Sylvia's Journal

The last day of the year is a day of looking back; everyone does that. But this year I am looking ahead, wanting to put this recovery stuff behind me and move on. My ankle has recovered as far as it can and I am learning to live with it and hope to stave off the inevitable deterioration as long as I can – this may be years. But now something else has come up that makes looking ahead a little more troublesome.

During the crash a seatbelt had kept me from going through the windshield. Axel who had not had a shoulder harness, only a lap belt, nearly lost his life because of that. But the shoulder part of the seatbelt left the right side of my upper body deep purple and severely traumatized. This included a right breast full of ‘debris’ as the ultrasound technician called it. Quarterly mammograms and ultrasounds have monitored the absorption of the debris in the surrounding tissue and the last reading some 5 months ago had been encouraging enough to stop the monitoring.

But now a new bump in the road appeared in the shape of a hard pea-sized 1 cm lump that requires further investigation. I am being shoved to the top of the waiting list for another mammogram and ultrasound but still have to wait a week which is about 7 days too long. I have closed off my feelings for this new development by shutting the door against possible future scenarios, as if I have no feelings.

The only hint about my mental state came in dream form where I was trying to get myself together for a journey on a bus. I let the first of two busses pass because I was not ready. I needed to find my boots and collect my belongings first. This required walking back to where I had been. Once there I noticed some things were missing and I had to walk away from the bus stop even further, to places I had never been and did not want to go. And every time I thought I got what I needed another distraction was put in my way.

I woke up with a headache and achy all over. There’s nothing mysterious about this because they are exactly the symptoms of the ailment that has kept Axel in bed the last 24 hours. What a way to end the year. 

I woke up from a bewildering dream of trying to check into a French chain hotel where the process was somewhat akin to the experience of going through customs and immigration. Along the way, through long hallways, ravines, slums, up and down staircases I lost my party and ended up with a staff member who showed me the staff quarters that had a foldaway bathtub – something the guestrooms did not have, she told me as if this was a most shocking revelation. And then she started to unburden herself about her employer. I woke up when her supervisor stuck her head around the door and caught her in the act of disloyalty. Still, when I am in Dubai I will prefer Le Meridien over the Marriott.

For many hours I was the only one awake on Christmas morning. I used my time to bake scones and then cinnamon buns, the latter being a whole lot more difficult than the pictures in the cookbook suggested. The buns were sweet and sticky, but also a little doughy confessed Tessa later but they are all gone now so they could not have been that bad.

We squeezed in our American Christmas between a late waking up of the key actors and early departure of Sita and Jim to one of his two families for Christmas dinner. A little hurried after our long and leisurely Christerklaas the night before. But then, there are no poems to read and several presents were still in a mail truck or depot somewhere in the area, or even on the doorstep of the wrong house, according to tracking information on the internet.

Axel had a late start preparing the turkey for the oven and then lost the recipe. Luckily he had made this Canadian style turkey (lots of bacon and maple syrup) last year and so he went by memory after a frustrating search that did not produce the recipe. If I had my way we’d eat a much simpler Dutch meal (boerenkool or andijvie stamppot) but that idea was voted out. And so I felt no compunction to start the turkey and instead concentrated on my baking before the oven would be off limits, entirely dedicated to the turkey. I did help out with the side dishes, sweet potatoes (including marshmellows on Tessa’s insistence), mashed potatoes, creamed onions and green beans with almonds. To the latter Tessa added some crispy things that came out of a can, made from palm oil, onion, wheat flour, soy flour, salt and dextrose; one of these traditions that come from a period in American culinary history that celebrated the magic of canned foods.

Anne and Chuck who consider us their immediate family in the area, joined us again this year. We sent them on a shopping errand as they drove down from Newburyport to pick up all these items that we had somehow forgotten. This included ingredients for martinis, one of Chuck’s specialties. I enjoyed my ‘framboise’ martini while on the phone with my siblings in Holland and in France, the latter just returned from a 10+ skiing day in the French Alps getting ready for their Christmas cheese fondue.

Tessa gave Sita a robot vacuum cleaner that sings a little song when it starts, when it finds a real mess (a special blue light comes on) and when its belly is full. We watched it as one would a new puppy. To given it even more life than it already has we put some eyes on it. It zips around the living room, hallway and kitchen with puppy Chicha following in bewilderment. It does tend to get tangled up in the fringe of the Afghan rug in the living room and squeaks helplessly when it does. Robots like this, we learned, are more effective in a house without stuff on the ground. We will miss it when it leaves this afternoon for Haydenville where it will, no doubt, piss off or freak out Sita’s neurotic cats Mooshi and Cortez.

