got Cheerios.

Then one elderly and one younger bunny hid the loot – with Bunny’s ankle problems the hiding is no longer so sophisticated (as in trees) which some people over a certain age took as an insult (“What? You don’t think we can climb trees anymore?”), while others just noted how times have passed.

Joe had flown in from Sterling Towers West (Alpine, CA) to Sterling Towers East (Lobster Cove), and lend a hand with pulling summer furniture out of storage and setting up the bar – an important support for the traditional Lobster Cove drink (Bloody Mary). Fire places were being stoked inside and out to keep us warm. The fierce wind and dropping temperature mandated this.