Sylvia's Journal

Christmas has come and gone. The dread turned into inspiration. First (even before the 25th) I hung all the christmas light we have that still work, everywhere: around the plants, the windows, the curtains – a tangle of wires. On the outside we also look more Christmassy than ever. I figured I would rise in stature as a homemaker in Tessa’s eyes. The lights were also for Faro of course. When I turned everything on he was mesmerized though I am not sure he even saw the outside lights that Axel tangled with.

As every year I had warned everyone about buying things they couldn’t afford and/or we didn’t need and especially those gifts that would produce more clutter in our already cluttered households (it’s a gene  we both passed on).  I think this year the message took. We gave each other either home-made gifts or clutter-free experiences (like restaurant gift certificates two nights at an inn, swimming lessons), though the teepee that Tessa made for Faro does take up valuable real estate in the Bliss’ already full house.  My present to Steve and Tessa were 6 enormous curtain panels that will keep them a little warmer in their drafty house. It took most of the Christmas week to sew them and line them and hem them, sitting in my temporary workshop set up in the basement. Tessa kept me company while she was making the teepee.

On Christmas Eve we celebrated with one part of Jim’s family, dinner and the traditional Yankee swap, though this time we returned home with several of our own presents. This included a box with the ingredients for Jamaican coffee (coffee, rum and 4 cans of whipping cream). We taught Faro one of my favorite things: spraying the whipped creamed right into one’s mouth. “”More..,more..,” he said in great delight. Now we have another whipped cream junkie in the house.

I had tried to give up on the Chisterklaas ritual of starting our adaptation of Sinterklaas avond late on Christmas Eve and instead do it the next morning – given that we have a toddler in the house who wakes up at 7 AM. But we fell back into old habits and started close to midnight with the preceding hours a frantic burst of activity for most: everyone was busy either writing poems, creating surprises, hiding them all over the house, or finishing projects (like the teepee) – it was, as always, rather stressful, so stressful that I kept walking around muttering ‘this is no fun’ and ‘let’s bag the whole thing.’ Tessa was in tears in the basement working frantically on the teepee with a sewing machine that didn’t cooperate. Only Axel was unaffected; he took a nap and accepted the reality that he was not ready and would not be uuntil the 27th.

And so, despite wanting to orchestrate this otherwise, we couldn’t help ourselves and had our Christerklaas that included IOUs from Tessa and Axel who had not even started their poems.  Our poems hang in the Christmas tree, a novel spin on an old ritual. Jim’s poems are of the literary type, with adapted passages from Keats or Shakespeare or the cleverly composed ‘histories of whatever the present it.’ Sita and my poems have real rhyme and Axel and Tessa’s, well we don’t know yet.

And now the house is nearly quiet with the Blisses departed for Easthampton to pay some attention to their cats since they had been a bit forgotten in the frantic Christmas prep and left to fend for themselves in Easthampton.  Steve arrived very early this morning returning from a long road trip to his family near Toronto. He has had his own franticnness up there and our post-Christmas celebration will be a bit subdued in comparison but welcomed no doubt. We will read the last poems this morning…and be done with Christmas for another year.

I have this tendency to dread Christmas because of all the hoopla about it and then, poof, suddenly it is there and I am not prepared, being so busy with the dreading.  That was one reason why I have not been writing. The other is that my fall on the ice after Thanksgiving is turning out to have some more serious consequences (another dread), requiring an MRI and physical therapy and many anti-inflammation pills, daily. I am rather handicapped in activities of daily living, which includes putting on a coat, pulling up and zippering my pants and drying myself after a shower.

And finally, my long stretch of not traveling has been shortened due to the insertion of a trip to Rwanda before I head out to Ethiopia.  It required a lot of re-scheduling and juggling doctors’ and PT appointments with the requirements of having a full time job. The Christmas vacation, short as it is, comes as a welcome rest stop – now that I think everything is back under, at least the illusion of, control.

