Sylvia's Journal

One week into Trump’s campaign I am amazed at the damage he has managed to do in just one week. Reading the NYT in the morning has become a different experience with worse news following bad news. The most disconcerting is that he and his entourage deny that what he does is illegal, heart breaking, outrageous or plain wrong. His supporters are cheering in the background.  The one thing I don’t know is whether their numbers are going up or down – I hope the latter.

I have written to my representatives, asking them to lean on their more generous and rational colleagues on the other side of the aisle, but I fear that republicans won’t break ranks until after they have secured a republican supreme court.

In the meantime our lives here in Manchester-by-the-Sea are not physically disturbed as they are for so many others. At work we are still recovering from the RIF shock and trying to regain our footing. But, having passed 65, I am also starting to look at options for what to do when work starts to move to the background. We both believe it is art that will dominate our lives in the future. Next weekend we are cashing in a Christmas gift Axel received from Sita: two days of personal instruction at the studio of a great silk artist in Rockport (Maine), Fiona Washburn.

I will tag along and am fantasizing about what to do those two days while Axel is busy. I wrote to a children’s book writer who lives there to see if we could meet, but she isn’t around. She recommended I join the Society of Children Books Writers and Illustrators which I promptly did. I’ve got to make some headway with my story that has been lingering in first draft for some years now. I will also be enjoying my Christmas presents when in Rockport: the New Zealand wool that Tessa gave me and a drawing kit from Sita.

I also plan to sleep in and read a lot. Last night we went to a mystery writers’ talk at a local bookstore featuring mystery writers. One of those is our friend Edith Maxwell who churns out cozy mysteries one after another. She already has three Agatha nominations on her resume – a high honor for mystery writers. We left the event with three new books under our arm.

To forget about all the bad news we joined a contra dancing group in a neighboring town and danced the night away accompanied by several fiddlers, a guitar and a flute. We met wonderful people who had come from wide and far. It was quite a work out. This, it turned out, was not so great for my left foot which is turning into an ever greater arthritic mess – a side effect of the fusion I could not have imagined. Some things (the arthritis in the heel) are now obvious as documented on an MRI; the nerve problems need another round of diagnostics. My future plans cannot, it is clear now, involve hiking or very long walks. Art it is!

We have a new president who reminds me of playground behavior when two kids argue and the language drops down to, what in Dutch I’d call a ‘nietus-wellus’ argument (“this did happen,” “no it did not!” “It did too!”) So Trump has already become for me the nietus-wellus president. He is pushing buttons left and right and risks bringing us down to his level, which is as low as a preschooler.

The big challenge for many of us now is to not enter into the game that Trump is trying to seduce us into. As my friend says, when they go low, we go high. This means becoming more inclusive (which does mean listening to those we don’t agree with and who did vote for Trump). What we already know about many of those is that we simply have pushed them away by not listening to their stories and showing ourselves superior to them. It is not about bringing them around to our point of view but looking through their window, listening, rather than pretending to listen while we formulate our reply. I know I have done that. It is seductive but it is a losing proposition.

We need to appreciate worldviews other than our own. It is easier said than done. Again, it is about listening rather than judging.  Rather than limit ourselves to hang out with those most like us, an ancient survival strategy, we have to recognize that survival now depends on the opposite. And then there is this thing of responsibility. We cannot say ‘you broke it, you fix it, because we all broke it, whatever the ‘it’ is. I cannot, as in the past, presume that our liberal politicians will take care of things. We have to let those brave republicans, the ones who are recognizing that the train is already derailing that we appreciate their courage to stand up to what is not right. Maybe, after all, the hard lines between republicans and democrats, are going to become irrelevant.

Oh brother, we are in for a wild ride.

I was back in the US just in time to knit one more pussy hat; a hat for someone I didn’t know yet. Tessa came in from NH on Friday night – all three of us had a hat. I had wool left so I started knitting on Friday night, just hours after arriving from Paris. I can make these hats now very fast.

We had agreed with friends from all over the North Shore that we would meet in the train. How naive we were; not just about the number of marchers from this part of Massachusetts, but also in the capacity of the train system to handle the crowds. Arriving at Beverly station the platform was already full, 100s of people.

When the train finally arrived we were told no one could get on as the train had no more standing room. And here I had had an image of myself knitting, on a seat no less. We walked back to the car to drive to one of the outlying subway stations, near my work, where I knew there was plenty of space to park. A young woman asked us whether we had an extra seat in our car. Since she did not wear a pink hat, the one under construction now had a destination. As it turned out our new passenger had founded a non profit organization to make science more relevant, more experiential and anchored in the world around us. Sita had bought ‘an experience’ at an online auction of the Kestrel Foundation in 2014 and gifted us a boat tour of Gloucester harbor in a dory, rowed by a colorful figure from Gloucester. I was happy to gift her the hat which was finished when we parked at the T station in Medford.