And so now we have arrived at the other end of Christmas. We are planning to go to Chinatown later today to buy ingredients required to cook from my Christmas present (that is still en route), a cookbook about China that is from the same authors, photographers and traveloguers who wrote my favorite sub-continent cookbook (Mangoes and Curry Leaves) that has seen much use since my return from Dhaka.

I woke up to a warm bed but a very cold Manchester by the Sea abruptly pulled out of a dream just when I was about to unfold a message from my mom. I would recognize the thin blue writing paper with her handwriting anywhere. This was from a time that we had two kinds of writing paper: the ‘luchtpost’ paper for letters that went by plane, and the regular heavier paper for local mail. The unfolded paper would have told me what I was about to create. I feel a little cheated by my alarm.

Monday morning is not usually a day that an alarm wakes me up because I work from home; a precious day for design work, reading, writing or simply catching up, undisturbed by meetings except for the occasional telephone meeting. It is mostly a day where I set the agenda.

Not today. Later in the day I am participating in a video conference with Washington. You’d think that by now we could have a conference like that with people participating from wherever they are; but somehow not this conference on this icy post-storm day. I have to drive to Cambridge. In exchange I will take Wednesday as my work-at-home day which happens to also be Christmas Eve; it will be a half working day as there are surprises to make and rhymes to compose for our Christerklaas evening.

I am glad on this otherwise utterly wintry morning that we have rounded the corner and are on our way to Spring after this longest night of the year. But that image was far away as we braved ice, rain and sleet as we went about our Sunday. From now on things can only get better. The maggots are gone and the sun is back on its journey to the equator. Hallelujah!

I drove to Quaker Meeting, early yesterday morning, by car with Axel; not, as usual, alone on my bike; that had been a good decision I discovered later as we left Meeting with Axel driving over the slippery roads in the blinding snow.

We were only 12 in Meeting, a few hardy souls. That included Merrill which practically guarantees a story or two. Merrill is a professional storyteller who knows thousands of stories, parables, historic, some funny, some serious, most full of lessons. He told us two stories, one from Chaim Potok and one we already knew, the Christmas story. Potok’s story is about the son who has wasted his father’s inheritance and asks forgiveness form a faraway place from where he cannot come back. The father asks him to come as far as he can with the promise of meeting him there. Both stories are about imperfection and finding the place where the divine meets the real world. It was a nice counterweight to the frantic consumerism that colors my Christmas experience here.

We drove to Newburyport to see Chuck in a radio enactment of This Wonderful Life which was done so well that our entire row was sniffling at the end when everything turns out all right and we regained faith in humanity again.

We declined the post-performance drinks and drove back in the same snowstorm that had brought us to Newburyport at a pace of about 25 miles an hour. Back home, before our next social engagement, a brief stop to shovel, with help from Tessa and Steve and with no help from puppy Chicha, the wet snow away before it would freeze into unmovable icebergs and unclogging the gutters that were pouring rain straight from the roof into the cellar – such is the wonderful life of home-ownership. But at least we had warmth and electricity, unlike thousands of households in our state and the one directly to the north.

Our last engagement of the day was a caroling party in Annisquam, requiring another drive through ice and sleet, accompanied by a 60 knot wind. Were we crazy? With one other couple (neighbors, who walked) we were the only guests who showed up and thus had the party to ourselves. We never sung but instead draped ourselves around the fire and admired the wallpaper that consisted of old and yellowed book jackets from a long time ago. Good company, warm cider and a winter meal was the reward for our act of courage or stupidity.

On our way back we were just about the only normal sized car between the many mammoth trucks with their large snowplough attachments – limiting our speed to about 20 miles an hour as the winter squall continued. It was the right speed for getting us safely home.

The dream is familiar now, even while I dream I recognize it – I am in a large jumbo jet and the plane rolls to one side and I think ‘this is it, the end!’ And then we land, with a bump. The details are different each time. This miracle landing was in Senegal and Axel and Tessa were with me. The dream kept on going and included scenes about scrambling out, retrieving my luggage and wondering whether my computer had been damaged on impact. And then there were more scenes of me, 27 years younger with baby Sita on my hip – in Africa, calmly looking for the rest of my luggage and Sita saying her first words, ‘Mommy, what is that?” as she pointed at something. I never answered, too stunned that she could say a whole sentence; or was it too stunned from the crash?

