Sylvia's Journal

All you have to say to two 22-year old boys is that a girl currently holds the record. They want to break it, no matter what. And so, yesterday, on that blustery Sunday, with winds up to 40 knots and the temperature below 40 degree Fahrenheit, Pieter and Huib donned their bathing suits (why they brought these in their luggage is beond me) and immersed themselves in the frigid waters of Lobster Cove. Axel went out, dressed in a warm coat, to document the event. Documentation is important. You have to have proof. Here is is.

The previous record holder was my niece Willemijn who immersed herself in early May many years ago. This was never documented since she did not set out to create a new record. Our own first immersion is usually not until sometime in June and even that I find too early and much too cold.

It is fun to take the boys places and try to imagine the experience through their eyes. The things we take for granted, find normal, are not for a visitor. I am familiar with this feeling as it happens each time I leave the country.

I biked to Quaker meeting, heading into the fierce wind on my way to Beverly Farms. It was hard work but felt great after a Sunday morning breakfast with too many calories. On my way back it was smooth sailing with the wind pushing me home. I think I may have fallen asleep in Meeting, the hour went very fast and I enjoyed the quietness after having to be ‘on’ and constantly anticipating about what next for the last two weeks.

We took the boys to a performance of Chorus North Shore for its annual spring concert. This time it was ‘An American Quilt’ with some locally produced music. The piece de resistance for me was Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms which I found very moving. The children’s choir was an essential part of that rendering. Later Pieter and Huib (and everyone else) got to sing along with “This Little Light of Mine,’ and ‘America the Beautiful’ which must be an odd hymn for them. This would-be American national anthem is so very different from our Dutch (real) national anthem in which we sing lovingly of serving our Spanish King. After the performance we headed over to our favorite coffee place for a cup for tea/coffee in the Atomic Cafe.

The boys also got the American Sunday afternoon grocery shopping experience; this too is full immersion, followed in the evening by a very unamerican fajitas dinner. We watched in amazement the enormous quantities of food that these rather skinny kids take in (must be the bicycling!).

Back home the swimming challenge was unwittingly created by mentioning Willemijn’s feat some years ago. And while Axel was documenting the event I called Tessa in the hope to get her out of her funk, or at least for some temporary relief. They had just gotten another 2 foot snow dumped and the winter appears without end. No wonder she is thinking about finishing her studies in California! When everyone was back inside Ankie called from France and between Axel and me kept her on the phone for over an hour. This is a normal length conversation; there is always so much to talk about, even though she faithfully follows my journal. She knows much more about my life than I about hers, which is why we need at least an hour.

At the end of our very late dinner I was ready to go to bed. Sita was working against a deadline (still up at 3 AM I noticed), Jim was jamming with a friend in a music studio in Danvers and Axel and the boys sat down to watch ‘If,’ a movie Axel last watched in the late sixties. He remembered it as significant but now realized that may have had something to do with his not so mental clarity at the time (remember, the sixties!).

I am still on Tanzanian time and thus wake up early. The weather is bad; again, no flying today.

Yesterday I was supposed to have flown to Concord and Laconia with my flying buddy Bill but the weather was too bad; three weather systems are colliding over New England. Instead I met with the other three co-owners of my plane and we discussed upcoming repair needs and how we are going to pay for them.

Late in the afternoon I picked up my nephew Pieter with his friend Huib, both medical students in Leuven (Belgium), who had bussed in from New York for Spring Break. In a pouring rain we drove straight to the Shriner’s Hall in Wilmington to watch a Roller Derby. In my 26 years in the USA I had not seen such an event in real life. It is very American and seemed like the appropriate way to celebrate International Women’s Day. After all, the sport is about assertive women racing on wheels to break through logjams and get ahead. I loved the way all the women, as well as the referees, some of which were male and one a canine, used the concept of a uniform loosely: there was lots of room for individual expression and creativity around the theme of sexy shorts and net stockings. What better way to way to celebrate women’s liberation and empowerment!

Sita and Jim’s friend Fred is dating one of the stars (‘Maura Buse’) from the Boston Massacre, the team that won from Maine’s Port Authority team and the more fearsome Bronx Gridlocks (dressed in cute yellow and black/white checkered outfits). Pieter and Huib got their picture taken with another one of the stars (‘Clare D. Way’) after the prizes were awarded.

