Sylvia's Journal

Not a good start of the day: first coming out of a very intense but irretrievable world of dreams by way of my too singsongy Chinese alarm and then not making any progress on getting people on the phone in Africa. Actually I did get people on the phone, either non English speakers who kept saying hello, with me saying the same on the other side, never getting beyond that; or taped voices telling me that the voicemail box is full; not just the voice mailbox of my target but even those of the assistant and the assistant’s assistant. I did get through to one person on the list, so there is some progress. A final call to my sister who turned 64 today completes the ‘to-call’ list. She is, not surprisingly receiving iTunes attachments of ‘When I’m 64.

Today is jury duty day and I need to report to Salem’s courthouse promptly at 8. I am bringing my computer and a very heavy library tome to wile away the hours in case the day is all about waiting.

Yesterday Axel and I crossed paths in the driveway as I got out of the car and he into it to drive back to Boston to his first class (a summer course) at MassArt again. We weren’t sure if he was ready and now with all the brain stuff emerging I was even less sure that this was a good decision. Although Axel did drive all the way into school he returned before entering, having come to the same conclusion that the stress of a demanding course is not what he needs right now with all the intensive therapies going on. I am very relieved.

We attended the yearly business meeting of the Manchester Historical Society. The average age at these meetings is a much higher than 64 and my presence brings the average down a few notches. I used to hate going to these sorts of meetings because I could never remember who was who and I was always only known as Axel’s wife. But after 15 years in this town I am beginning to know some of the old folks on my own (although I am still introduced as Axel’s wife). I had a delightful conversation with a woman who looked like she was 64 but actually is 80; there are many women like that, more women than men actually; all with the richest (her)stories. I am beginning to understand why Axel likes to go to these events. Of course for him it is different as he is so active in town politics and his family has lived here for about 100 years that he is well known and loved by all.

The yearly event follows a fixed formula: half an hour of socializing around tables filled with elegant finger foods, a business meeting where we go through all the motions of a business meeting but do it in about 10 minutes, a flurry of Roberts’ Rules of Order incantations and then it is time for the guest speaker. We were treated to a slideshow of architectural styles in Manchester which featured, among others, Axel’s childhood home. We now know it is Swiss Scroll style. It was a delightful parade through housing fashions from 1650 to the present.

Five minutes before the alarm goes I wake up. It is a built in safeguard to start the day with birds chirping rather than the whiny Chinese alarm tone. I have my morning routine pat now: a shower, emptying the dishwasher while making breakfast and at my desk at 5 AM.

Getting up so early is especially useful when I need to call Africa. I started with calling those who are the furthest away, in Tanzania, where the work day is nearly over. No luck; then progressively closer to home, ending with Ghana, only four hours away. Also no luck. The intended conversations are then turned into emails, sent off with a small prayer that people are checking their in boxes, and tomorrow we will try again. This is how it goes.

Yesterday was for many of us at work a race against the time. Not because anything special was happening but because the end of the day kept pushing closer through the enormous number of requests, jobs, assignments and chores. Many of them are relatively small things but together the sheer volume is at times overwhelming; there is also a relentlesness to the pace of work; assignments come in over the transom as if there is no tomorrow. There are trips on the horizon that function as hard stops for many of us. At some point they seemed far away and suddenly they are there; there are also new trips added and the juggling begins when a few dates start to slip. It looks now as if I will be going to Ghana on my way to Haiti at the end of this months. The ‘on the way’ part comes from JFK from where flights to both Ghana and Haiti originate.

Axel drove in to Boston with me yesterday for his early morning appointment at Spaulding Rehab. The brain injury work is beginning to reveal things that have puzzled us for a long time. It is as if Axel’s skull is pried open and we are getting a peek inside. We are discovering that the car accident that Axel was in 21 years ago had more severe consequences than we had thought; and not only on his spine. I have often wondered about Axel’s difficulty in staying focused and work systematically on getting things done and when that started; he wasn’t like that when we met in Beirut and when we lived in New York or even Georgetown. The plane crash has exacerbated what may have been an injury from that earlier time and so we are finding ourselves in this place of delayed grieving about a loss we didn’t even knew we had suffered; all of us because it is not just Axel who is affected.

