Sylvia's Journal

While I was sleeping Sita climbed Mount Sinai by the light of a very full moon and then camped out with bedouins – at least that was the plan. We have not heard from her since and hope everything turned out as magic as she imagined and that she made it back down safely.

Here things were less exciting; a full work day interrupted by an acupture session to get that Chi flowing again across and between parts of my body that are stiff, sore or both. I have also made an appointment to see Julia, my physical therapist, again. She is in high demand; I have to wait a couple of weeks, unfortunately. As a last resort I will call the orthopede but given how short these consultations are, how hard to get and how disappointing in terms of pain relief, I prefer not to.

Today we are entering Memorial Day weekend. Axel put in the geraniums at the family graves in between the gentle spring rains that have prepared the earth for all the plantings that will be happening this weekend here on the North Shore. The full moon has passed and we have received the go ahead from the universe for tomatoes, basil and other plants that do not like frost or cold nights. Later this morning we are finally going to put in the asparagus crowns that the Lasmans offered to us last fall. It will be a day of yardwork – a gorgeous sunny day, blue skies and the lilacs and beach plum (Jennee’s tree) in full bloom with shades of pink, white, violet and deep purple. It would also be a great day for flying but I think I’ll stay on the ground.

We are all up early this morning because Joe’s plane for San Diego departs early. Axel, the only non morning person among us, is driving which meant breakfast at 5:45 AM. He was jump-started with Harrar coffee from Ethiopia. It worked; they just left, on time. Joe’s visit was very different from his last one when we were in calamity mode. Although a wonderful and memorable visit at the time, we prefer to have it this way where we are all on same plain, at least physically.

Yesterday Tessa left and Joe returned, so we keep an occupancy rate of 3 in our house (not counting Jim across the driveway). I left the house in convoy with Tessa at 6 AM and when I walked out of MSH at the end of the afternoon she had arrived home in London. The homecoming was apparently not quite as joyful as she had expected: Steve was asleep, the house dirty, the plants crying for water and seedlings lying limply in their tender beds. Tessa has some educating to do it seems. Or maybe her father set high standards for male housekeeping: when I come home from a trip the house looks inviting and clean, everything put away and a cup of hot tea waiting. I felt sorry for Tessa as she had hastened home to be with Steve who needed her. That last part was proven to be true, although not quite the way she imagined. The sacrifices we make for love!

We had one more wonderful day with our colleagues from far away at MSH and then slowly people began to peel away to return to their respective countries. Everyone was in high spirits.

I picked Joe up at the Hyatt and interrogated him throughout our slow commute home about the practical applications of systems thinking to the realities in Africa. I am sorry to say we did not come up with a good plan but I got some ideas. For one, I need to take a refresher on the archetypal systems diagrams that may come in handy when looking at the kind of intractable problems we face out there as well as in here.

I made dinner grudgingly because Axel ran off with the car, having been without all day, to take care of some errands. I always dream of coming home to a dinner table set with the meal ready. That doesn’t happen as often as I would like. Working men with their home-bound wives in the 50s had a good deal going for them. I doubt they realized how good a deal it was until the idyll was smashed into a thousand pieces by the societal changes of the 60s and 70s and the first attempts at women’s liberation. I can see why many men were not enthralled with these changes. I like what they liked.

After dinner we went for a postprandial walk around the loop. We had to look up the word as we could not agree on its spelling. It is actually a medical term and has to do with blood sugar. It seemed a good idea to walk before tackling the strawberries with sweet whipped cream, more postprandial sugar.

I ended the walk with muscle spasms that required a hot pad intervention and finally propelled me to make appointments for more physical therapy and acupuncture, starting today.

After the strawberries we watched Roman Polanski’s movie Frantic. About half an hour into the film I could no longer handle the suspense and impending doom and, tired anyways, I went to bed. This morning I pestered Axel about how the movie ended. I wanted all the details. It was less scary that way, and, incidentally, it seemed like good frontal lobe exercise for Axel. I could tell from his frowned forehead and his hard thinking that he was engaged in serious brain gymnastics. Just what the doctor prescribed!

This is the fourth day I get up with the sun this week; tomorrow will be the final day and then it is Memorial Day weekend.

Today is a little sad because Tessa and Chicha are leaving, just before Sita is getting back home. Joe has also gone. He did play the beer game yesterday after I dropped him off at the Hyatt for his two day workshop on Systems Thinking. He told Axel they have gotten up to page 75 of the Fifth Discipline. What a dream: the Fifth Discipline book came out in 1991 and now, 17 years later this cow is still being milked. C’est genial, the French would say. If one of us could dream something like that up our ship(s) would surely come in. Alas! For now, nothing on the horizon.

