Sylvia's Journal

I have said a first no to an assignment offered, and received a first no to an assignment I had wanted. People around me tell me that saying no is something I have to practice a bit more.

I have started my teaching at Simmons University (no longer a college I just learned). It has been a steep learning curve, especially the online part and the grading mechanics. I had started to prepare for this  back in May when I was in Mali. At that point in time there was an assumption I would teach over the summer but there weren’t enough students. Now I teach two online classes, one on Monday night and one on Thursday evening. This is the reason for the ‘no.’ I could not possibly veer too far out of my time zone. An assignment in Africa would simply not work.

I teach one class called ‘Leadings Individuals and Groups, and another on ‘Negotiation and Problem Solving.’ The first class are mostly new MBA students, the second one are halfway through their program. In the latter group I am the newbie, learning the ins and outs of online teaching. In the other group we are all learning at the same time.

Since I have never taught classes for credit and grades, I realize that I have to be very disciplined about evaluating student work. There are grading rubrics I consult, but there is still a lot of subjectivity and judgment.

And so I find myself studying along with my students, reading materials, Harvard Business Review articles and cases, watching videos and trying my hand at their homework, so I know what they are going through. It’s challenging. Especially since life goes on, including other assignments that are on my plate (and so the second ‘no’ came in handy).  I suppose this is no different than what my students are experiencing, since all of them have full time jobs, families, and some even have weekend jobs.

I am addressed as ‘Professor Vriesendorp’ or simple ‘Prof’ which sounds strange to me. I only know one Professor Vriesendorp and that is my brother who is a real professor. I told the course director that I felt it wasn’t quite right to be given that honorific since I know what it takes to earn a professor ship. I have done none of those things that are required for the title: earning a PhD, doing research, writing books and countless articles, etc.). She told me that is what students do and to simply accept it. However, I could not put it on my CV (as if  would!).

We have returned from Japan,  one iPad keyboard lighter. Axel, left it in the pocket of his seat. The friendly Delta people told us that having lost something in Japan means it will be returned.  Now, three weeks later, it hasn’t shown up. So much for that assumption.

I resumed my life with a total concentration on getting ready for my first (academic) teaching job. It is a steep learning curve, accompanied by some nervousness, more about the mechanics of teaching online and the grading than the content.

The rain has been with us all month of September. Two years ago, when Tessa and Steve got married, we had the most glorious month of September (and as far as I remember, we usually have such September). But not this year. The rain stayed with us in Japan and then back in Manchester it wouldn’t let up, until now, nearly midway October. The leaves are still mostly green – and this is leafpeeper weekend in New England. This morning during our walk around the point we were wondering about the high level systemic impact all the wetness will have.

On a local level, the wetness has produced lost of mushrooms. They have carpeted the shadiest parts of people’s yards. The weeds also like the rain because I left them alone.  I love to sit between the weeds and pull them up one by one, but not in the rain.

The  fresh new greens on the kale have attracted small caterpillars who eat up to 8 times their body weight in a day. The kale is full of holes. Last night I, as I washed the kale, I had to pluck of as many as 10 on just one leaf. Despite the holes we had a nice ground pork/rice and kale stir fry.

Axel took close up pictures of one of the creatures, even one where it looks straight at him. They are good for a horror movie. Despite his efforts to get rid of them, they have now reduced our tall kale plants to stalks with nothing on them. Ughhh, no home grown boerenkool (a Dutch potato/kale stew) this winter.

Some of the leeks and potatoes have been turned into a thyme/potato/leek soup, all from our garden. We have to think of more leek dishes as Axel planted about 40 and we still have many left.

Leaves are starting to fall. It’s a time of both nostalgia and great beauty. September is the best month here. There is excitement in the air (new schools, new teachers, new classes), there is the crispness of the air and the abundance in the garden.

Abundance pops up everywhere and it makes me stop to smell the roses.

I am immensely grateful for so much. For one I am grateful for the people I have known who have left this earth. Most recently that was Baba Ted who we met in Kabul and who got Axel involved in Sola where he (and I a bit) worked with Afghan teenagers who were so thirsty for learning, and so full of energy and hope in spite of everything going on there. Through him we met others and formed lifelong bonds.

Gratitude for being able to swim at dawn in Lobster Cove – the water still and clear, the sun coloring the rocks rose and blinding me as I swim towards it.

Gratitude for all the people on Cap Ann who do their bit to counter the forces of evil that are lurking at every corner to destroy the beauty of this place. Last night we sailed on the Roseway Schooner, a fundraiser for Seaside Sustainability, led by the son of a good friend. We learned that the schooner (built in Essex in 1925) had been sinking in the mud, abandoned at a pier somewhere in Maine when (those forces again) people came together to bring her back to her old glory and use her for good. The good includes fundraising events and being a school for young people who are pulled to the sea and sailing. If I could turn the clock back, I think I would have signed on. I watched a young girl move around the deck with great agility, a knife dangling on her side, knotting the ropes on the sail. She had been a schooner crew member for ten years and had been promoted to first mate recently – the latter pronounced with great pride. So young and so accomplished!