Yesterday’s session at Spaulding had affected him deeply as the nature of the injuries is becoming increasingly clear, explaining much of the agony and frustration Axel is experiencing in getting back on the track he was on before July. We are reading articles about brain trauma and head injuries that seem to pop up in unlikely places such as Harvard Business Review (May issue), Wired magazine and then of course the internet in addition to the articles his therapists are providing him. Memories of my first real earning job as a neuropsychology test assistent in the early 70s came flooding in. I was a psychology student in Leiden at the time and considering a career in neuropsychology. A highly coveted internship in a family therapy practice diverted me from that course before I was whisked off to Geneva/Beirut/Yemen as a new bride changing the course of my life in ways I could not have dreamt up.

On a positive note, we are encouraged by what is known about the plasticity of the brain and grateful for the professional help. Jim has been instructed to initiate Axel into the mystery (and joys) of Sudoku. It’s not Axel’s sort of activity but the specialists are encouraging him and Jim and I think we might be able to get him hooked. For Axel the new insights have caused many emotions and lots of sadness. He writes, “I am beginning to understand what has happened in those 20 years and I’m starting to see what the treatment will entail. I am very sad about getting such a late start on it – I think of all the tension that not getting things done has caused and the huge effort that it has cost to do what I did get done – but I feel like some dam has broken letting all this out.” We are all standing by his side as he works through this.

We have a full house again. Andrew moved in for a week. Andrew is a young man on his way to Kenya where he will run a project that helps other, and less fortunate, young men in Kibera (Nairobi) and in Navaisha build and alter bikes for use in santitation and waste disposal. He is doing that for a small (tiny) organization called WorldBike. I have been asked to be on the Board of this organization. WorldBike has been hired by UN Human Settlements Program in Kenya. The operation is a bit of a family venture and also runs on a shoe string budget, so project managers are put up by friends and family when the budget has no line for a hotel.

My Quaker friend Kristna is the Executive Director of the organization. She dropped Andrew off and stayed for a Mexican dinner which we ate sitting by the cove on what felt like a late July evening; the mosquitoes thought it was still winter and it was only just before the sun went down behind the Putnam woods they discovered we were out there. Sita and Jim joined us and there was much to talk about: Kenya, Africa, Social entrepreneurship and amazing NGOs, like Kickstart, BRAC and so many others that grew out of nothing more than an idea and a huge reservoir of dedication, patience and perseverance. I think I saw a sparkle in Andrew’s eye. Who knows, we might be sitting in the company of another such brilliant young leader who will leave his mark on thousands of people.

Although yesterday was a Monday I drove into Cambridge because of meeting that could not be arranged any other time. This was an after action review meeting of our recently completed virtual leadership program with deans and their faculty teams from medical, nursing and public health professionals from Egypt, Yemen, Mexico, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and South Africa. After the meeting I sat with my colleague Jon who is officially retired but unofficially not and divides his time between Dhaka, Capetown and the Bahamas. We share a love for rowing and sailing as well as public health. We explored ways to get involved in the public health program that was started at BRAC University some four years ago.

And then there was an unprogrammed afternoon and I decided it was time for a row on the Charles River. It was the first such a row since July 14th 2007. I like rowing in the middle of the day because there is no one else on the river and only very few motor boats. The river is very crowded when the sun gets up, just about this time when I am writing in my blog each morning, and after school when all the clubs have their boats out training for the next scheduled event. In this cold climate all the races are squished together into a very short period of time, when water temperatures will not kill you in minutes.

Although a bit windy I managed to do my old routine: a 3.5 mile stretch from the boathouse to the Elliott Bridge and back. It was as if I never interrupted rowing. I had been worried about my right ankle and my glute(us maximus) which has been giving me so much trouble lately; but all the body parts aligned for the movement of rowing without a hitch or even hint of pain. However, by the time I arrived back at the boathouse I was very tired and realized that it had taken me a bit longer to row the distance than before the accident: a 10% difference; all in all not bad given that I have not done any aerobic exercise for more than 10 months.

Rowing on the Charles is always a treat because there is so much to see along the banks. For one there is the wildlife: I counted about 10 Black-crowned Night-herons. These birds are odd looking creatures. I learned that young Black-crowned Night-Herons often disgorge their stomach contents when disturbed. The adults would make good partners to cuckoos as they do not distinguish between their own young and those from other nests, and will brood chicks not their own. There were also snapping turtles, sunning themselves on logs. And of course then there are the humans. Unlike the herons they come in all shades and forms. There are the Japanese tourists who always take pictures of everything, which includes me. There is the office-worker lunch crowd; there are the young lovers, picking spots not easy to see from the road but very visible from the water. There are the countless joggers, attached to iPods, running along mechanically whose speed is averaged out by the shuffling elderly with their walkers and minders.