We took the Orange line into Boston. At each stop more and more entered the now crowded cars, with their pink hats and signs. By the time we reached downtown Boston it was clear we were in the thousands. We slowly streamed along with the crowd; once more with the naive idea that we would be able to see and hear the speakers.We never did see our speakers and only heard occasional sentences (which made the crowd roar) from the mayor of Boston, our two fabulous senators Warren and Markey and then an enormous variety of people representing various constituencies that make up the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and surrounding states.

For many of us Friday’s depressed state disappeared as snow for the sun, even though we knew we had to soldier on alone and some people in dire circumstances, for the next 4 years. The sun was out, the temperature went up, and the people were smiling and laughing.

We never got to march as the entire area around Boston Common was gridlocked. The MC, after telling us that the planning had been for a much smaller crowd (by then the estimate was over 100.000), suggested we take advantage of the situation and introduce ourselves to each other and talk. Talking would after all be the glue that we would need to hold us together for the next four years. We met people who had come from far and wide, all generations, all colors of skin, people in wheelchairs and strollers; it was the rainbow flag for real representing what Trump no doubt would call, the nasty liberal northeast.

Tessa managed to hook up with a friend because we were standing under an easily recognizable marker: a bare-chested man with dreadlocks up in a tree holding a sign that said:”Here I am a half-naked man surrounded by the opposite sex and I feel safe! I want you all to feel that way too!” The message was, I suppose, that bare-breasted women should feel safe sitting in a tree surrounded by 1000s of men. I am sure that many of the women at his feet felt like I did and would have liked to tell him to get real!  But then again, who cares about a bare-chested man high up in a tree – we had better things to do, like protesting a billionaire geezer with one of his (tiny) hands on the nuclear button and the other on a tweet machine. And our tree man was a great marker.

The week that just ended changed the lives of about 70 or so of my colleagues who were laid off in an attempt to bring our overhead expenses in line with our revenues.  Aside from the shock (how did this happen to me), the loss of office camaraderie, and, undoubtedly, wonder about one’s value to the organization, the layoffs are also confronting people with the immediate worry of Trump’s campaign promise to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.

It was the third ‘rightsizing’ episode I survived in my 30 years at the organization. How long I am spared is not clear. So far I have been able to bill myself to projects a sufficient number of work days to not be a drag on overhead. But the main projects I do work for will end later this year and there are no replacement projects in sight. It is a little bit like the discussions around sustainability: you can never say something is sustainable until it no longer is – and so it is with my tenure at the organization where I have spent about half of my life. Onwards we go with the understanding that when it is time to go, it is time to go. Hopefully by then Medicare will still look after our health care needs.

To make the departure for a trip overseas more acceptable to Axel we usually eat out the evening before I leave in a restaurant nearby, without worrying too much about the cost of what’s on the menu – a luxury that comes with still being gainfully employed. Last night we ate in a small intimate restaurant in Gloucester (the Franklin) where a jazz band (base, guitar and singer) was playing in a corner while we feasted on oysters, fish and good wine. It is the kind of small restaurant where one easily gets into conversations with neighbors whose table is just inches away (of course only if your table neighbors are as extrovert as Axel). They turned out to be very knowledgeable about jazz and knew the singer as well as the origin of many of the songs (with some help from the Soundhound app). We asked where they worked – ‘the swamp’ they told us, referring to the Washington swamp Trump claims to be draining. But so far we have only seen him populating this alleged swamp with alligators.

I have been busy knitting pussy hats, for Axel, for a friend and myself, all of us planning to march in Boston after inauguration day to show our unhappiness with Trump and his antics; especially as it concerns women (reproductive rights, here and elsewhere, harassment, legal protections, etc.). I will have just come off the plane from Yaounde (Cameroon) via Paris the day before if all goes as planned.

Axel’s pussy hat looks more like a piggy hat or a pink Viking hat as some of our FB friends told us – now, after knitting 3 hats I am getting better and the ears look more like pink pussy ears. One writer who does not agree with the frivolity of the pussy hats, the issues we protest about or not at all frivolous, described the effect of 1000s of pussy hats as a pepto bismol lava stream. I think it will be quite striking on a grey winter day.  I also like the lightness to accompany the seriousness. We have to keep laughing, if only to make a contrast with this new president of us who no one has ever seen smiling.

There was this poem playing inside my head, teasing me. It was about being behind bars. But what do I know about that? I could not retrieve the words but the imagery remained: words tumbling down like water, too fast to read, down a steep mountain, thinly layered over rocks and boulders, whole chunks disappearing underneath grassy parts and then reappearing again where the mountain meets the sky. Something wanted to come out but remained stuck behind bars.

The ‘being behind bars’ part kept me wondering, what was that all about? All was revealed when my friend and ex-colleague Liz, during lunch at the enormous Wegman’s complex in Burlington, told me about the documentary 13^th.

Last night Axel and I were supposed to go out to a new year’s party but Axel is sick again and so we stayed in and decided to watch the documentary.  That’s when I saw the bars, hundreds of them.

The most surprising part to me is how oblivious (if we are being generous) or how evil (if we are not) the powers that be are about how ‘the system’ (all actors together) will or might act when something  somewhere in the system changes. Wicked problems have been ‘solved’ under much fanfare as politicians tend to do, only to be a temporary illusion, generating over time even more wicked problems. Every administration deals with ever more complexity. Trump doesn’t seem to think so..”believe me, I can fix anything!”

