Sylvia's Journal

The summer officially began yesterday, precisely at 1 minute before 8 PM according to Tessa; she knows about such things. At the moment supreme we were sitting on hard benches waiting for our table at the Fish Shack in Rockport. That included Joe who had returned from a pharmaceutical company retreat in Worcester which had ended with 450 employees drumming to experience alignment with each others’ and the universe’s heartbeat, or something like that.

We let the coming of summer pass unnoticed. We had nothing to toast with. In Rockport’s restaurants you can only order alcohol after you have placed your meal order, and you can only do that when you sit at a table. At any rate, Aimee who is 19 years old, would not have been allowed a drink even though in Holland she is considered old enough to have a glass of beer or wine.

Yesterday was a workday for all of us except Steve and Aimee. While Steve slept to recover from his drive down from London, Aimee explored the neighborhood which included the experience of being envelopped in a fogbank, alternated with bright sun and rain. She also checked out the bike that she will take to Cambridge and which blew a tire, as on cue, on her way into town to the bicycle repair shop. Later in the afternoon I did spot her bike by the icecream store as I drove out of town for an appointment.

That appointment was for my last acupuncture session. The sessions come in fours and we are going to let the chi work its magic for awhile without needles. John, the acupuncturist, is still trying to sort out what is happening in my right foot. It is getting increasingly sensitive to the needles. This time I even asked him to take one needle out because it hurt too much. He considers this a good thing because the abnormal sensitivity of my foot (I still feel like I walk on a wad of cotton balls) is one of the presenting symptoms. He believes that most of the rest of my symptoms were/are related to the misaligned sacrum and the PT’s work will take care of that. I sure hope so.

Sita called from Kentucky where it is raining all the time – they are on the outer fringes of a series of weather calamities hitting parts of the central United States. They are lucky to have a cabin but their travelmates have a tent. There are some tensions and dynamics in the traveling foursome and I have a feeling that the best part of the trip is coming home. This, of course, is no news to me.

With the summer weather arriving the memories and images of last summer are bubbling up from the recesses of my mind. Soon, every day will have a corresponding day and memory from last year, when the universe was both limitless (in its grace) and tiny because of our restricted movements and preoccupations. Part of me is dreading this daily comparison that I expect to start on the 14th. Part of me is celebrating. During my acupuncture session, when I usually fall asleep, I had this expansive feeling of joy, gratefulness and deep gratitude that envelopped me like a blanket and that stayed with me throughout the rest of the day, all the way into summer.

Yesterday was like driving with one hand on the steering wheel and the other cleaning the dashboard with spit. But first there was a trip to my eye doctor (20/20 vision, only a slight creep up in reading glass strength), who sent me home good to go for another 2 years.

Back home I kept one of my healthy eyes on the computer for emails washing in over the transom, especially from the countries where there are people who want something from me right now. The other eye/hand had started to clean out the mess in my office and do something akin to the reset button on a screen or computer program.

I finally threw out the coursebooks of MSH training courses I gave 10 or more years ago as well as anything else I had not touched for a few years. Sometimes I did not even open the file; it was easier that way. I am not an accountant so I don’t have to worry about stuff you have to keep x number of years for the taxman. In the process I also got rid of aged dustbunnies and untangled nests of wires.

I also rearranged the furniture so I can open my file drawers again; the last vestige of the calamity arrangement in my office, which used to serve as my sickroom, is now gone. With three more weeks to go to the first year anniversary, the symbolism of all these moves is hard to miss. When I picked up the biohazard bag with the keys of the plane that is no more I started thinking about what to do with them on July 14th. I am thinking of something splashy.

All this activity was triggered by the arrival last night of the 19-year old daughter of my friends Mariette and Dirk from Holland. Aimee is here to study economics at Harvard Summer School until mid August and I am delivering her to her dorm on Saturday morning. She is spending today at our house to ‘get used to being in America.’ A soft landing of sorts. Speaking about landings, I have not offered to take her for a plane ride as I am very sure her mom and dad would not approve.