After a row my head is always red like a lobster; I prefer to go home. I had some silly idea that I would do some more work back home but found Axel steaming from his nostrils after another hissy-fit about the general clutter in our house. Luckily Sita had come to the rescue but only after she heard loud swearing coming from the house. Axel had been preparing Andrew’s sleeping quarters and had run into the storage limitation of our house and some neglectful behavior of previous occupants of that room.

I decided to let him cool off upstairs and prepare dinner myself. This allowed me to finish the delightful British comedy/detective book-on-tape ‘The trouble with Harriet’ which would otherwise have me sit in the car on the driveway. Much of the dinner was already cooked by trader Joe anyways so it was not much of a chore.

After dinner we watched the last episode of Prime Suspect and finally disovered who dunnit and we cheered along with all the macho guys in Chief Inspector Tennyson’s office who, after much grumbling and sabotage finally admitted that a woman could do the job. And then it was bedtime again.

Flying has been much on my mind since I first woke up at 2 AM and then slept fitfully until I could no longer sleep, anxous to finish the last details on my cross-county trip planning. There is much stuff about flying going through my mind, some re-living of trips made and some prayers of thankfulness. Today looks like a good day for a long trip: blue sky and no wind. Whether it will be like that in Rockland County in Maine is not clear yet.

Yesterday’s bad weather rolled in slowly after noon. It was a chores kind of day. Before heading out west to make music and see their friends Sita and Jim cleaned the downstairs and then took the porch windows off and brought them into the cellar. The windows are old and very heavy and it is such a treat to have someone else do the heavy lifting and hauling.

A large amount of dirt, 4 cubic yard, was dumped on our lawn at the same place where we dumped this amount last year and what became a spectacular weed forest after being neglected for most of the summer. This year’s load will go partially into the half full asparagus bed and provide the rest of the flower beds with some badly needed healthy topsoil. Everything looks a bit anemic.

Putting the porch windows in the cellar reminded me what a mess the place was. Sita and Jim’s stuff was put on top of what was already there and after the crash the cellar had become a workshop of sorts for projects to help us adjust to living in our temporary handicapped state. The cellar had been beckoning as a project for some time now and yesterday we bit the bullet (and lots of dust) and we went to work sorting stuff, throwing much out and organizing all the thousands of little and big things that clutter the place. I lost track of how many times I asked Axel “what’s this for?” or “what’s this called?” There is so much I don’t know about how things are made or what they are made of. I labelled boxes and tins and small drawers so we can actually know what is inside each without having to open everything up. I found proper names for most doohinkies except a few which got their own drawer with ‘dookinkies’ on the label.

Such intense work amidst much dust and mildew and for so many hours left us rather diminished by the end of the day. Axel was in considerable pain and walked like he used to last October. Such a regression is painful to watch but impossible to avoid after several hours of physical labor. It requires a half hour of painful exercises before he can go to bed and hope to wake up in less pain. We have to remember that it has only been 10 months and that such setbacks are to be expected.

A thousand chirpy birds in a bright blue sky woke me up this morning. The cove was half full with the surface of a looking glass reflecting the blue of the sky. The row boat beckoned. This required a bit of assembly. Axel had bought new handgrips and new oar ‘buttons,’ the red and green cuffs that hold the oars in the oar locks. By the time I made it onto the water the glassiness had given way to ripples and once out of the cove it was a bit too choppy for relaxed rowing and so I returned. Still it was fun to be able to go for a row like that early in the morning on this beautiful spring day. We do live in paradise!

Sita sent us an article this morning, all the way across the driveway, from Time magazine that features a story about Tony Blair’s new calling with him posing in front of Sita’s rendering of his journey. How proud can you be as parents?

Yesterday I went in early to Cambridge and found the office deserted, which it usually is at that early hour, but staying deserted the rest of the day since most of my colleagues are still in Washington. My elderly computer acted up so much that simply sending some follow up emails to people met in Washington took me nearly two hours. I tried to be patient and resisted the increasingly strong desire to throw a temper tantrum and fling the darn thing into the wall. A scheduled meeting prevented what would have been considered very unprofessional behavior. After the meeting my energy level went downhill so fast that I decided to give up on my plan to have a productive day. I sat in on a one hour information session on MSH’s benefits package which seemed a good use of time and, apparently, it did so to 9 other colleagues. Since there were 10 door prizes for attendance we all got a price. I won a leather CIGNA portfolio which I donated to my colleague Thomas who is going to be a business man after he graduates from business school in California, two years from now. At the benefits session I discovered that one of my new colleagues rows and became a member of the boatclub across the street. This is great news; we can now row together, in one or two boats.

