The joyous 40th anniversary celebration in Holland is canceled. What part of the already incurred expenses will remain depends on how the small print is interpreted on our travel insurance and whether COVID19 counts as an exception. Insurance is always about exceptions.
The other joyous celebration that always happens at the time of our anniversary is the welcoming of spring in Massachusetts, our Easter celebration/find-your-goodies-hidden around Lobster Cove. We hadn’t sent out the invites yet. They may still come but for a virtual celebration, in spirit, and possibly on Zoom or such.
I attended one of the sessions on Sita’s site but had to pull out because of a very poor connection. It was a poetry reading about “Lost Words,” with music and video. Kids had brought their instruments, and so I did too, the violin and the ukulele, but the poor connection left the instruments unused and me disappointed – there it was again, disappointment upon disappointment.
We had a virtual cocktail hour with friends in the neighborhood who we often hang out with over the weekend – it kind of worked. We made our own cocktails, toasted each other and our health and didn’t need to worry about drinking and driving.
Our brand-new gleamy new lease car stands mostly unused in our drive way as we don’t need any more driving, or very little. We could have done without a 2nd car and saved ourselves a bundle – how different things are from just a month ago, when people were led to believe this corona thing would soon be over, everything was under control and it was a Democrat hoax. Our country’s leadership must be dizzy from all the spinning it is doing.
My semi-retirement is now starting to look like full retirement. I no longer wake up at 5AM and go to bed later than I have done for decades. I used to go to the gym to swim or ride a bike at that early hour but all this is now a thing of the past.
I now do what other retirees are doing: projects in the house. I knit socks or whatever fits the amount of wool I have available. I am re-fashioning my mother-in-law’s braided stair runner that was half consumed by carpet beetles. It’s a huge project that will occupy me for years to come – or not if we are told to stay at home and the electricity/internet goes out.
My other occupation is being a member of the coaching program team of EthicalCoach which focuses, for now, on organizing a year of free coaching of Ethiopian NGOs by world class coaches. I know they are world class because I interviewed people who were coached by them and were transformed. It has strengthened my resolve to continue to coach and promote the coaching profession.
And now there is Sita’s creative response to the new normal of (working, or trying-to-remain-working) parents at home with young children. Her platform allows for what she calls ‘community learning,’ using the expertise, passion and skills from one person to be flowing, like a river, into places where there is interest or even a dire need.
I signed up for next week to talk about Mongolia, a country I visited some years ago. I will put together a series of pictures of this faraway land and contribute to this opening-of-the-minds initiative. I also contacted an actor friend to see if he is willing to read my (as yet unpublished) children’s book about a school bus’ journey to Africa. I wrote it years ago and looked for a while for an illustrator, and then, being unsuccessful, left it languishing on my computer. Maybe this is the time for a world premiere.
When my trip to West Africa was postponed, most of us were indeed thinking of temporary postponements, not cancellations. But how quickly things changed.
Between arriving in DC and leaving everything seemed to be upended – VUCA times indeed: volatile (yes), uncertain (yes), complex (yes) and ambiguous (yes). Our daughters felt we were socially irresponsible to even be away from home, ride the Metro, visit musea. We didn’t think so. They rolled their eyes – baby boomers were not taking the corona virus seriously – we thought we were safe and careful. Sita took her kids out of school – I didn’t see why. Now I do,
We are humbled of course because we didn’t see the Draconian measures coming, but also proud that we raised kids who are more socially responsible than their parents.
We have friends who overwinter in France who are now imprisoned in their AirBnB. Europe is locked, as much as one can lock an entire continent. Now our much anticipated trip to Holland to celebrate our 40thanniversary is hanging by a thread. The hotel manager and I are in contact about whether to cancel or not. He wrote me, “if you don’t know what to do, it’s best not to do anything.” We will go one week at a time – but even that may be too slow, the landscape seems to change by the day.
I have already canceled our AirBnB and plane trip to Grand Junction where we were to attend the wedding of a dear friend at the end of May. The couple canceled rather than postponed the event. They made a trip to their townhall where there were pronounced husband and wife – no party, no honeymoon. Oh, all those disappointments, or as John Adams wrote in his diary: “Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.”
On March 6 I should have left for a two week trip to West Africa. The trip was postponed which was both a relief but also complicating my life and reducing my first quarter earnings by a considerable amount of money.