I had always assumed that Roller Derbies were somewhat gothic and dark, with people full of tattoos, wearing leather, spikes and black or fluorescent hair. The name of the Boston team suggested so much. How wrong I was. It was a joyful, noisy and irreverent family event. The sport itself suggested strong women hitting each other off the track, brute force with a sexy feminine veneer (‘this is a contact sport’). Again I was wrong, although there was a lot of jostling, pushing and shoving and some bad falls, all followed by the most amazing recoveries. Axel and I shuddered at the sight of some of those falls.

The sport requires finesse, good balance, strategy and endurance. It was fascinating and exciting. We watched three ‘bouts’ of half an hour each. The Boston team won each hands down. Basically there are two teams of five women who circle around on old fashioned four-wheel roller skates, at high speed on a concrete floor in a rink marked by pink fluorescent tape. Two of them are ‘jammers,’ one from each team. Their helmets are marked with a star. They have to brake through a wall of four fast skating opponents, in which they are helped by four of their own team members. There are as many referees as there are skaters because there is an elaborate set of rules and everything moves very fast. The referees communicate with hand signals to the public and to a whole battalion of people, most sitting on the side of the rink in front of laptops and a gigantic scoring board, and some inside the rink writing check marks after people’s names with blue markers on a small white board that sits on an easel. There are also people with clipboards, some sort of way station between rink and laptops, maybe. One of them, to my great surprise, was a colleague from MSH who left in the great clean up back in May (Alex).

You need to be away from home from time to time to appreciate what you have. I am lucky in that my frequent departures automatically produce frequent homecomings. These are the best moments of all. No matter how often I have done this, I never tire of this final part of my journey: first the landing and the joy of touchdown, then the phone call to Axel while taxiing to our gate; the impatience of going through the immigration line, the seemingly endless wait for my suitcase and then the last obstacle of the agricultural inspection (coming from Amsterdam I always carry food: cheese, sometimes herring and licorice). And then comes the best part of it all: going through the opaque doors of the customs area and stepping out into the arrival hall while scanning the waiting crowd for that one particular face that is so very (VERY) dear to me.

My arrival this time did not quite follow the script. For one, my suitcase came out in the first batch and so I walked out into the arrival hall much earlier than Axel had expected. He was not watching and we missed each other. I walked over to the side, a bit disappointed and puzzled and left several messages on his cell phone. I finally decided to sit on a bench and read my book while waiting for him. When I picked a bench, just a few feet away, I noticed the back of a familiar head of curls – he had been sitting there all along. The reunion was sweet and all was quickly forgiven and forgotten.

I received an update on Axel’s recovery and learned he is adding two new specialists to his care team: he is seeing a physiatrist (fizz-ee-a-trist) by the name of Sara Lee. She is not a cupcake. She is a physician specializing in physical medicine and rehabilitation. Physiatrists focus on restoring function to people after the orthopedes and neurologists have done their work of diagnosing and putting the pieces back together. He is also going to see a hand doctor, which is different from a peripheral neurologist, to give advice on how his left hand can regain its full functionality. It is much better than before, but his hand is swollen as a result of, what we assume, not the right kinds of exercises. We are getting in really specialist territory now.

Sita is rapidly filling up her dance card with trips to London, Dallas, Sharm El Sheikh, New York and Bangkok. So Sita and I will be flitting in and out of the country for the next few months (my trips will take me to Afghanistan and Ethiopia) while our men will stay put, keeping the home fires burning.

The latest update on Tessa and Steve is that they hate living in London (Ont.). The poor things have several more months of winter, cold and snow and this doesn’t help. The contrast between the lively student scene in Amherst and the industrial city of London and living surrounded by agribusiness soy fields is becoming increasingly untenable to them. Tessa has one more year to go and is beginning to wonder whether her sanity can handle this. We old people know of course that one year is nothing; but when you are 22 one year is about 5% of your life and that is a long time.

Everything is covered with a layer of 8 inches of snow. The world is beautiful, even though the skies are grey. There is a particular calm after a snowstorm that I love.

Yesterday was a day of completion, or semi–completion. I have completed two of the four sets of teaching notes for our leadership program. The Ghana team is setting out on its coaching rounds and will sound prepare for workshop two. Now we are ready to support them; a cascade down of teams helping each other succeed. It is a nice formula and I think it works.