This new discovery propelled me to the boat house for my first row of the season, months after my clubmates put their boats in the water. But then I could not remember the combination of the lock on the women’s dressing room and that was the end of that plan. It was time to go home and stop expecting great deeds; how much wiser it would be to simply enjoy the beautiful day; there was still plenty left of it.

We had a lovely dinner consisting of asparagus, salmon burgers and tabbouleh made from a Lebanese cookbook that witnessed our courtship in Beirut some 30 years ago. We dined sitting by the cove drinking Axel’s home made beer out of a blue bottle with a home made label that was part of his graphic design school assignment some years ago. Life is good!

When you walk out of the house a subtle but penetrating scent of lilacs envelops you. They are at their peak in three magnificent colors: white, pale violet and dark purple. The sight and scent make you want to stop the progress of seasons. This is a great time of the year at our house (something I say nearly every season).

We touched down in our tiny Canadian Regional Jet yesterday at 6:30 PM. Axel was waiting for me. We had some turbulence on the way back from Washington which made me break out in a sweat. I have never quite responded this way to turbulence. The little plane veered left then right and my body instantly relived the anxious moments on our climb out of Kabul six weeks ago. The body remembers, I remembered!

Yesterday morning I had breakfast with Mr. Abed, the founder and chief exectuive of one of the world’s biggest and most famous NGOs which is called BRAC. I had met him some 17 years ago at his headquarters, sitting on the topfloor of a highrise that was, at the time, unusual in the otherwise low city of Dhaka. Then we talked about sucession planning. I mentioned to him that seventeen laters he was still at the helm. Indeed he is, but he has strong leaders at each of BRAC’s enterprises: a university, a series of profit-making enterprises and the social programs. When you teach about leadership it is very exciting to meet someone in person who is/does everything you associate with leadership. Story telling is one of those abilities. I had heard the story about the introduction of oral rehydration therapy in Bangladesh before, but hearing it come directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, made for one of the better breakfast dates I have ever had. We explored how BRAC can include the teaching of leadership in its preparation of the next generation of public health leaders.We are both seeing a trip to Bangladesh in the future.

After breakfast I checked out of my room and went to see my friend Tisna and her husband in their building project, a brownstone near Dupont Circle that has been undergoing reconstructive surgery for several years now. They are no longer camping in their own house and the end is in sight but for me it seemed like a long way off. I suppose it all depends on what you are used to. We are also perpetually busy with our house but not that busy and we can actually sit and read most every night. Such homely relaxation is not in the stars for them quite yet. But when it is done it will be magnificent, in a wonderful urban setting.

When I arrived home we made ‘a tour of the estate’ as we call it. It has become somewhat of a ritual upon my homecoming: we pour ourselves a drink and slowly walk around the house, checking whether the seedlings are emerging, the progress of the lettuce, the length of the grass (Sita mowed yesterday and so everything looks pristine). I noticed that creatures have nibbled a particular plant. I may never come to flower and so I can’t remember what it is supposed to be which makes it less of a loss. The Columbines that reseeded themselves (with some help) are deep blue. I suggest them as a subject for a new line of note cards. On the seaside lawn the lily-of-the-valley are in full bloom and filling the air with their fragrance. Axel’s mother used to bundle and sell them on the flower market; the revenu went into their Bermuda fund, an annual vacation. I never quite understood how such a tiny humble flower could fund such a trip but, apparently, city people pay big money for small bouquets of these lovely flowers. I have never been to Bermuda and it is not a destination so we just let the flowers bloom to their hearts’ content and then they die to do it all over again next spring, to our continued delight.

Today is Memorial Day in the US, the equivalent of May 4 in Holland, celebrated with parades and speeches at cemeteries that are sprigged up for the occasion. The weather is nearly always perfect, as is today. It is one of those days that makes leaving home very hard but that is what I have to do. In the afternoon I will fly to Washington D.C. for the annual Global Health Conference. Most years I manage to miss this conference which always requires travel over the Memorial Day weekend. This time I got strong-armed onto program. With one of my young colleagues I will be doing a workshop that illustrates how we demystify leadership. I know that, once I am there, it will OK and may be even fun. But right now, looking out over a glassy Lobster Cove and a roto-tilled garden that is ready to plant, I am reluctant to leave home.