It was not a difficult decision to make. Imagine being on a jumbo jet with a few coughers or sneezers and maybe even someone with a fever. Canceling a trip costs money and so people get on a plane when they shouldn’t. I was trying to imagine the public health officials at Niamey International Airport as we stream out of the plane and one, it only takes one, person turns out to have a fever – would we all be quarantined at the airport? Would we have to camp out there, or only the people who can’t afford a hotel? I decided that I didn’t want to find out how that would work.
Axel had planned a trip to Washington DC to see some friends while I was away – and maybe enjoy some spring time which is still so far away for us here in Massachusetts. Since my schedule was all cleared for my West Africa trip I decided to join him.
After a failed start on March 7, (Axel forgot his wallet), we tried again on Sunday, International Women’s Day, with a woman at the wheel!
We drove to DC in our new car, an electric blue Toyota RAV4 Hybrid that we leased after our Subaru lease was up. After nearly 40 years of being a Subaru family we stepped over to the competition for the simple reason that Subaru didn’t have any hybrids within our budget. We are now the owners of an SUV, I am embarrassed to say. It seems nearly everyone is now driving SUVs; the carmakers must have listened to Americans who seem all to want big cars – this makes being in a small car increasingly dangerous. Our new car feels like a tank.
New to the Hybrid experience, we competed with each other about who got the highest ‘eco’ score, a feature we don’t really understand yet, but higher seems better. We drove to DC on one single gas tank, which is no bigger than the one in our Crosstrek, which would have used two.
I started the new year without trips on the horizon, at least in the near future and for paid work. Rather than being a source of worry these blank calendar pages have been a delight. Staying home, getting up whenever I want, going to the gym whenever I want, going to bed whenever I want, no more ‘school nights’ – I love it.
We are settling in for the long cold winter after the holidays and after a short trip to Holland to have our annual Old & New Year’s dinner with my siblings and share our good wishes for 2020 with them in person. Holland was cold and clammy with the high humidity and cold. Even though not as cold as we are used to in New England, it is the kind of cold that chills the bones. We visited with friends and family, celebrated the year’s good things, ate Dutch, Swiss and Indonesian meals and snacked in between on fries, herring, drop and other sweets. All this added about 5 pounds to our girth that we are still trying to lose.
Our days back home have taken on a quiet rhythm now that the PT sessions are over and we are done, mostly, with the frantic pre-holiday schedule. I have only a couple of coaching commitments left, after one of my clients felt confident to let me go. A good thing I suppose. I am finishing up one last contract with MSH for work in Bamako and Niamey before it gets really hot over there.
The India work is still ‘in the works,’ so to speak, with no clarity about when it may move again. I orchestrated my second proposal (as a free agent), and produced something reasonably compelling in three days, bringing together a team from three continents (Asia, Africa and North America) to contribute to a larger DFID project that aims to help independent media in 3 countries, in Asia and Africa, to stay independent and do their good work. It’s a very long shot, but it was fun to lead the effort using WhatsApp, Google Docs and Hangout. Most of the team members had never met before – it’s a trust fall if ever I saw one. If, by some miraculous or heavenly intervention we are selected I have some teambuilding to do.
My two creations
Choosing our colors
In the absence of travel Art has moved up from its fourth position to number one. Sita, Tessa and I made glass swizzle sticks, a delayed Christmas present, in our local glass workshop, the Bubble Factory in Essex. We are ready for summer and swizzle our G&Ts with our creations. Axel came along to document the creative process. In the meantime Axel continues to perfect his technique of printing on silk, remaining in his geranium phase, making large pieces, more stole than scarf.
Enjoying doing Art as a family I promptly signed us all up for a fall weekend course at Snow Farm in western MA. Sita, Tessa and I will be making wooden spoons and Axel will take the Monoprint class. At the end of that weekend we will be celebrating Sita’s 40th birthday.
In the meantime, Sita and Tessa continue to make me proud. Sita with her extended networks of extraordinary people who are actively changing the way we work and talk, and have gotten very creative in transforming loose groups of individuals into communities. She gave an interview that articulated better than I could, how this happens. Tessa was the only one heeding our Christmas rule of only home-made gifts, and showered us all with the fruits of her cooking talents: burnt onion jam, pickles, tomato sauce, elderflower syrup, chili oil, macaroons, truffles and fudge brownies. She’s picked up more clients for her graphic design business which means less time for cooking and baking.