In the afternoon I logged on to an OBTS Webinar where Peter Vaill and David Fearon talked about their teacher-student relationship some thirty years ago. It was a conversation about the profession in that time of history, when experiential learning in the classroom, especially the academic classroom was looked down on with great disdain and seen as a waste of one’s tuition money (they are laughing and playin in the classroom, can you imagine?! The job of the professor was to lecture and dispense wisdom, not engage with the students in learning, godforbid. We have come a long way and the community of people who teach that way is growing in leaps and bounds. The set up of a Webinar is fairly passive, as presenters mostly talk and participants mostly listen and occasionally post a question on a common chat board. The neat thing is that you can chat with individuals in the audience, wherever they sit. I discovered someone I had not seen for a long time and we chatted while the Profs were speaking without anyone noticing. You can also occasionally answer an email, or all the time if you find the lecture boring, which it wasn’t. I love these periodic webinars. I love seeing who is listening alongside with me and it does make me think in bigger ways. Next week I will be working with professors in Arusha about just this kind of stuff.

After the webinar I realized that a snow storm was building up outside and an email alerted me to its severity when our HR director alerted us all that MSH was closing its doors in the middle of the day. I remembered the commute from hell in December. I was glad my departure for Tanzania was postponed form Friday to Saturday. I would probably have been stranded at Logan.

I never made it outdoors, not even to pick up the newspaper. While I spent the day sittiing in front of my computer, Sita spent the day making bread. She made one after another in the bread machine that had been sitting unused and unobserved in a cabinet. She started with plain Dutch brown whole wheat bread and then got bolder, under protest from Jim. Each loaf of bread came out nicer than the previous one. The last loaf was made with rosemary, thyme, and orange juice I believe. Of course we had to try each new loaf as it emerged hot from the machine. Now we have a plastic bag full of half eaten loaves. It looks a little bit like the bags we carried as children, when we went to see the deer, donkeys and ducks in our local petting zoo in Groenendaal.

We had a Dutch dinner (andijvie stampot) which is a perfect comfort food to eat during a snowstorm. It consists of mashed potatoes, cut up curly leaf lettuce and crisped bacon. The best part n the making of this dish is the pouring of the hot bacn fat over the mashed potatoes and lettuce. Not a low cal meal, there is also sausage that goes with it, at least in our American interpretation. Jim likes havng multipe types of meat in his meal; sausage and bacon.This is good for people who bike all the time, but not necessarily for couch potatoes, which some in this household have become; more about this later.

We had hoped to watch the new Dutch movie that my brother Willem sent me (Alles is Liefde) but our equipment won’t take a Pal DVD so that requires some investigation. Instead we called Tessa and put her on the speaker phone. The phone conversation turned into a graphic design consultation session with the other graphic designers in the room, while Jim and I eventually peeled off, doing dishes (Jim) and packing (me)

Later in the evening we all settled in front of our tiny TV. Sita practically lives on the coach with her workspace on her knee. She watches movies while she builds websites and earns money. She has always been able to combine work and pleasure, smart girl she is. Jim works on sharpening his Sudoku skills, also on a computer, also watching a movie. Sita and Jim watch movies that are much too violent for my liking. She has a high tolerance for awful scenes. I already knew this when she was 10 and reading R.L. Stine horror books from the library, where we parked her after school until mom got home. It is only later that we understood this to be her revenge for this daily affront. More revenge came on her 11^th birthday party. She insisted on watching some god-awful Freddie the something movie and we of course didn’t want too upset our little princess, especially not on her birthday. Sita and one brave little girl watched the entire movie in her bedroom, while all the other invitees emerged one by one from her room, seeking safety and comfort from me, scared out of their minds and shivering in their thin cotton nighties. As a big mother hen I watched over them until the movie was over and they could resume their sleepover part.

Later in the evening we all watched Tom Hanks in the Money Pit, a film we last saw some 20 years ago when we were brand-new homeowners and could relate to the money pit idea on a gut level. It was still very funny, maybe even funnier, after all these years. It was probably also educational for Sita and Jim, as aspiring homeowners.

Now I need to go back to my packing and checking things of my to do list. There is nothing like going on a trip to make progress on long to-do lists.

Yesterday was a marathon workday. Some things have to be done by Saturday; my departure on that day for Tanzania is like a hard stop. I have been able to stretch some assignments onwards from last fall, but this is it. I usually reserve Mondays and Fridays for thinking and writing work which I need to do undisturbed on my own. Staying home saves me the two hours of commuting time. These then get added to the workday making these days usually long, now that the doctors’ appointments and PT sessions are done with.

The only interruption yesterday was for what Axel calls the sanitation brigade. The brigade, which usually consists of Axel with neighbor Ted as his adjutant, is called into action when it rains cats and dogs, especially when the ground is frozen and there is still snow on the ground. That is when we have to be on alert for groundwater flowing into the septic system overflow tanks. This is a larger systemic issue brought on by the cutting up of old and large estates which used to have elaborate drainage pipes. Some of these have been cut or broken over the years as new houses have sprung up and installed mammoth septic systems. We are talking once more with an engineer to figure a way out of this predicament in ways that does not require building a new septic system. If you live on a piece of ledge the options are limited and expensive. But the constant dread of the system backing up into our cellars is not fun either.