There is snow on the ground this morning. Now I understand the man with the snow shovel I nearly bumped into yesterday, outside the store with the cheap overstock where I go to get cheap high end chocolate (for Christmas and also for no reason).

All day yesterday I sat in a windowless room with several of my colleagues to sort out the content of chapters that will combine into an electronic handbook for, as we call them, managers who lead. The intended readership are people who manage health programs, facilities and services that have to produce quality care with (always) scant resources. We are drawing on our collective and somewhat specialized knowledge about what really happens (or does not happen) and what should not (or should) as people manage money, information, people and medicines.

I don’t know if this was a coincidence but it was a very supportive and productive meeting that I associate with working with women. There was the lonely male wandering in and out occasionally and the only male author was not able to attend because he lives in Australia. We made progress and set our deadlines. I have till the 9th of January to fix my outline of the opening chapter.

We now know that the new fireplace will not be installed before Christmas and so we suddenly have plenty of space for a Christmas tree in the empty living room while we trip over boxes and stuff in the other parts of the house. Tessa is happy, and so is Axel; not about the delayed construction project but about the tree. We will now also have room for all the Christmas tchotckies which we can simply put on the floor, since there is no other furniture in the room.

I tried to do the work of Monday and anticipate the work of the week, as I usually do. It was as if I was wading through molasses. I let my inbox fill up and now there are so many things that need attention that I get overwhelmed. I don’t like the feeling, even if other people say they feel the same way and that it has something to do with Christmas. Maybe. Or maybe it is simply that 2008 stuff has to be completed in 2008 and new stuff for 2009 is already seeking my attention.

I had a dream about a large bus that was already amphibious as it came put-putting to the shore and then took off like a plane to make a loop overhead and continue its journey in the air in the opposite direction. It did not make it and with a big ‘ploof’ fell back in the water and landed on its side. The few people inside scrambled out with big grins on their faces as if it was one big joke. I watched it, not in horror, but it did drain more energy out of me.

Axel’s experience for his last two classes this semester may be similar. He has been glued to his computer screen for whole days on end since he returned from his last week’s Thursday class. It feels as if we are lumbering busses that should simply be riding the streets and not try anything silly like making loop-the-loops.

We tried to be disciplined and have at least some minimum of physical exercise during the day – something that has completely fallen by the wayside despite our good intentions. And so, at noon yesterday, we took the puppy for a walk. When we do that we can’t simply walk with her because we have to train her to heel which can make the walk a little tedious. It took about half the walk before she did what she was supposed to and avoided the choker with the spikes that cut into her throat. I can’t stand the contraption but we have to go by the rules of her mom and dad.

Everyone in the house is now reading the dog whisperer (Cesar Millan – Cesar’s way) a Christmas present from last year that is being rediscovered. Cesar has taught us that we are not ‘on top’ and so the puppy is leading us rather than the other way around. It is not the dog that needs to be trained but us. We learned that we did a lot of things wrong. The new discipline is good preparation for parenthood – a little too late for us but in time for Tessa and Steve – since the same principles apply to little children: when you pay attention to a whining dog or kid, it will whine some more.

We had Ken and Margaret over for dinner. They came with a delicious Thai take-out dinner that has become somewhat of a ritual. They had escaped from their silent retreat and cell-like accommodation in East Gloucester at an ocean-side Jesuits retreat center with million dollar views. Margaret does this frequently which is probably why she can write these wonderful books about spirituality and leadership. Her last book, The Soul of a Leader has the story of our leadership program in Egypt in it. Margaret and Ken are also Quakers and taught me about the Clearness process many years ago, at Wellesley Meeting House. That is how we got to know them, and their dog Rufus who passed away not so long ago. We still had his purple leash hanging on our hallway radiator. They took it home, as a souvenir. It still smelled like Rufus.

A night full of dreams; about old friends in Holland; someone going back to school to become a doctor; narrow streets and someone explaining why in Holland people have things delivered rather than dragging them home from the mall; a trip to a lush vineyard with an abundance of fruit – full summer, and no one there to eat the fruit. A trip with women who used to be girl scouts who revealed to me that once a girl scout, always a girl scout, entitling you to camp out with the young ones, given one’s own tent, out in the front yard of a hotel – wondering, do I like to sleep in my hotel room or on an air mattress in a tent? And, would there be snakes in the front yard? And then finally coming home to Lobster Cove with our land clearcut from trees and brush and seeded with a rolling lawn onto the water – clean, simple and boring, with the cove turned into a lake. I did not like it.

