Sylvia's Journal

There were only a few days to recover from our roadtrip vacation, a few long days at work, beforfe the next event arrived. Yesterday Axel turned 70.  We decided some months ago that we would not let pass this opportunity to have a big celebration. We’d have a Hawaiian Luau, mostly because I wanted to have an excuse to make ‘Flaming wieners in pu-pu sauce,’ a recipe out of one of our favorite cookbooks (Square Meals by the Sterns).

There is a chapter on Luau at home, which featured the wiener dish, among other tantalizing recipes. It required a large cabbage, a sterno can, bamboo skewers and tiny wieners. The sterno can is put in the hole carved into the cabbage, the wieners put on bamboo skewers and the cabbage leaves turned to resemble a flower. A pu-pu sauce put next to the cabbage and voila, you have an exotic dish, at least people in the fifties thought so. I unnecessarily multiplied the recipe by four: a lot of cabages and a lot of wieners. Our friend M was getting pretty good at ‘roasting’ the wieners over the sterno fire.

Fatou, our amazing Senegalese caterer friend and animatrice-par-excellence went all out with several Hawaiian dishes plucked from the internet (Hawaiian macaroni, coconut crusted lime shrimp, Char Sui chicken skewers and kimchi that will last us until the middle of the winter). Tessa did her fair share of cooking and prepared Okinawa sweet potatoes, sweet rolls, and three macademia tortes. Tessa did most of the party planning – something at which she is very good, temporarily interrupting her own wedding planning.

The square meals cookbook chapter on Luau’s at home was also the inspiration for our offerings of Hawaiian cocktails: Trader Vic’s Babalu, Leilani Grass Hut, Hawaiian punch (the real thing) and Pineapple drops. We needed someone to mix those complicated drinks and Tessa found a friend with a good sense of humor and a willingness to learn. He got some help from another guest and the duo stayed behind the bar which was Axel’s upside down lobster boat, mixing and pouring for the 60 or so guests who joined us in the celebration.

Tessa had organized Hawaiian leis by color (“Get Ley’d”) , depending on which of the preceding 7 decades the guests had met the birthday boy. The yellow leis were for the people who knew Axel (then Richard) the longest, meteing him for this first time between 1946 and 1966. They sat in a circle most of the night, until the mosquitoes chased them home, recognizable by their leis, trading old stories.

With Sita and Jim the musicians, and me the poet, we were able to organize a singalong describing each decade of Axel’s life in a few lines. We printed 30 sheets and invited everyone to, if not sing, then at least read along. It was a formidable team effort of those nearest and dearest to Axel that brought him successfully to tears.

And now we are in the after party mode. Everything is cleaned up and the enormous amounts of leftover food distributed (for Tessa, for Sita and for MSH). There is enough booze to last us through the summer; not just what we bought but also what Axel received as gifts. When people get older and should stop drinking, booze appears to be the default gift. We will be good for a awhile in the hard liquor department, especially rum. I see many dark-and-stormies in our future.

Another week is racing by bringing me closer to the start of our family vacation in California next Thursday. It seemed so far away (as did the summer enveloping us now) when I made the arrangements back in December and January. I am going to have unfettered access to our two grandkids. I am excited. It is the kind of excitement I remember from grade school, when the summer school trip to the zoo or the beach came into view.

In the meantime headquarter work is getting my attention. I get up early (now it is dark again at 4:30 AM) to beat the traffic and arrive at a dark office – springing to light automatically when I enter. I am the only one this early but a few people follow quickly. Around 6:30 there are a handful of us. It is quiet in our open space. I get much done.

I have a lot of desk work to complete before my travel will pick up again, later in the summer. It is the kind of work that keeps me billable through stretches of time when there is no travel. I design events on the horizon. I review what others have written. I revise what I have written before based on feedback or pilots. I check a French translation of something I wrote many years ago. Sometimes I am surprised about what I wrote years ago, impressed with myself (“I wrote that? Wow!”). And sometimes I write new stuff or turn something I read into a short training session. Some of the work is creative and some is not but overall it is fine.

I am turning 65 this year. Some people, especially in Holland, are asking, “are you retiring?” Our CEO, who is from the same vintage, is stepping down as the chief. I don’t have retirement plans yet. By and large I enjoy my work, a privilege I am very conscious of.

My official workday is 8 hours, although I am often putting in more than that. Because I start early I also leave early which gets me home in the afternoon, with hours left before nightfall. Last year at this time I would change into my bathing suit, put my goggles on and swim across the cove and back. This year I haven’t been in the water yet. It is very cold (52F or 11C). If it hurts my ankles when I step in the water I turn around.

This summer’s weather has been funny – from very warm (hot even) on some days to spring temperatures on others. Last night it was like winter in the southern hemisphere – I needed to wear a cardigan in the evening. The warm afternoons, the unseasonably cold water makes for thick mists drifting in from the ocean at the end of the day, lowering visibility to as little as 30 meters.

On my commute home I am listening to a fabulous novel about Malaysia, the Garden of Evening Mists. When I pull up to the house and the mist pushes in from the sea I have my own misty garden.

There are three sides to this world: this side, the other side and in between this side and the other side.

On this side something good happened as Tessa turned 31 during this year’s long holiday weekend. We started celebrating on Friday night just the three of us at a restaurant in Gloucester. In the morning I thought about that momentous event when Tessa made her way into the world, remembering it as yesterday. Tessa arrived while the remnant of burned croissants was still lingering in the air. Axel had put ‘heat-only’ croissants in the oven of the birth center.  The oven thought it was getting cleaned, locked itself while the temperature increased to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. This activated the fire alarms and brought the firetruck out with screeching tires and probably a hefty bill for the hospital; it should have replaced the oven. Did tiny Tessa smell something was awry? Nothing in her life shows she did, unless it is her obsession that everything should be right.

The festivities of this 31th birthday continued in the morning with our birthday ritual – a festive table with all the tchotchkes we can find in the house standing to attention around the plate of the birthday girl, flowers on the chair, cards and presents. A brief interlude followed to prepare for the annual birthday bash at Lobster Cove: tents, a keg, fireworks, barbecue, potluck, fire on the beach, silent disco, late night fishing and eating it the next morning, cooked over the still burning fire with fresh eggs from Steve’s and Tessa’s Ladyland Farm chicks. Tessa counts among her friends a highly sought after DJ who reserves this event in his full appointment book year after year.

And then from 2Pm onwards people trickle in, accompanied by the gear they need: fishing rods, canoes, kayaks, tents, fireworks and booze. The latter two I don’t care that much about but I usually retire before they get activated.

That was on this side of the world