Sylvia's Journal

Yesterday Last night I said goodbye to Sita and her family who are still in the air for many more hours. Although I had the best seat  of us all (a large king size bed) that they would have been jealous of in their cramped economy seats, I had a restless night because of restless nerves in my foot.

This morning I enjoyed a solitary breakfast that Saffi and Faro would have loved: a machine that made tiny pancakes by simply pushing an ‘OK’ button, a dish full of whipped cream that was constantly being refilled, a syrup dripper and all the other things that they want for breakfast.  The hotel on the website did not look attractive but the experience surpassed my expectations. The young gentleman at the reception desk, after I mentioned my web impression, said he would tell the marketing people, implying that they don’t do their job (“they are just walking around”). Maybe they should talk with their guests.

The hotel is super sustainable-economy conscious, even the salt and pepper shakers (made from 100% recycled plastics, refillable, and recyclable again). The toilets flush with grey water, the bathtub has a sign that says that filling a bath would deprive society of 320 glasses of water which made me wonder why they even bothered to put in a bathtub, you get points for using fewer pillows and towels.

It was strange to be alone after being with 2 kids and three adults last week. The silence is deafening. I hope to get some serious reading done; not just Rushdie but also a book by a South African writer Sita left me.

Now the work begins. I turned my vacation setting off and started to prepare for the next 10 days of work that involve both individual coaching, team coaching and who knows what other surprises await me. It will also be a time to reconnect with old friends, people I haven’t seen since my last trip three and a half years ago, when I made three trips here in 2019.

At 12:15 I landed in Jo’burg and got my first chance to use my new Chinese smartphone which I bought in a mall in Noordhoek for 50 USD. It is rather slow and I should probably have bought the 10 USD flip phone because I only want the phone for local calls so people don’t have to call the US to reach me.

Of course I hadn’t fixed the settings (I have to get re-adjusted to an Android phone) so that driver Larry was calling me and looking for me. When I finally managed to call him he was standing right in back of me.

Load shedding, the turning off of the power grid was bad enough in Capetown (stage 2, which means two hours of no electricity), but here in the Jo’burg and Pretoria area it is worse: stage 6, meaning no electricit

Troy has just been taken. No, I am not talking about Congress which has also hauled in a Trojan horse, a modern-day drama to appease the demands of today’s gods (egos). I am reading about the original story of ancient Troy and how it succumbed to the Greeks. It is very different from the story I learned in school when we had to read parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the original language. The original epic poems are about heroic men: Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, Achilles, Hector, Patroclus and all the other fighters. It is history written by a man as the story of men, his story. The protagonists (the good and the bad ones) are described in the most flattering ways, waging war for pride and power. I was led to believe that these were indeed great men. 

Now I am reading the other side of the story, her story. I realize, shockingly, that I never thought about the women in the story: the one that get kidnapped by Paris (Helen), the teenage daughters of Clytemnestra and Hecuba whose throats are slit to appease the gods; Cassandra, who refused to surrender to Apollo and gets hit with a curse that destroys her. And then there are all the other women of Troy who were simply divided among the Greek troops as just so much more loot to take home.

This story (her story) is ‘Elektra,’ written by Jennifer Saint, a British classicist and teacher (her other book is about Ariadne, which is next on my list). Some decades ago, I read Maryse Conde’s story about the Salem Witch Trials from one of the accused’s perspectives (Tituba) – that book too was a revelation. Of course, there is nastiness between the women, and they are not saints, but that doesn’t take away from their perspective, which is about love, grief, fear, jealousy, and revenge, to name just a few minor emotions.

Managing the pain and muscle relaxer pills may well reduce Axel’s pain, but for me it continues to be a pain in the neck. We are three weeks post-op and down from 8 oxys every 24 hours to only three, and hopefully today only two. Once he is off those nasty but very effective pain killers, we can use our home-grown cannabis and the elixir he extracted from the plant to ease the pain further without the constant fear of addiction. 

We were told these first four weeks would be rotten, and they are indeed. But we do see progress. He is starting to sleep through the night, missing last night’s middle-of-the-night pain pill. That is not quite happening with me yet.  I still wake up every two hours, a habit laid down that first post-op week.

