Sylvia's Journal

I accompanied Sita to the vet in a tearful farewell to her beloved cat Mooshi. The end of 2016 would also be the end of Mooshi.

Mooshi first showed up as an adorable peachy white kitten in Sita and Jim’s life in Salem. They lived with a bunch of friends next to the ‘real-cream-Bismarck’ donut shop on Bridge Street. I did buy the Bismarck once to make sure it was real cream (it was). I ingested its delicious 1000 calories. It resembled what is known in Holland as a ‘roombroodje.’ I used to consume these often when I was a high school student in Haarlem. I biked to and from school every day so those calories were used up daily – the Salem variety would take longer to burn up.

Mooshi traveled across the country when Sita and Jim tried out San Francisco. I remember the phone calls home along the road with Mooshi whining in the background. He stayed in their tent on some nights and on others was smuggled into cheap hotel rooms. The three of them then lived in their pricey one room apartment in the Castro section of SF. Half a year later they traveled back East, Mooshi still not liking road trips, and Sita and Jim preferring the East Coast after all.

Over the years Mooshi, always an indoor cat, moved less and less.  He messed up some nice couches sharpening his nails (for God knows what) and interrupted his sleep only to find a more comfortable (sunny) place and for taking care of essential body functions.

He didn’t care much for humans, especially not little ones and was very particular about who could pet him. Still, all those years, before the real babies came, Mooshi was Sita’s baby. Jim eternalized them in a lovely portrait.

Mooshi’s hairs and dander made it hard for Axel to stay overnight. He had to take special pills to manage the allergens.

Over the last few years Mooshi had developed diabetes which Sita and Jim valiantly managed with costly daily injections, making overnight trips more complicated as caretakers were needed who could do the injections. I remember the first time I did those and gave Mooshi 5 times the prescribed dose by mistake. Whether he got the injections or not, and in the right dose or not, they showed no visible difference. He kept peeing and pooping all over the place making life very difficult for everyone in his household. The cat was old and sick, and the decision to let him go seemed obvious to all but Sita and Jim.  They just couldn’t ‘play God’ as Jim called it.

Eventually, as 2016 came to an end, Sita and Jim had come to the same conclusion as all the parents that Mooshi had had a good and very long life but that it was time to go. I accompanied Sita to Mooshi’s final visit to the Northampton cat hospital. It was very sad; all those memories. We hugged and left Mooshi with the nice lady who gave Sita a box of Kleenex, understanding how hard it is to say goodbye to a beloved pet. On a happy note, Mooshi will never know what it is like to live under a Trump administration.

Christmas came and went. We were incomplete, without Tessa and Steve. Things simply did not work out, which was a shame. We may have come to the end of our traditional Christerklaas. The poems will stay, but not the frantic preparations on Christmas Eve and reading poems and hunting for gifts into the early morning hours. With Faro four, and for the first time understanding what happens at Christmas, the experience will be different from now on.

I still would prefer to be out of the country for the entire month of December, and maybe next year will insist on it, going off to some place, if such exist, that isn’t contaminated by the obsessive buying and gifting, especially for people who already have everything.

Maybe our best Christmas gift, which we gave ourselves, was to offer Faro a week with his grandparents at Lobster Cove so that his mom and dad could take care of a long list of work related to-do’s. They remembered that having one child is a hobby but two is a job. So we offered to take Faro. I ordered a bunch of museum passes from the library and drew up a schedule: Monday was zoo day; Tuesday was Museum of Science day, Wednesday was for the Aquarium, Thursday a trip to the Peabody and Essex Museum and Friday with grammy in Beverly before heading home. We also got two movies from the library: the BFG (Dahl/Spielberg) and the remake of the original Dumbo. Both were good fun for ages between 4 and 70.

On Monday we discovered that most zoo animals don’t like winter. Many of the cages were empty with signs that said ‘seasonal.’ The Stoneham Zoo was a sad affair with only a few animals that could stand the cold: a brown bear, a flock of chattering flamingoes, and animals that were asleep somewhere and invisible). We were done in about 45 minutes. We continued to downtown Boston for a hot chocolate and then on to the Franklin Zoo which had a few more animals, including a family of Gorillas living in a tent – I felt sorry for them, they looked so very bored. But there was a nice playground which was probably the highlight, plus a cow being weighed (1660 pounds), chicklets and a duck hospital.

We had a hotdog lunch (“my parents let me eat meat now!”) and then headed home. On Tuesday we visited the Science Museum together with all the children of Boston. Faro pushed every button, turned every wheel and had an average attention span of about 20 seconds. I would have liked to go there myself; there are some great exhibits for adults. On Wednesday we packed everything up for another trip into Boston where we met Sita at the Aquarium – another place where all the children of Boston had converged.

Faro was given the choice to return home with mom or with us; he choose us, probably because with us he had more chocolate and more movies than at home, and at night he had the bathtub to himself rather than having to share with his little sister.