It was the state trooper at Logan who alerted me to her presence (“Where are you ma’am?” – “I am standing by the reception railing outside customs.” – “Turn around ma’am!”). Aimee has passed through immigration and customs very quickly and I had arrived much too late, because of a brain only half turned on after the great clean-up. Her Dutch cellphone did not work. She had struggled with the coin-operated phone and given up, putting her fate in the hands of our state police, who delivered her into my hands. Not a good way to arrive. It was exactly what I had wanted to prevent. I learned something about the neo-cortex and my reptilian brain; the latter to be mistrusted and shut off as soon as possible after it kicks into gear.

Joe is coming back later today and then we will have a full house again with all the rooms in our house occupied. The idea of Lobster Cove Inn is not so strange as it may have sounded before, except we like having people we know rather than paying strangers. And as I write this there is another arrival. Steve and puppy Chicha have arrived after a long drive through the night straight from London (Canada). There is much hugging and yelping as Tessa is reunited with her man and dog.

Yesterday I was chauffeured into town again by Joe. While he was skilfully manipulating powerpoint (‘noodling’) to perfect the conceptual framework of CHS, I attended to other business, mostly related to our partnerships. It felt more like partnershits and mid-morning I was getting in such a funk because of all the hiccups in those relationships that it was time to get out of the building. Luckily the rowing club is across the street, so I left Joe to his noodling and went rowing on the Charles River for about one hour, down to the Elliott Bridge in Watertown and back. That got things right and the rest of the day went well.

After lunch we had another meeting with some staff from CHS in Cambridge and one on the phone from DC which produced iteration 8, sent out before we left the office for one more round of comments. That will be it for now. This morning Joe slept in; the early risings were starting to get to him. He is off to another job in Worcester to be back with us tomorrow night. On Monday we have one final meeting on the framework to put that baby to bed and Joe on the plane back to San Diego on Tuesday.

We left MSH late; too late, because of two goodbye parties that I wanted to attend. Thomas is leaving for business school in California. We travelled together to Nepal a few years ago. I will miss all 6 foot 10 of him. I read him a short poem and handed over lots of money from all over the world that he will pass on to a friend in Nepal. Kathleen is off to Belgium but she will come back in 3 months, speaking fluently French, at least that is her plan.

Our commute back was our slowest sofar and took us nearly one and a half hour. The worst part of the commute was that it was NPR fundraising week so the people who would otherwise have given us the news to distract us from the traffic jam were busy telling us why we should give them money for most of our slow ride home.

Back home hausfrau Axel was waiting with ‘mood adjusters’ and a chicken on the grill. Tessa joined us soon returning from a hard day of selling leather goods in Rockport. We sat outside as long as the mosquitoes let us, which was not very long. We ate our meal inside while outside continued to be a glorious evening with mosquitoes looking for blood.

After dinner we watched the movie Pucker Up which chronicles the run up and climax of the international whistling championships in Lewisburg North Carolina. Sita does not order hits or popular movies from Netflix. This is how we learn many things about the world we had no idea existed. Among other things we learned that Geert from Mierlo in the south of Holland was crowned the world whistling champion (in 2005 or 6). The movie follows him around in his native town which was fun as I could check the translations. Axel could too. I was also fun because none of the Americans could pronounce his name. We think Geert won because his last whistle was the American national hymn and the audience rose from their seats, hand on heart, deeply moved. After the movie was over everyone who could was whistling throughout the house for a little longer as he/she went about the business of getting ready for bed. The house was full of happy whistling sounds. I also puckered up producing a puffy sort of sound, not a whistle, but happy nevertheless.

Yesterday Joe and I started out again at a very early hour. Once again I was chauffeured to work. I could get used to that. Joe calls it ‘driving Miss Sylvia.’ I particularly like it on the way home when I can totally relax, nap a bit and then, if all the stars are lined up right, come home to a husband waiting with a drink and the perfect meal.

Last night that perfect meal was grilled squash (courgettes), grilled asparagus and salmon accompanied by a light summer wine overlooking Lobster Cove at full tide in the late afternoon sun. It was heavenly and worth every minute of the one hour commute each way, chauffeured or not.