Sita gave me a birthday present that she discovered in her explorations of sound and tone frequencies. I participated in a soundscape workshop, some weeks ago, that she led with two other people who know a lot about sound. She did an experiment with us. She had everyone find their favorite hertz frequency using a slider, and then put one on top of the other, and then played the compilation back to us. If you want to know how diversity adds up in a collective, that’s what we got. I suspect we only learned about the top of her exploration iceberg. Once thing that came out of it was this new toy she gave me, a tone therapy system.  It consists of two small puck-like discs that emit two sets of varying tones for three minutes. It has helped me to reduce the time between waking up every two hours and falling asleep again. It is helping Axel through his pain. It is a remarkable invention that came at exactly the right time.

We are beginning to have some visitors which is a wonderful distraction. One of these friends had a similar operation 3 years ago. Her account of that was both helpful and depressing. So many years later she is still dealing with the aftereffects of the cutting of bone and the fusion (and caging) of her lower vertebrae. On the other hand, I think she got Axel over some of his anxieties related to pain and movement.

He is moving more and better, even started to help in the kitchen where he can do everything that is at counter level. I am lining up some silver polishing chores that he can do standing up without bending.

A physical therapist comes twice a week and takes him for a walk up and down the driveway. He still walks with a walker but now and then he forgets, and he does fine. The walker is mostly to keep him from falling. We also enjoy the weekly visit of a nurse who is a riot. She is funny, caring, and encouraging especially when we talk about the pain and how to manage it.

Yesterday I visited my orthopedic surgeon to help me handle my moderate and severe arthritic knees, a condition that has gotten worse over the last 3 weeks because I have been walking for two, short back and forth sprints inside the house. I used to have a strict exercise regimen to stretch and strengthen the muscles that hold my knee joints in place. Once Axel came out of the hospital, that regimen has gone out of the window, except for a few now and then, but these are now painful to do. I got a cortisone shot in my least arthritic knee, keeping the stuff out of the more painful one because it is clear a knee operation is probably due in 2023, when Axel is mobile enough to become the primary caretaker. 

Until recently I have not minded getting older; things don’t bother me as much, I don’t care what people think of me, I don’t need to wonder what to wear every day as I did when I still had a job. But the knee joints are becoming increasingly painful.  The plane crash from which, according to the doctors, we both fully recovered, is still in our bodies. The damage done then is coming back to haunt us. It is responsible for the things we are dealing with now (Axel’s back and my ankle and knee problems). At the time we may have felt fully recovered, but that is no longer the case. There are moments when I watch people our age walk, run, play sports and the regrets come back but only for a moment, like a wave, before I go back to living in the present. 

On Wednesday, the day before Axel went into the hospital for his back surgery, I met Willie. I had not planned to meet Willie. In fact, I would never have crossed paths with him if it wasn’t for my Toyota car keys that have the unpleasant tendency to turn the car lock on active when I don’t carefully put them down. And so, after filling my car with gas and was ready to get back into my car I found all doors locked. And my phone was in there too.

Long lines of cars were waiting to get to my spot at the pump, but I couldn’t move my car. I made a ‘so sorry’ gesture to the car behind mine and then sought out a person whose cell phone I could use. I hoped that Axel would pick up the call even though it may have seemed like a robocall. Luckily, he did. I explained my predicament and left him to figure out how to get his keys to me (we have only one car). We have good friends who had a car available and gave Axel the wheels to bring me the spare set of keys. It would be a bit of a wait.

In the meantime, here I was in the cold in the dark, bereft of phone and keys. And this is when I met Wllie. Willie is the guy who sits in a small box in the middle of the pumps and presses buttons to allow the next customer to fill up. Willie took pity on me out there in the cold and let me in his warm little box and pulled up a chair. We started to chat, and I learned a lot about him and his job. He is originally from the Dominican Republic and told me he that he hates the cold more so than the hurricanes that fly by every so often in the fall in his homeland. He told me he can handle hurricanes, but the cold gets him. Funny, for me it would be the other way around. 

He said the cold aggravates his asthma and then proceeded to tell me how, since his childhood, all sorts of remedies have been tried on him, herbal concoctions, and pharmaceuticals but nothing helped until he started smoking pot. Of course, he cannot smoke pot on the job. He only smokes when he is alone.

So, getting in and out of his small box in the winter is a challenge. I asked him why he ended up here in cold New England. He shrugged his shoulders and told me he didn’t know that it is a hard place to live, expensive and cold. But anything is better than staying on the island because there is no work, and the little work that is there pays next to nothing, much less than what he makes now (he did add that he’d like a little more money, but even Nelson Rockefeller said that in an interview in the 50s).