Most notable are the contributions of all administrations (since Bush the elder), and yes, this includes the Clinton administration, to the worsening of the prison problem. It now has for generations torn apart families and emasculated young black men. So should we be surprised about violence, crime and drugs? It is not as if we don’t know about the stabilizing influence of whole (complete) families and how self confidence comes from being (and being seen as) a productive member of society.

If all this is about ignorance of system dynamics it is bad enough, but of course it is also about economics; there is money to be made, billions in fact. And then, buried way beneath all this, the fear of ‘the other’ which is as old as mankind – the fear of black men raping white women, while of course, the reverse was much more prevalent.

Our new administration from hell will be taking over in less than two weeks. Its members and adherents are making pronouncements that the documentary recognizes and cleverly matches with scenes from America’s past. This is a past that I cannot imagine anyone in his or her right mind would want to go back to. Yet, here we are. Vigilance is in order. I hope that our sane and reliable decision makers who haven’t already done so study history and get wise about system dynamics. Imagine if we had elected mostly historians and system engineers….  Sigh.

We spent the first day of the year 2017 in our pajamas, never left the house. We learned halfway through the day that Faro had strep throat as well, and so I probably have it too. In hindsight I think we practically asked for colds by going to the Aquarium and the Museum of Science during Christmas vacation week with all the snotty nosed children of Boston and surrounding areas. It’s good business for the makers of tissues. I buy the nice soft ones in bulk. Every few feet there is a box.

In my mind I had all these things I wanted to do as the end of this vacation nears but I have no energy to do anything other than reading. I have been completely enchanted by a Dutch writer, by Annejet van der Zijl. She has extensively researched and chronicled the lives of interesting and mostly Dutch and very colorful people who did amazing things, socially and art wise. Some of these people were alive and well (others not so well) at a time that I was trying to be a good student and color between the lines, preparing for earning a living. These people did not. They were either born into money (and usually squandered it) or married well, and when the money was gone they just survived. They certainly did not color between the lines. They partied a lot and managed through ups and downs, sometimes in a haze of alcohol and other stimulants. All of them, the ones that died young and the ones that lived beyond 50 became famous through their writing and illustrating the stories I read as a young adult.

It is easy now to give in to my addiction to this writer. With a few key strokes I can download her books from a Dutch book website and then read them on my iPad. I haven’t read this many Dutch books in more than a decade. It is too bad these books are written in Dutch. I have to enjoy them alone as there is no one around me here who can read them.

I accompanied Sita to the vet in a tearful farewell to her beloved cat Mooshi. The end of 2016 would also be the end of Mooshi.

Mooshi first showed up as an adorable peachy white kitten in Sita and Jim’s life in Salem. They lived with a bunch of friends next to the ‘real-cream-Bismarck’ donut shop on Bridge Street. I did buy the Bismarck once to make sure it was real cream (it was). I ingested its delicious 1000 calories. It resembled what is known in Holland as a ‘roombroodje.’ I used to consume these often when I was a high school student in Haarlem. I biked to and from school every day so those calories were used up daily – the Salem variety would take longer to burn up.

Mooshi traveled across the country when Sita and Jim tried out San Francisco. I remember the phone calls home along the road with Mooshi whining in the background. He stayed in their tent on some nights and on others was smuggled into cheap hotel rooms. The three of them then lived in their pricey one room apartment in the Castro section of SF. Half a year later they traveled back East, Mooshi still not liking road trips, and Sita and Jim preferring the East Coast after all.

Over the years Mooshi, always an indoor cat, moved less and less.  He messed up some nice couches sharpening his nails (for God knows what) and interrupted his sleep only to find a more comfortable (sunny) place and for taking care of essential body functions.

He didn’t care much for humans, especially not little ones and was very particular about who could pet him. Still, all those years, before the real babies came, Mooshi was Sita’s baby. Jim eternalized them in a lovely portrait.

Mooshi’s hairs and dander made it hard for Axel to stay overnight. He had to take special pills to manage the allergens.

Over the last few years Mooshi had developed diabetes which Sita and Jim valiantly managed with costly daily injections, making overnight trips more complicated as caretakers were needed who could do the injections. I remember the first time I did those and gave Mooshi 5 times the prescribed dose by mistake. Whether he got the injections or not, and in the right dose or not, they showed no visible difference. He kept peeing and pooping all over the place making life very difficult for everyone in his household. The cat was old and sick, and the decision to let him go seemed obvious to all but Sita and Jim.  They just couldn’t ‘play God’ as Jim called it.

Eventually, as 2016 came to an end, Sita and Jim had come to the same conclusion as all the parents that Mooshi had had a good and very long life but that it was time to go. I accompanied Sita to Mooshi’s final visit to the Northampton cat hospital. It was very sad; all those memories. We hugged and left Mooshi with the nice lady who gave Sita a box of Kleenex, understanding how hard it is to say goodbye to a beloved pet. On a happy note, Mooshi will never know what it is like to live under a Trump administration.