Joe and I are making some progress, we think, on the model and positioning statement of the MSH center that has hired us, although we haven’t had that much input from the technical folks since they are all on the road. We are not too worried about that because we are distilling text and model from the, fairly raw, material from a retreat that was held earlier this year. We are building on that, not re-building from scratch. The model spontaneously turned into a key and a key hole; those sitting with us around the table liked it. We’ll see if it does anything for people who were not part of that conversation. The biggest handicap has been that we have not been able to have even one minute with the center’s chief and the deputy is now on vacation, so we are playing alone in the sandbox, without any supervision. It’s fun!

Axel spent another half day travelling to and fro for a half hour appointment at Spaulding’s Rehab in Boston. Three of those appointments a week eat up a considerable chunk of his time; and this is only the speech and occupational therapy. His dizzy spell in the car on Saturday has now been labeled as a vestibular disturbance that requires another therapeutic intervention. Tessa is trying to get Axel to do Kundalini yoga instead or at least start doing, on his own, one of five Tibetan rites. It certainly sounds better than going to rehab. However, what she demonstrated made me worry about finding Axel at the end of the the day crashed into the antique full length mirror in our bedroom. It requires circling 20 times with arms outstretched while keeping one’s eye firmly fixed on one’s index finger or something like that. It’s a nice idea but knowing about Axel’s pre-existing balance problems with this new dizziness on top of it all worries me a bit.

We are discovering over and over again that recovery is not a linear process – as in getting a little bit better all the time, a graph line that goes only up. We are finding new defects in our bodies that either went unnoticed or that were caused by one misalignment or another during the last 11 months. Yesterday I went back to my physical therapist because of a variety of pains and aches. That was a good thing. She discovered that my sacrum was ‘off’ as she called it. “That is no problem,” she said as she pressed and pushed it back into place. I was amazed that she could do this just like that. With the help of my breathing (“take a deep breath in – hold it – let it go”) she manipulated the bottom of my spine back into alignment. Whether it will stay that way is doubtful and so I have a new set of exercises to strengthen and stretch muscles on one side to keep the sacrum in place.

There are new therapy schedules in our appointment book on the kitchen counter. I also need to get back to the ankle doctor because the swelling of my ankle has not changed since February and it is about time to be back to normal. Axel too is going through this; a dizzy spell on Saturday is sending him back to the frontal lobe doctor again. Overall the line of recovery moves upward but there is some looping back.

The word ‘recursions’ came to my mind and when I looked it up in Wikipedia it turned out the wrong word however one sentence in the description of the word resonated, “Are we done yet? […] Without such a termination condition a recursion would go on forever.” That’s sometimes how we feel.

Joe and I went to MSH early and sorted out how best to help one division of MSH in its identity search, for which they had hired him and blocked some of my time. Usually I am not in on Mondays and I stayed under the radar by being on another floor; several people never realized I was there. This was a good thing as it turned out because the assignment took all our attention for the day. Joes stays with us in what he calls ‘Sterling Towers East.’ It was nice to be chauffeured to and from work by Joe; I fell asleep twice on the way home and he took a nap when we got back home. After all, for us the day had started early. I had not been getting up so early for over a week and it takes a bit to get used to the day starting at 4:30. It means that I am ready to eat at 5 PM (dinner is never ready that early) and to go to bed at 9 PM. We did not quite stick to that schedule once home for the dinner portion. The lateness of our dinner had something to do with Sita and Jim’s setting off on a trip to Kentucky to attend a music festival

Axel’s new grill, a Father’s Day gift from me, was used for the second day in a row. My being pressured into this gift went something like this: Me: “Why should I buy him a gift? He’s not my father.” Sita: “He’s a father because of you.” So now there is this shiny new Webber charcoal grill; a replica of the one Sita and Jim burned up by putting wooden logs in it – as if it was an outdoor fireplace. Sometimes I wonder how they can be so dumb and smart at the same time.

We started father’s Day with a Tessa-led yoga exercise in the living room for all but Sita and Jim. I have not done any yoga for years. I knew I had gotten very stiff but was dismayed at how bad it was. We did two sun salutations which is all Axel and I could handle. I repeated it this morning on my own with an intent to do this every day.