Yesterday was a day like this as well. In between Quaker Meeting and a cookout at Nancy and Ed’s, Axel’s cousins who live in West Gloucester, we managed to put in some yard work. I finished the window boxes; we bought the tomatoes and basil plants and emptied the compost bin. The compost had, against all expectations because of our negligence, produced some very rich soil out of a year of (organic) consumption debris. It was like an archeaologicial dig: there were the tea bags, the egg shells, the corn cobs and melon rind, mixed in with the occasional plastic bag, elastic bands, tie-ums, that spoke of a lazy composter or one who did not want to get her hands dirty. Yesterday we got our hands very dirty.

Sita called from the airport as she was heading out to Western Massachusetts for a concert, whisked away by Jim who went to pick her up. After a three day R&R at a most luxurious resort on the Red Sea Coast and flying business class home she had no (and made no) excuses about being tired. I was relieved to hear her voice, not being sure how the Mt. Sinai adventure had ended. She was proud to have made the 7 km long and 7000 ft up trip ‘Mount Moses’ albeit it with a multitude of other tourists. The trip could also me made by camel for those less fit. This made the experience of watching the sunrise a little different than they had expected; apparently it was a rather noisy and crowded gathering at the summit. We were glad to find out that there had been no sleeping with the bedouins.

I woke up this morning with the word ‘otherwise’ on my mind. I was reminded of the poem by Jane Kenyon with the same name. I am acutely aware this morning of the other reality that we escaped by a hair last July, the it-might-have-been-otherwise reality as I look at the sleeping Axel. My heart fills with tenderness and I touch him softly, my fingers walking down his spine. He stirred for a moment but kept sleeping. He has no idea of the tender place I am in.

I am no longer thinking daily of our miraculous survival but today I am. I am even revisiting the last minutes or seconds before the crash when everything went black; and once again my body is trying to create another outcome – a successful go around – as it did nearly every night last July and August. I wonder why this is all coming back now.

Maybe it is because summer is arriving and today looks just like the 14th of July: a stark blue sky that makes me look upward and think of flying. Or maybe it is because Ann Lasman showed up with her family yesterday as she did so often last summer, to take care of the garden. Or maybe it was Anzie reminding us that there will be a 14th of July party again at her house and this time she expects us to be there.

The gardening yesterday was hard on the body. I am as stiff as a plank this morning and in some pain; that too reminds me of last fall when I sometimes wondered whether we would ever be normal again. Might I have recovered too fast and here is finally the backlash? I am hovering between acceptance of my phsyical state (as if it is a premature old age) and wanting to fix the various problems that most everyone assures we are fixable. What is clear is that something has shifted and something needs to be done. Maybe it is finally time to join a yoga class again, as Abi has told me for months now.

Of course the pains may simply be a commentary on my rather busy day yesterday. I brought out most of the plants from the house which required some very heavy lifting as the pots grow bigger and heavier each year. Without the plants the sitting arrangements in the living and dining room made no sense anymore and thus I got into moving furniture around which then exposed parts of the room that needed to be vaccuumed. Axel calls these self-generating tasks. I also filled the window boxes with the plants we bought last weekend.

And then there was the asparagus bed planting. Although Ann’s husband and boys did much of the moving of dirt from one place to another, Ann and I contributed our share of shoveling. We now have 12 asparagus crowns that Ann assures us will provide us with an abundance of fresh asparagus a year from now and forever. It is hard to imagine. The crowns look like withered octopus tentacles, brown and brittle.

In the middle of the afternoon Tessa called in tears from London. It is as if the place is infected with a depression virus. I am beginning to suspect that fnishing her program there, one more year, is not going to happen. I told her that Jim and Sita are moving out this summer and that she and Steve are welcome to take their place if they can stand the cat shit smell that is clinging to the inside of the studio. The cats express their disapproval of Sita’s and Jim’s nights away (negligence they call it I am sure) by shitting all over the place.

I never heard from Sita anymore and can only hope that she is no longer with the bedouins on the top of Mount Sinai but in the plane to Frankfurt or already there and waiting for her connection to Boston. We are looking forward to having her back, even those it will be only a couple of weeks before she flies out to London again.