Who knows what cosmic and spiritual overtones were involved in my traveling home on the shortest day of the year while actually experiencing that day as the longest day.
For me Saturday the 21st lasted 34.5 hours (24 hours plus the time difference of 10.5 hours). It is as if I had violated some universal law about days lasting 24 hours, and was punished accordingly: coming out of the plane with inflamed sinuses and waiting for more than an hour for a suitcase that never was on my plane.
On the Delta app there is a way to track your luggage. It will tell you where it has last been seen. For two days it said ‘loading onto flight DL405 to Boston,’ even long after that flight should have arrived here.
You can also get a map of where your missing suitcase is. The little suitcase icon (my suitcase)was sitting right on top of the roof of the CDG airport terminal 2. It sat there on Saturday, it sat there on Sunday and now it still sits there although the tracker itself has indicated that my suitcase was loaded (no longer ‘loading’) on today’s flight to Boston.
The baggage handler chief told me yesterday I should not count on getting it before Christmas as customs will keep unaccompanied luggage between 8 and 24 hours before releasing it to the Delta man or woman who, I am promised, will drive it to Manchester.
I am trying to be cool about not having my bag yet, but couldn’t help ruminating and catastrophizing about not ever seeing it again – making lists in my mind about all the stuff inside it, including a few Christmas goodies.
But things are lightening up with the latest information on the baggage tracker, the sinus problems have gone away, I went for a swim yesterday having a lane all to myself, and managed to keep up the tempo in this morning’s spinning class, despite not having exercised or stretched for two weeks.
I am now in the area in Mumbai (New Mumbai) where there are lots of engineers. I gather it is a desirable place to establish headquarters. I can tell from the many 4 and 5 star hotels in the neighborhood. There is less traffic, it’s more open/less crowded than in Mumbai proper. There are shopping malls for, what I imagine, the young and monied educated elites like to have close by. It’s a modern side of Mumbai. Reliance, the big company that appears to have its fingers in countless economic ventures has its corporate HQ here. I am going to have lunch there tomorrow, with my Indian team mates and one of their clients. I am being presented as one of them.
The hotel is not quite the Holiday Inn. It has fewer stars than the international business hotel chains in the area. But it will do for one night, and the price is right. It also has a spa with reasonable prices. I got talked into an immediate massage by the owner of the ‘Pink Door Spa’ who told me excitedly that she is going to start a branch in Manhattan (there are relatives to implement this ambition).
She recommended I wait with dinner (not good to be massaged on a full stomach), and talked me into a 60 minute Lomi-Lomi massage. Lomi-Lomi would relieve my tension and bad feelings. How did she know about my bad feelings about the motor cycle tour operator I wondered, and then handed over my credit card. I got an immediate 15% off, without asking. I think Mondays maybe slow days.
I can’t tell one massage apart from another, and sometimes wonder whether the masseuses can either, as the massages all seem rather similar. Except, that is, for the one where one is bathed in at least 2 liters of oil or have a slow drip-drip of oil on one’s forehead.
After my massage and the recommended glass of water and cup of green tea (“you will feel hungry by then!”) and not knowing the neighborhood, I opted for an in-house dinner. In a fit of ‘I earned this’ I ordered a cocktail, the only one without syrup or sugar. It was served in a skull shaped glass (or is it a dog?) with a rusty screw cap and a paper straw through a hole in the cap. It tasted like really bad medicine. I did not earn that, but by now I had spent my alcohol money.
The hotel’s main dining room’s claim to fame is fish and is named accordingly: “Something Fishy.” But there was nothing fishy about the restaurant. I had my best meal yet: two giant tandoori baked prawns and a garlic naan that did its name honor. I think I am going to be sweating garlic from all my pores for days.
When I walked into the restaurant the waiter to guest ratio was about 10 (waiters) to 2 (guest, myself included). After a while more guests came in, and more waiters too. I settled into a warm corner in the over-cooled dining room. From my corner perch I had a good view of the comings and goings of waiters and staff.