One week into my 64^th year I am settling in to a long routine, uninterrupted by travel. As it stands now my first trip is to Ethiopia at the end of January which I will precede or end with another overnight in Holland, this time at my oldest brother’s new home. Some of us are entering new stages in our lives; moving towards 64 doesn’t seem to be much of a new stage – I am not retiring and not moving.

The Ebola swat and swot teams are taking a considerable amount of my time. I am learning why Uganda, Nigeria, Mali and Senegal have been successful and avoided the many wrong turns that Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia took. 18500 contacts were traced in Nigeria – a lot, but apparently still doable – and the progress of the disease was halted. After years of investing in health systems in those countries it was good to find out that something worked.  It is also good to focus on what has worked as opposed to the finger pointing and blaming that gets picked up by the media.

I am back home from a ‘weather horibilis’ ride in, and then 10 hours later back home, from work. It has been raining cats and dogs, accompanied by heavy winds and icing early in the morning. It is the kind of stressful drive that makes one understand snowbirds retiring in the southern states. What makes it worse is that the otherwise soothing classical music that increases my tolerance for traffic challenges, is interrupted constantly by requests for donations to the member-supported station while the news is, if not distressing, then at least boring and repetitive if one’s commute is longer than one hour.

When I finally emerged out of the car, exhausted and stiff, I requested a stiff drink which Axel, my chief cook, bottlewasher and mixologist promptly produced: a sake martini which I am now sipping as I come back to myself and watch him prepare part 2 of the evening, a roasted garlic chicken with vegetables and fettucini. I am so blessed.

On Wednesday, while I was turning 63, my niece had a baby starting its first year on this planet. Between my brother’s family and mine, we have a bunch of birthdays bunched together, all sagitarii.

That was my first present, which was followed by Axel waking up at 5 AM, quite a feat, and preparing me breakfast with our ritual, but never the same, breakfast table decorations.

Although I was in the office, I used the first two hours off as vacation to attend to the birthday greetings and wishes from wide and far, with some surprising messages from people I have not seen or heard from in a long time, shuffling between Skype and Facebook. In the olden days it was postcards, I remember the excitement as a kid.

My next present was the news that one of my colleagues with whom I work a lot will move into a shared cubicle with me as another leaves to join another part of MSH.

I drove back through a drizzle, then heavy rain – it’s rarely nice weather on my birthday – to find Axel cooking my birthday dinner, a Peruvian fish stew with mussels cultivated in Chili, packed in Thailand and bought in the US. On the back of the package was a recipe for ‘gebakken mosselen’ (baked mussels) from Holland. We certainly live in an interdependent world!

The presents kept on coming. Axel had bought me Novak’s The Book Without Pictures which I look forward to read to/with Faro. Novak is the creator of the American Office and knows how to make people, big and small, laugh.

And then we watched another Poirot episode, I made another batch of Christmas mustard and the birthday was over. I have started my 64th year which I initiated by listening to ‘When I’ am Sixty Four’ on my morning ride into work.

On Friday night and then Saturday we joined first one set and then another of Sita’s in-laws for dinner, for variations on Thanksgiving. It snowed again and then froze which produced a nasty fall and a bruised arm. I made an appointment with the shoulder doctor to make sure I did not tear yet another rotator cuff tendon.

On Saturday night, after Thanksgiving, Tessa and Steve got their electricity back. And thus, on Sunday morning early, with the uncooked turkey in the back, we returned to New Hampshire for a second try at Thanksgiving.

Sita, Jim and Faro were not able to join, so it was a somewhat incomplete Thanksgiving, but still with lots of thanks to go around.

While everything was bubbling and cooking we played one round of ‘The Settlers of Catan,’ our favorite family game with basic and extension sets at Sita’s and Tessa’s home, so whenever we are together we can play, the old fashioned way of sitting around a board game.

After our copious meal (made for 6 but consumed by 4) we left with lots of leftovers in containers.