Our worldwide meeting is unfolding as planned, and planned it was. All of my young(er) colleagues were mobilized to run with the meeting, not just the logistics of it, a big piece, but also design and facilitation. They are doing a wonderful job and the energy they bring to the job multiplied (and is still doing this) around them. I am becoming more and more conscious of the shift that our generation is making (or if not, has to make) in order to create space for these new saplings. I am getting a kick out of seeing the talent, creativity and energy.

When I was that age I was in Lebanon, trying to figure out how to be (and stay) married, have a family and a career all at the same time. I was clueless and floundering. The marriage unravelled, the family expansion was, under the circumstances, luckily postponed while the career was adrift in a swirl of non compatible options. The experience of failure propelled the urge to have a meaningful career to the top of the list and has much to do with where I am now. Even so, compared with the path my younger colleagues appear to be following, it was a very crooked path. In the end I found a way that allowed for a relatively peaceful coexistence between career, marriage and family. Much of the credit for this goes to Axel with his steady and wonderful presence that allowed me to travel and build up my ‘experience’ capital starting when Tessa was just an infant.

Sita completed her assignment in Sharm el Sheik and is now resting and recuperating in Dahab, another exoctic place that Axel checked out on the web. The place is described as a mix of ” Hippie and Bedouin styles developed over several decades.” He thought that sounded just like our house. She will feel right at home.

I woke up with most of my large muscle groups in pain and a troubled gait that is pointing me back to the physical therapist. It is because I danced last night, quite vigorously. I can’t help myself when I hear the Latin music that our disc-jockey Christian played. During the day Christian unobtrusively cleans our counters and puts our coffee cups away at MSH but in the night he transforms into a great disc jockey. The party came at the end of a long day to celebrate our collective accomplishments, good team work and the talent of a multitude of people.

The streaming in of our Nepali colleagues did not quite work out the way we had hoped. Not so good sound quality compounded Nepali-english accents that are hard to understand under the best of circumstances. The heartwarming stories did not quite make it into the ears of our audience. Thomas and I were disappointed. We could have done an old fashioned powerpoint with us talking and pretty pictures but we had resisted. It had been a gamble that we had lost.

We listened to other presentations, traditional and experiential, that conveyed their messages a bit better. Nevertheless, in the end they all formed a nice coherent whole about empowerment and people moving out of their victim role into that of agents of change (for better health).

The war fuzzy feeling engendered by these accomplishments and all that altruism stood in sharp contrast to an article I read during some down time about China’s stealth invasion of Africa (Fast Company, June issue) in which Richard Behar describes what is generally referred to as the Great Chinese Take Out. Where we are practically hanging ourselves by our rules on how to work with and for the Africans, the Chinese have none of these qualms. We see dirt poor countries that need our help and use one year workplans to do that; they see their own raw resource limitations 50 years hence and poverty as an opportunity to extract riches for mere handouts to a greedy and easy-to-please elite. Our short term but uplifting interventions suddenly seem very naïve. I usually preach a message of hopefulness but reading the article was not good for my soul and usually positive outlook. I finished reading the article about what is going on in Mozambique and then had to put the magazine away. It was time to dance the salsa and forget about these weightier things.

I discovered that Tessa had decided to head back to Canada and her lonely Steve on Wednesday morning. It brought a premature end to the partying as I wanted to see her for dinner one last time. On my way home Tessa informed me that plans had changed as her best friend was in need of her company to help her through a rough spot. This included dinner; I ended up joining Axel and Joe at one of my favorite restaurants in Manchester (Cala’s) where I arrived just in time to finish Joe’s fries and use them to mop up Axel’s plate. A sake-soaked plate of PEI mussels and a third of a sugary dessert completed that meal. It was Joe’s treat.

Yesterday colleagues form around the world streamed into Boston: Peru, Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico, Haiti, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, and Afghanistan. It was like the United Nations at MSH. Nearly everyone came with a powerpoint presentation, as requested, and I got to watch eight of them. I am not used to sit through powerpoints in general and eight was a bit much, even though all of them were excellent and informative.

Today we will stream in colleagues from Nepal, in bits and bytes rather than live, if the technology permits. My young colleague Thomas has done an amazing job setting up all the technology aids so that we will see and hear them, come hell or high water. I am very grateful that he has stuck with it to get this impossible task flawlessly executed because the stories that we are getting from Nepal are heartwarming and worth sharing with a wider audience.