Gratitude for my family, the joys of my life – the amazing things they do that make me marvel every day.

Gratitude for work. The laying off in June turned out to be a good thing. It opened so many doors. I am so busy, nearly too busy for summer days. This week I worked 27 hours. I am definitely not retired. The last few weeks I have worked nearly full time.  One week I was in Chapel Hill, this one I was ensconced in the studio across the driveway. We were in the middle of a heat wave and it is the coolest place to be.

I was putting together all that I learned from some 50+ interviews I had done the week before in Chapel Hill where I was on assignment to tease out how my client organization can best move from one state of being to a new desired one.

I am also preparing for our trip to Japan and the three talks I will give there, and a bit of preparation for the leadership and negotiation classes I will teach this fall for a local college.

Everything is wet as it has been raining nearly every day. The once white lampshades on the porch are covered in black spots that only bleach could remove. The table legs, ditto. Our kitchen garden is overrun with weeds. Luckily I love weeding (small plots only) and have started to liberate the asparagus bed from its invaders.

At least 5 colonies of wasps and hornets have built their exquisite papery homes under the eaves around our house. Our neighbor opened his window and got stung. Walking on the outdoor stairs to the studio attic inevitable angered the beasts and Axel got stung. And so we called the exterminators who came in suits and with chemicals that, I was told, would not harm the honey bees that are feeding on our flowering bushes and in the flower beds. We have their word.

I am glad we are now rid of them but it was sad to see their rugbyball sized papery nests hacked to pieces. It must have taken a lot of effort to build those. The hornets and wasps that were not home at the time of the attack and returned later to investigate where their houses had gone, never found out as contact with the old home produced instant death. The surfaces below the nests look like a battlefield, no survivors.

On Thursday we listened to the chief of the Souther Poverty Law Center (SPLC) who is friends with one of our neighbors who is actively promoting voter education and voter registration. SPLC knows a thing or two about how manipulation of the voting process has disenfranchised many, especially those who would not have voted for our current president. Some 90 million people who did not vote probably handed Trump his victory. Now it is all hands on deck to reduce the number of people who don’t bother voting. It was an inspiring presentation that made me want to do more than upping my monthly contribution to SPLC.

In the past I would bring all sorts of things to our Maine vacation, out of some fear that I would find myself with nothing to do, maybe? This time I bought only half finished books: Coming Apart by Charles Murray, a book about Madagascar (Lords and Lemurs) and one I bought during our Cape Cod course in June. I am making progress on the Murray book which makes me realize that what is happening now (in the US especially) is a perfect example of the story of the boiled frog that Peter Senge described in his Fifth Discipline: the frog, put in a pan of boiling water would immediately jump out while the one put in cold water that is slowly brought to boil falls a sleep and dies. It’s a cruel story, whether applied to the frog or those who Murray describes as the inhabitants of US Fishtown. 

In the day to day news dramas played out under our president (or any president for that matter), everything is assigned to near and immediate cause and effect rubrics. It is quite a different view from the one painted by Murray from 30.000 feet, spanning the last 50 years. It’s not an objective view, of course – no view is entirely – but it is anchored in reams and reams of data drawn from the census, General Social Survey, Zip code and Census Tract data, National longitudinal Survey, and more. It’s a pessimistic view if you believe that the bedrock of any society is the family. It used to be the extended family: grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. The nuclear family has made the family unit more fragile, more susceptible to the stresses of life as there is no escape.

Our one week of three generations together in Maine makes the benefits abundantly clear – the parents sleep in while Opa and Oma entertain the kids with games, stories and food; auntie Tessa introduces the kids to the care of animals, wholesome food, exercise but also whimsical cup cakes and birthday presents. Uncle Steve the scientist contributes to the kids’ experience of their physical surroundings through discovery. The absence of cousins is the only thing that is missing – they would have taught the kids how to negotiate and resolve conflict, learn to share and play games together.

We are off the grid – really off the grid, even the cellphone doesn’t allows us to check in to our digital devices. This is rural Maine. We are in a new vacation place. It is nearly twice the distance from our house as Camelot, the cottage we used to rent on Southport island. Now it took us about 5 hours instead of two and a half.

We had outgrown Camelot where Faro has to sleep in a tent on the porch, Saffi in a closet and Tessa and Steve and the dogs in a tent on the lawn.  Now everyone has their own bedroom and the children have their own bunkbed and a door we can close.  We also have two large dining tables, and a well equipped kitchen.

A steep path runs down to a private pebble beach that is perfect for the kids – for Faro because of the big crabs that live there and for Saffi because the water is shallow and the pebbles are small.

Axel is wearing an orthopedic boot because he sprained a tendon in his foot. He claims it is because of the overextension of his foot as he meditated, kneeling on the small meditation stool he had made for me years ago (and which I cannot use  anymore because of my fused ankle). A walk into town on flip-flops appears to have made things worse and now he is in a boot. As a result he cannot go down the steep path and has to be ferried in Tessa’s canoe from a landing nearby. But all this doesn’t damp the fun of being together for a week on the beautiful Maine coast.