We celebrated Father’s Day in a way that was a little different from what was planned. Tessa had organized an outing on a Schooner from Rockport but the crew had called off all scheduled departures because of inclement weather. It was actually not that inclement except that the sun was not shining. Instead we went to a restaurant that claims to be entirely ‘green’ and has the best sushi in Gloucester. For the occasion Axel ordered a ‘one daughter’ sake that came in a small wooden box (nothing but sipping possible) while the girls competed for who was the one daughter. He could have ordered two drinks but he did not, getting quite disciplined about alcohol consumption, especially at midday. All our foods were served in small (tiny, according to Axel) quantities, cleverly displayed in three dimensions and unusual combinations.

We took the scenic route to Rockport, Tessa’s second home, and did the Bearskin Neck loop. We entered several shops, touching at least 20 things exclaiming how nice or how pretty or how cool and then walked out again. Tessa hates people like that. Axel counted the fathers who had been taken, like him, on a Father’s Day shopping adventure by their daughters, wives or girlfriends. You could tell they had been sold a load of goods; billed as if it was fun or lured to Rockport under some pretext or another, you could see whole bunches of them leaning against shop windows or doors, looking bored out of their minds. You could tell that they wanted to be home watching a game or rummaging in their workshops or doing something else, anything but shopping in tourist knick-knack stores.

Eventually our path lead to Val’s store and then to DJ’s leather goods store and we girls made sure we touched at least 20 things there as well. DJ is one of my faithful blog readers so he knows everything about us, sometimes even before Axel, Sita and Tessa know. Axel started saying that we had just come back from a conference but did not need to finish his sentence as DJ said, “I know.” It makes for efficient conversation as there is no need for preliminaries; you can cut straight to the chase.

Back home Axel received his present from Sita, an oil painting set. He has been admiring the paintings by John Walker (also at Bearskin Neck); we are hoping for an as yet unrevealed talent. I returned to the garden and ‘hilled’ the potatoes while Axel got the guestroom ready for Joe Sterling who has returned to the East Coast for a short consultancy with MSH and another in Worcester. The place where he built the ramp last year is still somehwat recognizable but the grass is growing nicely in, covering up memories of being wheelchair-bound.

It was heaven to wake up in a real bed and not have to walk on a scuzzy damp carpet to get to the ‘men-only’ bathroom that was the only one on our dorm floor; or to worry about the mice and giant ants that shared the space with us; or entertaining the possibility of being locked out of one’s dorm room in a flimsy nightgown with cellphone and car keys inside the room. All that is now past, until next year in Charleston where we will throw ourselves into such an adventure again.

Yesterday Ed Schein delivered the closing plenary in the conference with a reflective piece, what else could one expect, on teaching. He had sketched out his own learning journey. Sita was stationed in the back of the room and recorded his journey on two foam board panels while he talked. She had her own group of fans and curious people sitting close by watching intently as she turned Schein’s words into pictures and key words. Right in line with the conference slogan (we’ll blow their minds), she blew everyone’s mind there. For Axel and me it was an experience that is hard to turn into words: to see your child doing something that is so truly masterful is the best gift one can get as parents. Many people here knew Sita and Tessa from Caringbridge and greeted Sita as if she was a relative or close friend. OBTS was another one of those communities that circled its arms around us, eleven months ago.

Going home after such an intense week is both wonderful (own bed, own stuff, kids) and a let down. I was also intensely tired from having been ‘on’ for an entire week. I was also nervous about the coming two weeks and all the work that has to be done between now and then before I take off for two back to back trips to Ghana and Haiti. I did not dare to open my mailbox which had filled up to overflowing again, just as I had been getting the contents down to below stress levels.

I ended up gardening and had my first mosquito bites of the season. I discovered another two tiny asparagus spears which raised our success level in getting the plants started to 25%. I thinned the seedlings and put them in a salad with the romaine lettuce that had reached adult proportions. It was the first meal from our garden this year.

I still have not seen Tessa who came home after I left for Babson a week ago. She has a Father’s Day plan that brings us all together for an outing on the water. Right now it is raining which is good for the garden but not for the outing; still, being together in the rain sounds better than being separated in the sun.

Today Bill and I had hoped to fly to Rockland in Maine, the trip planned for last week but aborted because of fog. Once again the coast is not clear. In fact, nothing is clear this morning in a radius of more than 100 miles around Boston. So we will wait till noontime and see where the fog will burn off; that’s where we will go. Alternatively, we may end up in the practice area and practice manoeuvers and using the Garmin.