Decades ago, with an MSH colleague, since deceased, we played a game in a restaurant in Lesotho: spinning yarns about the other guests. We giggled until we were red in the face. I had so much fun spinning these yarns, partially because I was taught to never to judge people on their appearance – which is of course what we did, unapologetically. It felt rather naughty and irreverent. Although it is more fun to do this with someone else it’s still a great pastime when dining alone. On my right was a dour looking German or Swiss guy (an engineer no doubt) who washed down his meal with only one beer (Swiss then?), hardly ever looking up from his smart phone. No desert. Then entered a group of 4 middle-aged paunchy Indians and one young Anglo-Saxon. Everyone drank whisky on ice, except the young man who drank German beer; once I heard him speak I settled on the Saxon part – a German engineer, just out of school (although when he smiled he looked older, maybe 35).
I made him to be on his first trip to India, and watched how he related to his Indian table mates. At first, he was quiet but after two beers he was gesticulating wildly with his hands. I imagined he was telling what the Indian engineers needed to do to solve a sticky engineering problem. The Indians watched him politely, smiled now and then and stirred the ice cubes in their whiskeys. They were going to pay the bill, and they were here forever (unless they were going to emigrate to the US).
Watching the imagined drama being played out at this table reminded me of one of my many sins – talking too much about what I (thought I) knew to be true. I did not always read the signs of polite listening very well. I know a bit more now (I’d like to think). Although I will be presented as a wise expert coming from far away (some of it true), I will have to walk a fine line between the wise, the expert and the novice (on India certainly) . I brought Ed Schein’s Humble Inquiry to remind me about curiosity and not knowing.
I had wanted to join Sita and Axel to their Paris conference, a meeting that would have been of great interest to me, but I waited too long and the cost of a ticket jumped from 900 to 3.500 dollars. Out of curiosity I was looking for the cost of a ticket to Mumbai, which was half the price. I am learning these days that waiting for last minute price reductions is old school – this doesn’t happen any longer: prices go up to astronomic heights starting about a week before liftoff (and I wasn’t willing to buy a cheaper ticket that required traveling to Paris via Istanbul or Dubai).
I decided to take a trust fall and buy the Mumbai ticket in the hope that we can dislodge the stuck proposal I made with my Indian team to the the government of Uttar Pradesh. Since my team mates live near Mumbai I decided to fly there and meet them for the first time in the flesh, contract or no contract.
No sooner had I sent my itinerary to them that they told me that one of their clients was looking for someone like Sita to help with an event. Would I be interested in joining the team? Of course I would!
And so, on December 6 I will take off for an Indian adventure I cannot even imagine quite yet. It cannot fail because I finally get to meet my Indian team mates – I’ll stay at their house and then we scheme from there. Whether we will make it to Lucknow is at this point not guaranteed. Our client there is hard to pin down on dates. If we get to see her and put some more oomph into our proposal, it would be the cherry on the cake.
But that is not all. There is this fairly recent ritual of the new year’s dinner with my siblings and their partners at one of their homes, in Holland. My brother got very ill, earlier this month. He spent over a week in the hospital where it was touch and go. He is now home, still ill but hopefully on the mend. The annual New Year’s dinner is planned for December 28 at his house. How could we not be there? This time I did not wait and clicked on the ‘purchase’ button for two tickets to Amsterdam at the end of the month. We will spend the transition to 2020 in Holland.
South Africa wasn’t the last trip of this year after all. Friday evening, I will leave for India and then right after Christmas Axel and I are off to Holland.
We had our first day of easing into the pace of work here – courtesy visits to the ones in charge and getting the team together to discuss what they want from our visit. We integrated their ideas with ours and will provide them with an agenda tomorrow that we will hold lightly to respond to needs that surface.
We started them on conversations with each other about what they have been able to accomplish in this difficult work context and what they are struggling with. I watched to learn something about the team dynamics and noticed they are not listening to each other. I had already learned about this through our ICRC colleague, but watched it close up today.
None of the rooms that we had hoped to have were available. It amazes me the things we take for granted, like meeting in a nice place with chairs for everyone. Not here, the only place available was the windowless stockroom with hardly any room to maneuver and not enough stools (forget about chairs) to accommodate everyone.