In between these various chapters of my dream I woke up and then fell asleep again – I am still a little bit on Bangla time. The clear cut land was the last part of the dreams, or possibly the most memorable one. I think it is a reaction to the clutter and complexity of our lives these days. I have been playing with the idea of getting lots of boxes and packing things up and move them out, like books not read, clothes not worn, toys not played with, and pans not used, etc. And to bring these to people who would could or would use them. One of the local aid agencies had its basement flooded and so lost its Christmas toys for poor families. There is plenty of need out there.

But then I don’t act on it because thatwould be another (huge) chore and I already feel overwhelmed with things that need to be done, fixed, completed, read, written or organized. Even having a Christmas tree at this point is too much as it requires thinking of where to put it in our house with the displaced furniture everywhere, boxes, piles of things that cannot be in their ordinary places. We are still waiting for the new fireplace to be delivered (someone made a mistake) and the (de)construction crew to show up. Now, the best place to be is in the empty living room – I love the open space and am not sure I ever want to move things in there again. It brings up memories of apartment/house hunting and standing in the middle of an empty living room and imagining what living there would be like (before the inevitable clutter moves in).

There are many reasons why I don’t like Christmas. One of them is the boxes with Christmas stuff that come up from the basement as soon as the Christmas tree enters the house (which is why I try to postpone that moment as long as I can to the great consternation and frustration of the rest of my family). All the stuff in the boxes needs to be hung or placed on empty spaces, like Axel’s plastic reindeer set with the missing legs that, without its memories of Christmas long ago, is simply ugly; the porcelain elves with their bare bottoms sliding up and down candles, what to do with those when you have no childhood memories that make them attractive?

As always I am struggling through this Christmas season. At Quaker meeting yesterday I listened to people talking about how wonderful this season is and I feel like Scrooge, saying ‘bah, humbug!’ My experience of Christmas in America has always been about shopping, not quite being able to afford it and then paying for the madness during the dark days of January and wondering why I got so carried away. My own Christmas memories are so different – large family meals, a Christmas tree with real candles, red and white, positioned with care in little clip holders so they stand straight and won’t drip their wax on the ground or branches below, and a large bucket with water next to the tree, just in case.

Newspapers show pictures of out-of-luck families that cannot celebrate Christmas because there is no money for gifts (note the ‘because-there-is-no-money-for-gifts). No matter what people tell me, Christmas is about gifts. It’s hard to swim upstream and pretend that Christmas is about grace, love, light, family. I have this terrible urge to escape to a place where Christmas either doesn’t exist or where it is not associated with gifts, as it used to be in Holland (but I suspect that has changed now as well).

Axel is trying to coach me to be more relaxed and ignore the gift giving but it is hard because all the talk around me is about gifts and the three shopping centers on my way home create enormous traffic jams for the next few weeks at any time of the day. Bah, humbug.

If I hear the words ‘the final stretch’ one more time I will throw up. I am tired of hearing the stale rhetoric. The only thing that is still fresh and funny is Tina Fey Palin. After Tuesday I will miss her act.

I had been listening to the radio for hours during the day and watched some TV in the evening. During the night the bites and pixels reconfigured into dreams about eruptions of Rwanda-like race conflict, nasty and violent and a family drama (not anyone I knew) in Technicolor and multiple languages (French, English and Dutch). I also dreamed of a visit to an MSH office that was only a short ride from my home. I considered a transfer and was going to follow up later. And finally there was the classic needing-to-get-someplace-but-not-being-able-to-get-there dream. The main problem was the barricade – erected because of the race riots – and my inability to get the right car window down to receive driving instructions from inflexible uniformed men. The trip to Afghanistan is coming into view.

On Sunday Axel went campaigning for Obama in Southern New Hampshire with a bunch of guys. Their marching orders were to visit all the people who had been missed in countless earlier strikes through towns and neighborhoods. Nothing is left to chance. He came back full of energy and quite hopeful.