Axel just took off to partake in the political process as a delegate to the Massachusetts Democratic Party State convention that takes place in Lowell today. He was picked up by two other members of the Manchester Democratic Town Committee, one displaying her Obama button; the other was for Hillary but I don’t know where she stands now. Does anyone know?

Yesterday was the third day of rain, a slow steady rain that soaks everything deep down to the roots. It is perfect for our flowers, fruits and vegetables. A quick tour of the garden shows the carrots, onions, beans, beets, chart, potatoes, lettuce, and spinach are growing nicely, as are the raspberries, tomatoes and basil. The only thing we cannot determine are the asparagus; the entire bed is filled with tiny weeds and, new to this crop, we have no idea whether somewhere in there are asparagus greens.

After my early morning visit to the dentist on Friday morning, I drove into Cambridge where the traffic was a mess because of countless graduation and other celebratory events. Harvard graduated on Thursday and MIT on Friday. These graduations bring thousands people into the city and create gridlock everywhere.

I suffered the traffic hassles only because I wanted to have a meeting with my ex-colleague Barbara who now works at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. She is responsible for building up the Institute’s capacity to work in developing countries. As it turns out IHI’s work of improving the quality of healthcare is quite complementary to our leadership development program and so we are exploring how we can enhance each other’s work. The manager of the Gates-funded Fives Alive! project in Ghana was visiting the US and this seemed too good a chance to miss. I am now connecting her team with our leadership team in Ghana so that they can continue the exploration on the ground and get more concrete about how this new relationship might be consummated.

At noon I was done with the meeting. I called my new colleague Lisa who is also a sculler and, after some protests (“it is such a yuckky day”), I was able to get her out of the building and onto the water. We had a wonderful row, having the Charles River more or less to ourselves. This was Lisa’s first row of the season and my second. We hope to be rowing in a double soon. With this row I upped my rowing mileage to 7 miles in total which brings the cost of my boatclub membership to $80 per mile. The more I row, the cheaper the mile!

I drove back to Beverly in the afternoon for my weekly acupuncture session. The acupuncturist is trying different things each time. Some of the symptoms that brought me to him are less acute now but nothing has gone away. He’s trying hard to get the nerves in my foot back to normal but we are beginning to suspect that the damage is permanent and more Chi flowing down there is not going to do the trick. The other pains are from knots and tightness in muscles and tendons; he used suction cups that increase the blood flow through the affected areas, in the hope of loosening things up. I may need to try something else. A trip to the physical therapist in a week or so may suggest other avenues.

I picked our lodger Andrew up from a Beverly basement where he was messing around with bikes, which is what he does for a living. Aside from preparing for his year in Kenya, he is also preparing for some bike fest in Jamaica Plain tomorrow. We will be saying goodbye to him today. I will see him next in Kenya if things stay quiet. This is not quite the case right now as we read on the internet, sitting side by side at the dining room table in front of our computers. Food riots in Nairobi are bringing people angry into the streets. There is much activity bubbling under the surface. It will require very good statesmanship from those in power to keep the place from erupting again; we are a bit pessimistic since it is the kind of statemanship that was not evident in the riots earlier this year.

We had dinner with the St. Johns and caught up on families and kids. The conversation drifted, as it does so often, to the crash, the early days and the Herculean efforts of our children to keep things organized amidst swirling emotions. This brought us to the brain injury conversation, of which we are having many these days. As it begins to sink in what the implications are (and each conversation contributes a little) more emotions come to the surface. Axel and I are both affected by this, albeit it in different ways. There is much sadness, anger, hurt and disappointment but also more and more clarity about the boundaries of what is possible. These are difficult conversations and not everyone understands what we are going through, except those who deal professionally with kids and adults who suffer the consequences of head injuries.

Yesterday was entirely dominated by my first experience of jury duty, billed as both a right and a privilege.

I was registered as juror number 37. I wanted to get number 8 and re-enact Henry Fonda’s brilliant performance in Twelve Angry Men in which he shows great emotional intelligence and brilliant logical reasoning, knitted together with charm, maturity and wisdom. I would have loved to have the chance to say quietly, ‘let’s just talk.’