Later we met in the PT exercise room after having dragged the benches from the waiting room and an odd assortment of stools and chairs pulled from all over the rehab center. It’s a tile clad room and with everyone talking loudly over each other I had a hard time hearing everyone. I’ve got to have that hearing exam when I get back, as my hearing is definitely not what it used to be
At the end of the day, just before the sun disappeared behind the river we arrived at the beautiful terrace of the Grand Hotel. It’s the place to watch the sun set and enjoy beer, brochettes and frites (again). Why the architects who designed our hotel (also on the river) did not think a terrace overlooking the river would be a major competitive advantage is something that escapes me. The Grand Hotel, even though it’s apparently not a place one would want to spent the night, fills its enormous terrace with people who stay after the sun has disappeared to eat and drink. Our hotel has an ill positioned, unattractive and unused terrace that looks in the wrong direction. And even if it had been positioned in the right direction, the view would be obstructed by barbed wire, military folks and a kludged together pizzeria and barbecue place. There aren’t even tables and chairs for guests, unless you stand there for a while and they drag out one table with one chair for you.
We were joined by our colleague’s Flemish husband and their 9 year old daughter who speaks 5 languages. She is a citizen of the world if I ever knew one, at ease in cultures as different from each other as Sudan, Bolivia, (Flemish) Belgium, Catalonia and now Niger, all in her nine short years.
We sat on the same terrace where I sat 32 years ago in my second year at MSH, 1987. At that time we drank the conjoncture, (Niger) beer, watched thousands of bats fly out for their nightly feeding frenzy, and followed the camels and cars traversing the bridge to return home. Tonight, there was no conjoncture beer, much fewer bats (and many more mosquitos as a result), no camels and lots of cars. Things have changed a lot and some things not for the better.
I learned that the last brewery was taxed out of existence, not just putting all its workers out on the street but also putting the hundreds of little eating places where people would go for cheap beer and brochettes out of business as the imported beer is now out of reach of the people who frequent those places. It seems like another infuriating example of religious fanaticism with a very short horizon – maybe something on our horizon if our president has to step down?
Back at the hotel I could not get my room key out of the lock. I called the reception who sent a man up. As soon as he arrived the key came out. I quickly put it back in because I didn’t want to let him off the hook so easily. And indeed, he was not able to get it out. He told me, ‘just a moment,’ and went back down. I assumed he went to get something like graphite, but no, he came back with a foot long insecticide spray can. If he had intended to spray into the lock, he could not since it was occupied by the key we couldn’t get out. So he sprayed around the key, as if it was a lubricant. Of course it didn’t solve the problem, only added bug spray to the other fragrances wafting into my room from the tired and mildewed carpets in the hallway. At least I won’t have bugs in my room lock tonight, that’s comforting to know. Eventually the key came out but neither one of us knew the magic formula. I am pretty sure it wasn’t the bug spray. Just a lucky jiggle.
Labor day signifies the end of summer. We already knew it from the shift in the air, crisp at night, no more need for fans or AC, and the days agreeable warm. We still occasionally swim in the cove, when we are not too busy with the management of stuff. This is why getting rid of stuff is so liberating – less management, more time to swim.
Whenever we can we take meals, breakfast, lunch, cocktails, sitting just above the beach. We have created a little eating corner with the bottom of an old bench and two chairs left behind after a party earlier this year, when the summer was just starting (sigh). I both love and hate this time of the year: love because it is Lobster Cove at its best, hate because winter is coming.
I have put the finishing touches on a weekend in April on the island of Schiermonikoog, way over at the most northern-eastern point of Holland, close to Germany, surrounded by the Waddenzee, loosely translated as the ‘Flats sea,’ a part of the North Sea that empties with the tides. It will be a family fest, a ‘Vriesstock or Vriesenpalooza’ as my nephew calls it. Axel and I will celebrate our 40thanniversary surrounded by our dear and noisy Vriesendorp siblings, those of their children and grandchildren who are around next April. We will show up with the 8 of us and it will be Faro’s and Saffi’s first trip to Holland.
Among the many things we are carting to Sita this weekend are Dutch books, so that the language barrier will not get in the way of the kids playing together and our son-in-law Jim can say and understand more that the word ‘paprika snippers,’ which he learned on his very first trip decades ago.
Our car could be mistaken for one that takes stuff to their kid’s dorm. But a look inside shows that it is filled to the gills with things that have accumulated after the student experience (mine and Sita’s): desk belonging to her great grandfather on which I studied for my final high school exams in the spring of 1969, books, photos and CDs from Sita’s school and early employment years, blankets from West Africa, an old map of China from the Cabots who left their stuff in the house we live in, to decorate Faro’s room – he will be the only one who can read it.And after that Tessa gets to pick up her stuff and we should finally be relatively free, free enough to empty one side of our office to install a heat pump and we can be warm this winter, and cool next summer. Free at last!
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