Faro’s ‘Opanoma’ vacation has come and gone. Opa and Oma are our grandparents names – to distinguish us from the other two sets of grandparents he has (Grammi and pep in Beverly and Gramps and Amma I Manchester). 

Faro was delivered to us the Saturday before camp and stayed behind when dad and sister left on Sunday afternoon to return home. He was a little sad the next morning.

We did what grandparents do: we spoiled him, somewhat to the dismay of his parents who disapproved mostly in the food department. 

We quickly slide into our roles for the week: Axel was responsible for stories and beach activities, I ran the breakfast and lunch department. We shared the drop off and pick up to and from the Audubon camp in Ipswich. Let year Axel was responsible for nearly everything when I was still employed. I had a new appreciation for how much work was involved in creating a successful into ‘Opanoma’ vacation. 

Breakfast and lunch always included something chocolate (chocolate milk, hagelslag (a Dutch invention), and a dollop of chocolate whipped cream from a can on top of the pancake or waffle. Every morning I prepared (from scratch) at least a pint of chocolate milk. During story time Faro had learned about the concept of ‘counterfeit,’ from a Hardy brothers adventure Axel read to him before bedtime. After inspecting the milk, and after a thumbs up that it was not counterfeit, I poured the chocolate milk into the Roy Rogers thermos that fit neatly into Opa’s, somewhat rusted, Roy Rogers lunchbox.

After camp pick up Faro quickly changed into beach gear and rushed off with his water wings and snorkel to check on the crabs, unless there was another activity, such as the pretend Beatles concert in Masconomo park. I would not be surprised if Faro knew more about the Beatles than any of the teenagers. He knew songs we didn’t even know. An ice-cream (M&M) was unavoidable, what with the ice cream story right there. Two days later we went to another concert on Castle Hill in Ipswich where we met up with friends, another opa and oma and their daughter, son in law and two grandchildren.

On the other nights we watched Shaun the Sheep’s naughty adventures, a claymation movie, which gets Far in stitches, no matter how often he has seen it. After that sleep came quickly.

We are staying with the daughter and son in law of a dear longtime friend who is hosting our reunion in San Diego. The house has a pool that covers the entire backyard. We are warmly welcomed and take a daily dip in the grand pool. The temperature of both air and pool is perfect – the latter a far cry from the glacial waters of Lobster Cove.

We drove up into the mountains to visit our host’s friends from their Peacecorps days in Ghana. When they returned from Ghana they bought a mountain and started an avocado farm that now produces 100s of thousands of avocados each year. They flattened the top of the mountain and built a dream house with 360 degree views, an enormous veranda with a pool, a hot tub and shaded places to eat and far niente.

All 10 of us descended on the place and were warmly welcomed as if old friends all of us. It was a case of my friends are your friends. We the wonderful Mexican food we picked up along the way, and sat around the table telling stories, serious and silly. We learned a bit about avocado farming and farm help and unavoidably drifted into immigration issues without getting too much into current affairs and our perpetrator in chief (PIC) as he who shall not be named is referred to by some. After that it was pool time, and stretching out in sun and the dry mountain air.

We returned to our various lodging places, tried out a fast food fish taco place in Rancho Bernardino where the tacos were delicious and the beer was cheap. En passant we bought a case of various summer wines to accompany our home cooked Moroccan dinner tonight that will precede the AGM – the official reason for our trip to SD. And today, apart from giving a helping hand to the cook, we are free and taking a trip to La Jolla.

Last Monday, after a busy morning of working on various tasks of Sylvia Inc. I went on a shopping spree at the mall. I used to work from home on Mondays and couldn’t shake the belief that I was playing hooky. I have gotten used to not having to get up early in the morning, but I haven’t gotten used to not having to be at my desk – and since I had been most of the time, it felt wrong to be going to the mall doing working hours. I still have to shed that part of my past life. 

Axel returned from a week in Seattle on the red eye. Within 24 hours he was back on the plane, this time with me, to the west coast for a week vacation in San Diego. I was so ready for a vacation after a week of nearly 8 hour work days.  For he first time ever I used my free companion ticket, compliments of American Express. We got upgraded to first class on the first leg of our trip, to Salt Lake City, and are still in good seats for the second part. 

We are off to the now annual Zugsmith reunion – for the first time on the other coast. Most of us are now retired and can afford to fly to faraway places, if not because of a good retirement arrangement, then at least because of all the miles we have all flown over the years during our international development careers. The ZS Society, as we refer to ourselves, consists of a group of colleagues who started working at the same place more than 35 years ago. I was only there for 8 months, but others for their entire career; some of them switched to MSH and we were reunited again, there went on to other organizations, but we all stayed in touch. 

For a brief moment each year we come together for the Annual General Assembly, the AGM, of our society and act as if we are decades younger – we are silly, talk silly, make up stuff, and enjoy each others’ loving and laughing company. It is a most wonderful group of people and worth getting up at 3:15AM for to catch our early flight west.