But before I became juror nr 37 I had to sit through a half hour orientation conducted by a jury officer who had honed his talk to be understandable and intelligible to the lowest common denominator of The American People. It was agony to sit through his endless repetitions, answering questions no one asked, or rather, he asked on our behalf and then answered. The question of why we had to wait in a church basement when we were here on duty for the government, probably anticipating church-state separation protest, was actually not on anyone’s mind but he answered it nevertheless, two times actually. The first time in a ‘comical’ way as he admitted (“it is easier to pray to God that you will not be called”) and then a second ‘no kidding’ answer that the church had kindly offered to put us up during our, potentially entire day’s wait in a place that was, in my mind only slightly more comfortable than the hard wooden benches in the courthouse.

We had all been told, weeks before our date, on various pieces of paper that came in the mail, in huge white letters on a black background to bring our confidential questionnaire and call a number the day before to see if we would be dismissed. Nevertheless several people showed up whose number had been dismissed (if they had called the day before they would have known and not needed to show up) and about one third of the people present had not (NOT) brought the questionnaire. I am not sure what this says about The American People: they either don’t know how to read, can’t be bothered to read or simply are so stressed out by jury duty that their normal brain functions are temporarily disabled. I can’t think of another reason. But it does make you wonder about the quality of the deliberations that we are all supposed to engage in if we are selected. I thought of Henry Fonda again; the stuff he had to put up with! I wondered about all the emotional baggage and psychodynamic stuff that this group of people carried into the church basement and into the jury pool. One woman was reading a book with the title ‘How to live successfully with screwed up people.’ Another was reading ‘Trial by Fury’ (I am not making this up!). I knew then that I was in for a treat.

We were informed about breaks with special mention that taking insulin at any time was OK. Apparently there have been some scares and emergencies caused by the many signs that say ‘no eating and no drinking’ in the courthouse. Diabetes is pretty much a national disease in this country and so insulin is now part of the orientation. There were a few very obese people in the pool and the information must have been a relief to some of them.

Our holding pen was the basement of the Tabernacle Church. It looked like all other church basements with long folding tables and hard metal folding chairs. The walls were decorated with handmade quilts of happy hands and proclamations that we are all children of God. There was nothing by way of entertainment and I felt sorry for the people who did not bring anything to read or do as I had an inkling that the day was going to be very long. I had come prepared and considered the situation no different from travelling overseas with endless waits: in airports until it was time to take off and in planes until it was time to land. Except this wait might have a surprise at the end (a case), like a toy in a cereal box which you cannot have until the box is empty. The excitement comes from the anticipation, not usually the toy itself.

And so the real wait began at 9 o’clock. I used the time to clean out my email box. I received an email from my Iraqi doctor friend Samer who forwarded me something that requires multiple clicks on forwarded attachments to get a slideshow about conducting CPR on yourself while driving in a car alone far away from a hospital in case of a heart attack. The trick is to cough repeatedly. IT COULD SAFE YOUR LIFE screams the PowerPoint with much flashing of arrows and stars. It is rather touching to think that an Iraqi doctor believes I need to have this information, living in a place with more hospitals per square mile than any other place in the world. I am touched but delete it anyways. I am on his ‘forward’ list and get much internet flotsam and jetsam through him often in Arabic and often with pictures that make fun of Iraq’s ex-president the same way we make fun of our current one. I do not respond to his emails anymore (I used to) as I don’t want to encourage a more active correspondence of this kind.

My email cleanup project was interrupted by the same officer who did our orientation. He apologized profusely for moving into what he called ‘one-way communication.’ I realized quickly that this was code for “do as I tell you!” He made a case for his authoritarian behavior which he wears like an ill-fitting suit by telling us stories about having to hunt for jurors in cafes up and down Federal Street. It was clear that he considered us his flock of sheep and I suspected he is held accountable for us being there when we are called. I am sure that the wrath of lawyers and judges is something he wants to avoid at all cost since he is the little guy in the chain here. The rules he imposed on us are undoubtedly based on years of experience with what Axel’s father used to call ‘The Great American Public,’ and I don’t envy him, having to go through this day after day.