Friday night I drove Faro back to Easthampton, leaving Axel with a persistent streptococcus infection in bed – which is also where he will transition from 2016 to 2017 tonight.

Yesterday, on my way to work, all the 12 or so stoplights between my home and work were green. It was a nice experience of flow, a good start of the day as a superstitious person would assume. Today all of them were red. It would be a bad day. If  you predict that something will go bad or end bad it probably will. Such thoughts can easily become reality as the mind is focused on all those things that could qualify as ‘not so great.’ There is usually a lot of these in one day. And then you were right, it was a bad day.

Looking back over the last 3 months – this is after all a time to look back – I can see the green and red stoplights all through the year – periods of high and periods of low; periods when I was in the flow and periods when I despaired.

One of the things I do in my coaching is getting the people I coach to take a step sideways and look through another window at their reality. I try to coach myself in the same way. Simply by stepping aside, and looking from a different vantage point, a bad thing can suddenly look good. Or, when we step back and look at what happened after the immediate ‘bad’ is over, still moving to the next window or the one on the opposite end, we see all sort of other things come into view, possibilities we had missed before.

I am quick to label something as bad but I have learned to catch myself. Before, when something bad happened everything got tainted with the ‘bad’ brush. It’s a bit like Axel’s silk painting – the tip of the brush touches the silk and whoops, the ink spreads wide and far.

Artists look at this not as something bad that happens (or something good for that matter) but with wonder. “Geez, look what is made possible now!”

My red stop lights today were moments of repose – of brief meditative experiences. I didn’t mind them. I think of Mark Twain’s wise words often in such circumstances: “If you are patient you can wait much faster.” I also think of this poem from a South African poet, Benjamin Mo Loise:

“In our whole life’s melody the music is broken off

here and there, by rests.

And we foolishly think we have come to the end of the tune.

God sends a time of forced leisure, sickness,

disappointed plans, frustrated efforts,

and makes a sudden pause in the choral hymn of our lives.

And we lament that our voices must be silent.

Our part missing in the music that goes up to the Creator from the

world.”

Last week we met a young couple film makers at the house of a friend in Rockport. I like these new encounters, especially with young people who are doing amazing things. We learned about the documentary they are currently filming about children with cancer in the developing world. And then they told us about their documentary about the Sikhs (under the turban) which was being screened 4 days later at MIT.

Axel was supposed to come but the train came at a different time, it rained, he was soaked, in a bad mood and stayed home to cook. I invited a friend. We had dinner at the Tibetan restaurant in Cambridge and then made our way, in the pouring rain (after months of draught) to MIT.

We learned much about the Sikhs, what the diaspora has in common and what not. I did not know that they are the world’s fifth largest religion (in terms of followers). The film started in response to a question from a 9 year old girl to her parents: what does it mean to be a Sikh? The parents had enough money to take the girl on an investigation that spanned five years and several continents, duly filmed by the film maker couple. They spoke to cheese making and Italian speaking Sikhs in Cremona Italy, and Spanish speaking Sikhs in Argentina. They followed from a helicopter the orange-turbaned members of a Vancouver motor cycle club through the awe-inspiring landscape of southwest Canada.

They filmed a gaggle of young men displaying the Singh Street fashion, wearing their turbans proudly in fashion statement ways. They spent days with the grieving members of a Sikh temple in Wisconsin where 6 of their community were gunned down by a white supremacist who may have thought that turbans=Arabs=terrorists. And then of course they visited the Golden Temple in Amritsar and family members India. I am currently trying to get a visa for India and had to fill in a form that made me swear my trip to India would not plan to be involved anything religious. I wondered how they got permission from the Indian government to film Sikhs. Apparently it was not easy. But the shots in Indian were magnificent.

Yesterday our friends had organized a gathering at their house to explore the poetry of Wallace Stevens.  I read his bio on Wikipedia and noticed that his life more or less coincided with that of Margaret Sanger. I wondered if he knew about her. They must have been walking on the streets of New York City about the same time.

I was not familiar with his poetry and might not have cared if I had read it by myself. And so this is what I learned about myself and poetry last night: I loved the community experience of poetry. We shared the poems with some 20 other people a good many of whom I did not know, but the poetry made this ‘not knowing’ irrelevant; better yet, it led to ‘knowing.’

When we arrived we had just read in the local newspaper that a friend of us had suddenly died in his early 60s. We read the notice too late to participate in a memorial service that was held practically around the corner. We were stunned and deeply saddened.  As we got ready to drive to the poetry evening we wondered, would poetry distract us? Would it soften the sharp edges of this realization that Tim would no longer be waving to us from across the cove? Leave his kayaks on our beach? Invite us to join him and his daughters as they were perched high on one of the Lobster Cove rocks on a summer evening at cocktail hour?