I am a new member of the brigade. I always considered it manly business (try prying away one of the manhole covers) requiring brute force and engineering ingenuity. But yesterday morning the cats and dogs came down relentlessly and Axel was sound asleep. I donned my 99 cents poncho, which looks a bit like a brightly colored (yellow) whole body condom and armed with a shovel set to work to displace the manhole cover to peek inside the tanks. I could not do it and so I did get back into the house to wake Axel up. He saw me standing, dripping wet, in the bedroom in my yellow condom outfit, asking for help with some urgency in my voice. Later, at dinner, he compared my apparition in his semi-sleep state to Woody Allen in the film Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask (1972), when the sperm get ready for action in their white outfits and Woody wonders what happens when he lands on the floor. Hmmm, I did wonder about the comparison, but it seems that he too believes there is something about manly business in all this as well.

This morning in Quaker Meeting someone stood up and talked about the opportunity that sitting in silence offered for wonder. Wonder about the amazing workings of our body that happen without requiring any conscious attention or action from our side. Over the last 7 months we have been very tuned in to the wonder of our bodies; bones and ribs growing back together, vertebrae re-aligning (with some help) and nerves re-generating (with no help other than a reduction in alcohol consumption). Someone else spoke about her father who made a toast, on his 95^th birthday, to his heart and thanked it for its long and faithful service. And we wondered, in awed silence, about all these things that happen on their own without our interference.

We have an Amaryllis growing on our counter. The flower bud is about to pop (it will pop the day I leave for my next trip and will be done flowering the day I come back I am afraid – this is what happened to the Paper Whites and the Hyacinth). This Amaryllis last flowered about one year ago. I left it in the pot and cut the stalk back. For months it kept producing leaves. Last June I finally took it out of the pot with the intent to bury it in the ground and leave it there till fall. And then I forgot about it; and then things happened.

For months it sat outside by the front door. It got kicked aside when the ramp was built, then picked up and moved around from one place to another, like an orphan nobody wanted. It sat in the rain and then in the scorching heat. When the ramp was taken down I noticed it again but left it outside for a few more months. It was too late for planting it outside and too early for an indoor pot. In October I took it inside. I wondered whether there was any life left inside it. It looked terrible. I left it on the radiator to dry out from the fall rains. Late November, not knowing what else to do with it I planted it on pebbles that I kept wet. Nothing happened for months although it did produce a few roots but no other action was visible from the top. And so we all forgot about it again. And then, suddenly, about 4 weeks ago something light green appeared at the top in between the brown papery layers. Now, one firm healthy looking stalk is sticking out of the bulb with a fat flower bud on top. Another bud is wriggling itself into the world, one foot and a half behind the other. It is a source of great wonder.

The thought, planted in Meeting and fed by this Amaryllis miracle is a reminder of sorts; to look out for wonder(s).

Martin Imm and I were going to do some more wondering, in the skies over Essex County in the afternoon. Martin has a pilot’s license, although not current; still, he fits in the category of potential flying partners. We made these plans while the sky was blue and the winds fair. By the time Quaker Meeting for Business was over the skies had changed to a more ominous color and the winds had picked up. We canceled the trip and I am back to looking in wonderment at my Amaryllis, hoping with all my heart that the bud will burst open before I leave.

I discovered how easy it is to get a lot of hits on your blog site – if that is what you want. The entry from January 1, which was named after a famous playboy and had a picture with his name embedded, kept getting hit all the time, with a record number of entries and new visits every day. It shows the power of the search engine. Apparently, anyone googling this gentleman who-shall-no-longer-be-named was led to my blog. I have removed all references to monsieur and I hope that with this, the hits will stop and I will discover the real size of my faithful readership.

I woke up to a fiery pink and orange sky this morning. The landscape outside is bleak and uninviting despite the bright colors of the morning sky. Looking out onto the yard between us and the Hoopers there is a strange design in the remaining snow. It looks like one of those mysterious patterns in cornfields or forests that you sometimes see in documentaries that prove that not everything can be explained by science. Our pattern is random, circular and frantic. From the second floor it looks like the drawing of a child that has just learned how to hold a pencil and knows about circles and lines. The pattern is probably made by moles or voles running in tunnels underneath the snow. The paw prints of a fox would explain the franticness. It is actually quite beautiful. The artists in this family are enthralled with it; the ones who believe in plots and conspiracies even more so. It does make us wonder, however, if the presence of these small rodents also means there are grubs for them to eat in this lawn that was newly seeded last summer at some expense. Why else would they be here now?