We were told to watch a video which has various characters, carefully gender balanced but not racially balanced, about what is awaiting us if we get to be selected. First lots of thank yous for fulfilling our sacred duty, then some explanations of terms and the kinds of trials we might be part of and finally the dos and don’ts of juror deliberations. I learned that what the foreman of twelve Angry Men did (a straw vote at the start of the deliberations) is not a good thing. Advances in social psychology since then must have shown that, once stated, a person’s opinion may not change that easily anymore out of fear of looking dumb or impulsive. I am not sure if this is true but if it is, the system is capable of learning; miracles happen alongside with shit!

After the obligatory watching of the video we were released for a coffee break with directions to Dunkin Donuts down the street and a plea to be back at 10:30 (or else!). At 11:15 a new jury officer comes to get us. Like ducklings we file out of the church basement, across the street and into the District Court building where we were told that there were only two cases requiring 12 people (out of the 30 or so of our pool). We were seated in a windlowless courtroom that was designed to impress and/or intimidate with cold stone walls and clear signs of who is in charge (The Government of the United States of America!).

The first jury selection process was for a drunken driving case. It took about one hour. Everything was done in an atmosphere of hushed awe with various suits whispering while standing at what is called the side bar, if I got that right. One by one jurors were called ‘to step up to the side bar.’ Here they were questioned by the judge and attorneys and one more person in a suit who called our numbers. To my great surprise jury number one was the first to be called. I had expected something more random. The jury box, one level down from our ‘pool’ benches at the back, has only 7 seats. They were filled before we got to number 10. With my number 37 I thought I’d be scot-free and on my way home in no time but I was wrong. People already seated in the jury box were returned to the pool for reasons only known to the four whispering suits at the side bar.

One of our group knew the defendant and another the policeman witness. They were dismissed for this case and returned to the pool, three rows of benches in the back. One woman was sent home in tears, after she was given some kleenex. May be she had lost her husband in a drunken driving accident. She was excused for the day. The rest of us watched intently for clues about why people did or did not get selected. I saw people nod and shake their heads and wondered what questions they were asked; questions best asked in private about alcohol use and opinions about alcohol maybe? I wondered whether Quakers are generally known as teetotalers and if should I mention the plane crash and our reduced alcohol consumption since last July? As more numbers were called up we entered the twenties, then thirties of the juror numbers. One or the other of the whispering attorneys continued to dismiss prospective jurors back into the pool. They are allowed to do that, some for reason and some for no reason at all. There were words for that in the video but I had already forgotten those.

The selection process remained very mysterious to me. It felt a bit like musical chairs except the rules of the game were not clear. Suddenly my number was up (is this where the expression comes from?). I was not even questioned and ordered straight into chair #2 in the jury box and I wondered ‘why me?’ But before I had a chance to answer that question I was released back into the pool again, like an undersized lobster (don’t take this personally the lady on the video had said earlier). Finally the attorneys and judges agreed on a new occupant for chair 2 and with that the slection process was completed. I had escaped by a hair (I seem to do that a lot these days!). The remaining twenty two of us were sent back to the church basement. It was close to lunchtime but the second case was not ready for jury selection yet.

After that some bonding began to happen; the two Asian looking women sat together and people started to talk. We were no longer strangers, and bound by a same wish (to be dismissed altogether). I was relieved that I didn’t have to hear the testimonies in the drunken driving case. I watched the defendant and wondered what it would be like to sit so exposed to total strangers and what tragedy was hiding behind the facts that would be presented later? After our final dismissal, later in the day we learned that the DUI case is continuing today!

We were let out for lunch into the most horrid weather, which led me back into the basement as soon as I had finished my sandwich. I did not want to risk coming back too late and sent home without any credit. We had to wait for another hour and a half on our hard church seats, yawning in chorus out of sheer boredom making us look like a bunch of unlikely candidates for serious decision making about someone else’s life.

At 3:30 PM a female jury officer explained that case two was being settled and did not require a jury. This announcement was greeted with a big cheer from everyone. She promised us certificates as if we had just completed a course and told us that we would be exempted from jury duty for the next three years. Within minutes the basement was empty and we were all strangers again.