The poetry evening, the combination of the poems, our eminent poetry guide Paul and this community of poetry lovers, did distract us. Paul had done a fabulous job picking a few poems, wrote them in large letters on flipcharts and had us explore, feel, and even draw what we experienced. The poems were of the kind that I would have read and then shrugged my shoulders, thinking, what was that all about? But after hearing others share what they heard or saw, it was as if a door into the poem opened, revealing surprising vistas of meaning, associations, feelings.

I used to write poetry, dabbling I called it, but I stopped doing it a long time ago. I wrote them when I was feeling low, when things were not going well. This (this time, this poetry session) reminded me of the power of poetry and the power of being with others. I think I am going to write a poem about Trump: Dump Trump! Ha!

I had hoped that Trump would disappear from view and we could go on with our lives, but this is of course not happening. He shows up in most of my waking hours, causing distress. In the community around me I see the whole range of reactions: from catastrophic scenarios to ‘may be it won’t be so bad – there are after all checks and balances;’ from calls to jump into action, to protest, to contact one’s congressman/woman, senators to we should give him a chance, let’s wait and see.

We can gloat about his already being in disarray to form a cabinet or be deeply worried about what that means. We can slap him in his face with his already violated campaign promises (in one week!) or hope and pray that he gets it together as we are, after all, talking about our country, not the alt-right republican America.

The knot in my stomach has loosened a bit but it is still there. I go to bed exhausted from all the mental gymnastics I am engaged in to sort out my response, attitudes and courses of action. I am going to be more politically active, that is for sure. I congratulated Elizabeth Warren on her letter to Trump about the number of ‘swamp’ creatures on his transition team and appointments – she is a brave and principled woman (which of course makes her a bitch in the eye of many). I am going to call my congressman, a democrat, and urge him to follow Warren’s good example.

Against the backdrop of the Trump turmoil is also my current job which appears to be in danger as there is little work for me and planned trips are being canceled or at risk of being canceled. With the big unknowns of Trump’s foreign aid plans, the far future doesn’t look that bright either.

The only bright spot at the moment is my upcoming birthday, 65, which we will celebrate with the girls and the grandchildren somewhere in Maine. I only know that I have to reserve December 1 through 4 for this but not what will happen those days. I am excited about this. Tessa will join us the 2^nd, having just returned from her honeymoon after a punishing return flight that will have them experience the longest first of December ever.

Tessa and Steve’s trip is also marred by setbacks, like everything else these days: there was the earthquake and its many aftershocks on South Island, the tsunami warnings, and consistently bad weather on the North Island, Steve’s foot injury and Tessa’s  sinus infection. Mercury retrograde again?

We were so high, after Monday’s canvassing in Southern New Hampshire. We convinced some people to vote, even if they didn’t like the choices available to them – though all were fervently anti Trump. We talked ourselves into a Hillary landslide, a broken ceiling, the first female president.

After we had knocked on some 25 doors we travelled to Durham to stand in line for a few hours at the Whittemore Arena where Obama would be speaking later in the afternoon.

After getting inside the arena we were entertained by the university band, and then a series of rah-rah speeches, kicked op by Congress woman Gabby Gifford and her husband, and then, from the bottom up, the entire NH democratic ticket.

It was my first large election rally. It is a strange phenomenon: candidates preach to the converted. Obviously all the people there were going to vote, and vote for the right people. They had spent hours shuffling along in a line that snaked along for block after block in the hope to get a glimpse of Obama.  I was surprised none of the speakers said, “yeah, I know you are going to vote, but what about the other people on your street or in your apartment building; are there people who are not planning to vote for us, or vote at all? Go and talk with them!” The nice thing in NH is that you can vote and register at the same time.

Instead we applauded their every word, their campaign promises that we know are not that easy to realize, until Obama appeared. That was the real treat: he is a master story teller and the only one who actually engaged with the nearly ten thousand people in the arena. Many of us will miss him, what an inspiration.

And then election night arrived. I was stressed out. My gut told me tings were not going to go as we had hoped. We did not go to the Gloucester Democratic Party HQ. It was a school night and I couldn’t get rid of that bad feeling. I went to bed at 9PM when things still looked promising (with only a few percent of the votes in, eastern state by eastern state), but the running numbers all over the TV screen continued to feed my stress. I slept poorly. When I woke up after midnight I checked Twitter and the sinking feeling was no longer a feeling, but a full body sink. I slept poorly the remaining hours, got up very early and went to work.

At work everyone was in shock. It felt like a funeral – I don’t think there are any Trump voters in my workplace. One colleague wore a black armband as a sign of mourning.

We are all holding our breath to see what will happen to reproductive rights (here and overseas), foreign assistance and of course the Supreme Court (how conservative/fundamentalists will it get). Luckily Sita sent me a little video that said ‘breathe in, breathe out,’ the most sensible thing to do.