Yesterday was the 14^th and signaled the 7^th month post-crash. It seemed a fitting day to shed yet another doctor. I bicycled to the doctor’s office to see my ankle orthopedist. He gave my foot a last check up, made some remarks about the remaining swelling and tendon pains (normal, good pains) and let me go. No follow up appointment required. Now all that is left is the massage therapist, who I don’t ever want to let go. There is of course still the issue of the ‘debris’ in the right breast. The report from the ultrasound and mammogram, done last month, indicate ‘not cancerous,’ which is what I had expected, but a relief nevertheless (although I don’t understand how they know from looking). However, the nurse practitioner wants to watch things closely so she asked me to schedule another mammogram and ultrasound in a couple of months. This turned out to be a bit more complicated to organize than I had thought for the simple reason that my two breasts have different diagnostic codes for the referral. My insurance company is OK with re-examining the right one sooner but the left one has to wait until after April 9, when it has been one year since the previous (routine and bilateral) mammogram. The breast doctor wants to see both side by side. It took a couple of hours of phone calls and inquiries to get the green light from Blue Cross to admit both breasts into the X-ray suite.

The girls celebrated Valentine’s Day by going out for dinner, Sita and Jim close by and Tessa and Steve in distant London (ON). Axel and I had a simple dinner in front of the fire, watching Hercule Poirot. The Valentine part of the meal was a ‘mousse au chocolat’ that was as rich as mousse can be, including whipped espresso cream on the top. Life is good!

I woke up to the sound of the snowplow, scraping. I remember now that I heard something about another snowstorm in the middle of the night. But we paid no attention. We should have turned the cars around so the exit is easier. I have to shovel a way to the car before I can leave. Snow plows have a way of digging you out and at the same time hemming you in. And all that at some ungodly hour in the morning, while everyone is still asleep and it is dark as the night. The winter here is getting awfully long.

I am in another set of marathon days, partially because I have been taking on some extra curricular activities. I keep thinking that this too will pass. But it is a bit like the email coming in over the transom. Things do pass and then other things come along.

This is why I felt a little anxious last Sunday when Larissa, the daughter of my old schoolmate Xandra, knocked on our door for a visit in mid afternoon as she was showing some schoolmates around the area. Larissa is about Tessa’s age and has been studying English in Boston for a while now; not that she needs any English but because she fell in love with Boston and she keeps coming back each time after she renews her visa for another series of courses. She has, in the meantime progressed to the higher levels of the course but, despite her chatter in English, claims she is not done. Larissa is a citizen of the world. Born in Sri Lanka, raised in Holland, I don’t think I have ever seen her in the company of someone who looks, speaks like her or has her nationality. This may have been her third or fourth visit and each time she comes with at least 2 other nationalities. This time she brought Columbia (Pablo) and Sweden (Lisa).

My anxiousness about work completely and quickly vanished in the company of these young people. Although she promised she’d call next time, maybe this spontaneous visit was better. If she had called I might have said we were busy. Her visit reminded me of my student days in Holland and later in Senegal when no one ever called before showing up (in Senegal we had no phone and it was long before the appearance of cell-phones). I remember missing these unannounced visits when we moved to the USA and we were suddenly in the grown up world in which people went about their own lives and visits required appointments ahead of time. As it turned out Larissa’s unexpected visit was wonderful. This is how we fool ourselves about having no time and long lists of ‘have-to’s and ‘must-do’s. Axel made a big pot of tea and we sat around the table talking about everything and nothing while outside the sun and blue sky looked down on the newly dusted white landscape left after a squall had moved through the area. I appreciated Larissa taking us away from our studies and computers and serving us old fashioned great conversation with wonderful people. Keep coming Larissa!

Yesterday, after work, we celebrated the departure of one of our colleagues to Guyana for a stint of about one year. Maryellen came to MSH as a temp wanting to do simple work that did not require much stress or responsibility. See where that got her…now, six years later, she is off as our country representative in Guyana on an HIV/AIDS program, having to deliver results to the US government that pays for her and her colleagues to do work there. Her departure brought back together a bunch of people, some of whom are no longer at MSH, having moved out voluntarily or involuntarily in the great shake up of last summer at MSH; I was there for the lead-up but mostly missed its execution which took place in July 2007. It was a joyful occasion to see old friends and find out that, in general, they have been faring well. They had another sort of awakening from their ‘must-do’s and ‘have-to’s.