Sita sent word (and pictures) yesterday from Sharm El Sheik. We have put away all soap in the house and are lining up to shake her hand when she comes back, the hand that was shaken by Tony Blair who she scribes in the picture. She is such a hot shit. We, ordinary mortals here at home, are awestricken with our very own Sita rubbing shoulders (and shaking hands) with the high and mighty in exotic places.

After a whole day of powerpoints I was pretty pooped coming home but we had another engagement; to celebrate the graduation of Alan, Edith and John’s son, from Boston University. He is one of the few graduates who leaves school without tens of thousands of dollars of school loan debt because John was faculty at BU. It would nearly be worth switching careers to get that lined up these days. Too late for us.

It was a small gathering en famille with dear friends and we toasted to open roads and possibilities and finished with carrot cake and champagne.

This morning I woke up before the alarm reminded me. It is now fully light at 4:30 AM and I can dress without having to turn on the lights. Summer is just around the corner!

I did not get the potatoes in but noticed I must have overlooked a few last fall when I spent a couple of hours on my hands and knees rooting through the dirt to collect our last harvest. Small potato plants are poking through the garden debris in various places. I did get the many raspberry stalks out that threatened to take over the garden and its immediate vicinity. It seemed wasteful to pull them all up but I have to assert my control.

After Quaker meeting we went to one garden center in Ipswich to pick up our seed potatoes and the geraniums for the Magnuson graves and then to another in Gloucester to get the plants for our window boxes and some vegetables that can be put out already. Tomatoes are not available until after the next something-or-rather-moon. Age old farmers’ wisdom tells us that we have to wait for this moon before we can plant tomatoes. It is hard to believe that frost is still possible, as we are in middle of May, but then again, the old farmers knew best and it has been known to freeze even this late.

Putting the flowers at the Magnuson graves is an annual event that has to take place before Memorial Day of course. We did not get that task finished yesterday as the weather turned cold and rainy in the late afternoon.

We bought the traditional coral and white geraniums that Penny liked so much. We had planted tulips and crocusses last fall but then we forgot to enjoy them this spring. On our way to the airport to Holland, now three weeks ago, I remembered the bulbs and we swung by the cemetery to admire them only to find them post-bloom with shriveled up petals on the ground. We missed it!

For the summer plantings we have experimented with something other than geraniums but none do well in the generally poor soil; or Penny protested; so we are back to the coral and white geraniums. We plant them for the whole family, which includes grammy and grampie Magnuson, Ester, Paul and Phil. When the plants are in we have a little ceremony which includes vodka. We toast to them, thank them and pour some vodka on the gravestones. Most of them like(d) vodka. I don’t like it all that much. I just wet my lips.

Joe arrived last night from California. He is here to educate himself at MIT on systems thinking. He will get to play the beer game this week. We prepped him by serving Sita and Axel’s home made beer. It is of a rich dark color and we all agreed that it tastes better than store bought. It is also more affordable.

Joe was last here as the Lobster Cove Calamity Management coordinator in late july 2007. He left early August after having installed the first ramp to allow me easier entry and exit through the front door. Upon leaving he passed the baton to Sita which she held firmly until we were all better. Joe’s last image of us was of me in in a wheelchair and Axel in a hospital bed. We have come a very long way. We already knew this but Joe confirmed it.

Today will be a day for gardening. It is sunny and warm and the whole universe commands ‘Grow!’ Sook told us yesterday that we are too late for potatoes but we found some and Axel will get them. Last summer we got hooked on home-grown potatoes. The store-bought variety only remotely tastes like it. We will also put in the asparagus bed sometime soon, with the help of the Lasmans, experienced (asparagus) growers. If we can get these two things right all we need is the pig and the chicken to complete one of our favorite meals: ham, hard-boiled eggs, potatoes and asparagus (with lots of butter). Tessa grows asparagus in her London backyard but left just at the wrong time and Steve is not paying attention. She will come back to a bed of feathery green plants. What a shame.

I called Holland to see how my niece Emily is faring at the university hospital in Leiden after yet another operation on her insides. It is better that I do not talk with her about asparagus meals because that will not be in the stars for her; a simple meal is still weeks (months?) away.

We celebrated Katie-Blair’s birthday in style with as many of us as could be seated on a table that filled the dining room. There was more asparagus and colorful salads and salmon and potatoes. With only one of us under 30, her son, we talked about what our thoughts were about careers when we were 30 and how far ahead we planned our future then. The group sorted itself along gender lines, mostly, with the women getting used to mothering and having to make adjustments to career plans, if there had been any in the first place and the men making decisions that rippled long into the future, that is the present of now.

If there was such a thing as Quaker Bells, they would be ringing now and it is time to get on the bike and ride to Beverly Farms for the hour of silence that I have missed now for over a month.