Sylvia's Journal

When we arrived Sita whisked me away quickly to the piece of land in Westhampton she has had her eye on for some time. It is 70 acres that used to be a summer camp – remnants of it still visible here and there; cabins slowly rotting back into earth, some pipes, street lamps, an asphalt parking place, cement basement walls caving in foot by foot. And all the rest is back to the wilds, overgrown trees and bushes, brush everywhere.

Sita wants to buy it and turn it into a kind of retreat center, with tree houses, cabins for her parents and her sister (the dogs would love it!). It’s a wonderful vison I have already fully bought into but the owner of the land doesn’t want to sell – holding out for ever rising real estate prices in this part of Massachusetts. Although I can see what Sita sees, I also see a money pit and a project that will outlast us by decades, maybe even outlast Sita.

Sita gathers the most amazing people around her, far and wide, like burs on a fall walk jumping on one’s furry coat.  They traipsed along through the woods (the friends, not the burs), sharing her vision, even picking out the place where her parents will be living.

The friends are creators, inventors, optimists, go-getters, driven by a strong passion to make the world a better place for everyone, especially those having few chances now. Social maps, Future Scouts…all very exciting. If anyone from my generation is worried about the millennials they are completely wrong. We discovered we will be in NYC at the same time as one of Sita’s new friends. I am sure we are unlikely to see each other, we have a full program, but we pretend as if.

And then, a week later, when we are in NYC it turns out the this person amazing is embroiled in a fight with his partners about IP and a lawyer is needed quickly. Axel’s cousin is mobilized to find a lawyer. And so we don’t see Sita’s friend but rather Axel’s cousin and my nephew and his wife. And then we see the fabulous performance of Duda Paiva’s Blind – the reason for our NYC trip.

We are lodged at the midtown YMCA to save money for nice dinners. It means Axel has to climb in the upper bunkbed in our tiny dorm room and we share bathrooms with about 100 rooms on our floor: two toilets for women. One is occupied a good part of the night by a young woman – constipated I suspect.

But down in the basement of the enormous Y are two swimming pools, two enormous and well-equipped locker rooms with a sauna and steam room and a large exercise room with bikes and treadmills and ellipticals. We can exercise to our heart’s content which leads to slow starts in the morning.

Every night we eat with abandon in interesting restaurants handpicked by Tessa who is good at this sort of thing (as we learned last year in New Orleans). We are always in the company of whichever family (or near family) members are around and enjoying the time together, with only me seeing the bill. It confirms why sleeping for less and eating for more is so much more fun.