I am ready to cast my vote. Axel thought it is fitting that my first presidential vote will be for a Kenyan American, the grandson of a Kenyan farmer. It is wonderful and amazing. There is something unknown in this, the roots (or tentacles?) reaching into another continent. I wonder about the expectations in the extended Obama family there. In most of the rest of the world having a president in the family is a bonus. I am trying to imagine the hordes of relatives that will come out of the woodwork. The newspaper already reported on an aunt (an elastic concept) who is living in Boston. Some people are trying to make hay from the fact that she may be here illegally. I hope that everyone is too tired to invest much mental energy in small stuff like that.

I attended Quaker Meeting and tried to subdue my overactive left brain that was busy making to-do lists and chatty commentaries about every thought that fleeted through my head during the hour-long silence. No silence in there at all. I think I see some meditation lessons in the future.

I biked the half hour distance to Meeting against a cold wind, both ways, under blue skies and a canopy of yellow leaves. Sometimes I wonder if I should start to catalogue what I encounter on my bike trip, other than the many (empty) liquor bottles. This time I also found a pink baby sneaker, size 6, right foot, a large and perfect piece of plywood, enough to make a table out of, and a fancy dog leash. There was the usual assortment of returnable cans, none of which I picked up even though it could have earned me a handful of dimes.

Packing for my trip to Afghanistan is a bit more complicated than all my other trips. For the latter I have a routine and the packing is easy. For this trip I have to think hard: warm clothes that cover me from wrists to neck to toes plus plenty of scarves. I went to the second hand clothing store in our town and picked up a pair of slacks priced at 35 dollars. I asked why the price was so high, double the price of all the other slacks. My question exposed me as a fashion heathen. “Too much?” the saleswoman said incredulously, “Look at the label! Do you know how much these go for new?” I then learned that the previous owner paid some 300 dollars for them. So, it was a bargain after all. I am going to be quite fashionable in Kabul. The only other items I need to buy are tops that are both warm and will cover my bottom. Not a standard item in my closet but, it seems, on the racks as the new fall fashion at Target where they will no doubt be less pricy than my new fancy slacks.

Once again I swiftly surfaced from the depth of the subconscious on the sound of stereophonic alarms going off on either side of the bed (his and hers); two different tones rudely interrupting my active and intense dream state. I was teaching in a workshop that was culturally homogenous but for me. It was a steep hierarchical culture and I tried to read the mood in order to determine whether I could question practices related to how one approached the chief. The workshop swung from chaos with no one listening to a rigid and hierarchical affair with no one speaking but the boss. Luckily the boss was a woman and I felt I was making some headway, explaining to her something about group dynamics. But I never found out whether I had overstepped my bounds or not and whether my intervention made any difference because of those two loud alarms.

Some of the elements of the dream I could connect to my upcoming trip to Afghanistan, others to the movie about Idi Amin I saw last night; and all has some meaning against the general backdrop of my work that takes me, by definition, into deep cultural currents where the surface says little about what happens underneath.

This too was the case, some forty plus years ago, in my years in secondary school in Haarlem, in a class that looks very homogenous except for one girl from China whose parents had settled in Holland. One of my former classmates has been finding people on the internet on various social websites and has brought us all together, at least virtually for now. I am following the back and forth emails full of memories with increasing amazement as my former classmates come to life in ways I never knew them. I discovered that some are dead – which shocked me a bit since I do not consider myself of a generation in which peers are dying already. Others, I learn now, came from very disturbed families or were disturbed themselves. Some can be googled and I learn more things I never even suspected: books written, canvasses painted, music and drugs.

These complex and multidimensional lives were already in full bloom when our paths crossed in the old Latin school tucked away in the center of Haarlem behind the central market square. But I had no idea. There was Emile. I knew that something was wrong because he could not look you into the eye and plucked his eyebrows incessantly with his fingers in one continuous nervous tic. We knew he was odd and we treated him like that – ruthless, without any grace or compassion. Now I think he probably had Asperger’s Syndrome or something like that. He was brilliant and died much too young. I was pleased to see that somewhere on the internet he was honored and that his books live on. Funny, that may not happen for the most adapted of us.

I don’t have many memories of my time at the school, and certainly not of the students. I had found my best friends elsewhere, at the rowing club where I spent all my free time. No one there went to a stuffy Latin school and I always envied their much cooler schools. As a result I never got to know my classmates well and certainly did not appreciate the diversity we had there and the fascinating lives that were unfolding. I am catching up now, with much curiosity and some regret.