He came here because his uncle brought his father here and his father brought him here. After 5 years he became an American citizen. He is still trying to get his wife here, but the paperwork stalled when the pandemic hit.

I told him I was, like him, not born an American. We exchanged notes on the process of becoming one. We talked about the intimidating practices of uniformed officials and how small they made us feel. He observed that he doesn’t often hear from white folks about such things. And why would he, we live in very separate bubbles.

I watched him press buttons on his computer and realized he can never take his eyes of the computer because the gas pump’s system needs to be reset after each fill up. It bleeps when someone has paid, and the next customer pulls up. He needs to press a button to allow the next customer to fill his tank. He does this 8 hours a day, from 2-10 pm, without a break because there is no one else to take over. He does have a bathroom in a small room tacked on to his box. But even then, when he is in there, he can hear the bleeps and must rush back to his computer. As he told me this, he made a gesture of pulling up his pants (so I gathered we were talking about number 2!). His bathroom is so clean that people from the nearby store that belongs to the same company walk over to his bathroom because it is so clean. How he manages to keep it so clean while attending to the tyranny of the bleeping computer is a mystery. I didn’t ask him.

Occasionally he must leave his box to deal with pump problems, cards that don’t work or gasoline spills. He told me that he couldn’t leave me alone (the cash register is in the box), and so we traipsed out now and then to deal with such problems.  I also watched him interact with cash paying customers or people with problems and I was touched by his kind and friendly manner in his dealing with people, some very exercised about the long wait (it is the cheapest gas around).

After about 45 minutes Axel showed up with the spare set of keys and I introduced him to Willie and said goodbye. He had made my long and cold wait into a very pleasant experience. I think I will go back sometime to bring him something to help with his asthma.

We all knew Obi wouldn’t make it to 2023. He left us at the end of September after a long struggle with cancer. Yesterday we sent him off into the hereafter at the same church where he was baptized in 1951, which is also the year I was born. Some 100 people gathered in a giant Catholic Church in Brighton. Obi was a musician extraordinaire. His send-off was full of music, the music wafting high up in the vaulted ceilings to then descend on us like a warm blanket. The acoustics were fit for a king. They were fit for Obi. 

We were mesmerized by the highly choreographed movements of the priest and a few other church officials at the altar, especially the communion ritual, with much filling and wiping of goblets. I knew about this ritual from my childhood when my brother and I snuck into a nearby Catholic church out of curiosity. We weren’t forced to accompany our parents to our protestant church (somewhat like a UU church). It was a small and picturesque building with white-washed walls and few adornments. I grew up in a time when Holland was divided into religious ‘pillars,’ which applied to all spheres of life: schools, political parties, even radio stations, and marriage, with everyone staying in their lane. As a protestant it was not OK to date a Catholic. I don’t know if the Catholics felt the same way.  We even lived somewhat segregated. 

A girl my age who lived on the other end of the street was Catholic. We did not mix much but I do remember she told me about what happened in her church and that she had to confess her sins every week to a priest. I felt sorry for her about the latter, but I was also intrigued by the rituals she talked about. This made attending a Catholic service so much more interesting for a child. That’s why we snuck into the church. 

My father, a fierce anti-papist, was not pleased with our transgression into the Catholic Lane. ‘Liever Turks dan Paaps” (rather Turkish than Papist) was a slogan used during the Dutch revolt against the Spaniards at the end of the 16th century.  Wikipedia, reminded me of where that slogan came from. The Dutch were in such dire straits that they looked for help from the Ottomans to support them in their fight against their common Spanish enemies.

And so here I was, some 60 years later, attending a no holds barred Catholic funeral service. There were a few non-Catholic flourishes, like the violin solo and a procession by the priest and Obi ‘s two best friends carrying the box with his ashes and placing it on a table in front of us. There was a man blowing a conch shell and the sound of Buddhist temple bells. We hadn’t known Obi that long and did not know as much about him, other than that his real name wasn’t Obi – the priest spoke of Dennis returning to God; for us it was Obi going to some other place we couldn’t begin to fathom. Wherever it was, he would be resting in peace according to the priest because he was baptized in that same church; for us he would be resting in peace without the distraction of his no longer functioning body.