Sylvia's Journal

A virus invasion left me coughing and hacking, nearly unable to communicate with the rest of the world, for nearly two weeks. Last night was the acid test: could I sit through 1 hour and 40 minutes of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis without a single cough or gurgle?

Modern medicine and traditional herbal medicine were called upon: a codeine-infused cough syrup and 20 herbal drops every 30 minutes, suggested by our herbal-wise daughter and confirmed by our local herbalists did the trick. From an experimental view it was a bad design since we don’t know which of the two contained the winning formula, or whether it was the combination of ‘something new and old.’

At any rate, it was the result that counted and I was able to enjoy Beethoven’s masterpiece, as some call it. It was performed by a chorus of 40 men and 60 women and 4 soloists, with a fairly large sized orchestra of hired hands in between them. The soloists sung the sacral music with great skill and heart. I wondered what it is like when your instrument is your voice and the virus finds you.

A cousin of our sings in the chorus, which is the reason we went. If every one of the 100 singers invites a few family members you can quickly fill up Jordan Hall. On the reservation screen we got just about the last seats. But once there we noticed many more empty seats than the seating chart had indicated. I am sure it was that same virus. It has been racing through New England like a tornado, leaving whole offices empty, schools cleared out and keeping doctors and pharmacists busy.

My Afghan/American friend Razia Jan has expanded her Afghan school for girls, graduated the first class, kept a few young women from being married off to men my age, and is now forging forward with a community college aimed at bringing Afghan women into the productive economy. You’d think it would be an obvious calculation: more family income, more employ, more taxes, more development and more happiness. But in Afghanistan nothing is simple.

Beth Murphy produced a new documentary about Razia’s school. It took her 6 years. Once you see it you can see why – it takes a tremendous amount of time to  build the kind of trust that is needed to be able to film very intimate scenes inside the homes of some of the students and teachers. The documentary has been airing on public television. I took advantage of Razia being in the area on one of her many successful fundraising sweeps through the US, by contributing to a fundraiser in Concord (MA). A certain level of contribution allowed me to spend some quality time with Razia jan over dinner and get to watch the documentary in a private screening.

The film gives one perspective: where else does the head teacher have to drink a cup of water from the well every morning to make sure the well is not poisoned? She comments, ‘better just me being poisoned than 400 girls.’ It gives a new meaning to passion and commitment. The constant threats and risks require enormous effort and patience to make sure that the elders in the community play their part in safeguarding the girls and the entire idea of the school.

There is a request for me from my colleagues in Afghanistan to come out and work with midwives. I am of two minds as the news coming out of Afghanistan is not very encouraging. But then again, it never has. I think of Razia jan and her girls, her teachers, and the daily acts of courage they display. They too have a choice. They choose the path less traveled. It is risky, everything in Afghanistan is risky.

It’s that time of the year again. A frost warning is expected any time now and since Axel is going to upstate NY for a week today, this migration could not be postponed. It is a big two-person job.

This morning, after their long summer vacation in the great outdoor of Lobster Cove, our house plants woke up snug and warm inside.

We had to dig the acorns out of their roots, so cleverly hidden by the squirrels. Oh how disappointed they will be when the return later to collect them. We cut off protruding roots, wiped off the dirt, spiderwebs and worms from the bottom of their  pots. Some of our houseplants have been with us since we moved from Senegal to Brooklyn in 1981. They had become small trees. We were unforgiving yesterday when we cut them down to size, and did not, as we used to do, start new plants from the cut off branches. Our house is too small. We are now on a trajectory of shrinking rather than expanding. Off with those branches! Over the edge!

Axel is going to co-facilitate an event with a nonprofit global venture organization that is bringing in all its global partners. It sounds so exciting. I looked at their website and if I was young and open to anything, that’s the team I would join if they’d have me.

I will once again be home alone. This time I don’t think I am going to clean out more closets and cellars, but rather catching up on reading and writing.

A lot has been churning in my head from the readings of Margaret Sanger, watching the movie Snowden – and reading how other companies have been teaching leadership. I keep looking for the essence, the few basic levers that one has put out there for people to learn to press. What are they? I sense that I am engaged in the mental equivalent of the creation of a nest, hollowing out the earth, collecting twigs and grasses to create the perfect place to bring that baby forth.

I have been reading everything I could get my hands on about Margaret Sanger. We named one of our conference rooms after her and I am telling her story in a few weeks to colleagues who don’t or barely know who she was. As one of her biographers wrote, she led 13 lives at the same time. Her birth control  legacy is astonishing; the things young woman now take for granted, such as being able to make choices rather than being shackled to one’s biology, were only known and practiced by a small group of generally well off women, who could get the services they needed.

It was exactly 100 years ago that Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethyl and a young Lithuanian translator, Fania Mindell, opened the first Birth Control Clinic in Brooklyn. Women lined up around the block to get advice on how not to be constantly pregnant. Margaret Sanger’s mother had 18 pregnancies in 25 years and then she died. That 10 of her children survived into adulthood is a miracle.

But the clinic, barely started was raided and its staff prosecuted. Sanger’s life was full of arrests, jail terms, fines, exhortations, yet she continued to provoke in order to test the laws against logic. In the end she won but it took decades.

And then I hear Trump talk about making change and I wonder what he has in mind. His kind of making change is turning a paper dollar bill into 4 quarters. It’s easy, anyone can do it.

But when I study the people who actually changed things, the inventors, the discoverers but especially the activists who got challenged the laws of the land in order to get them scrutinized and overturned, their change was all but small change. They were demonized, pursued, lost things dear to them, sacrificed personal comfort and their family life. Now that is real courage.  We saw the movie about Snowden this weekend and there it was again, this same pattern of giving everything up for this one cause, risking life, liberty and happiness for this one goal.

In my job we teach about leadership with a lower case ‘l’ because it is more accessible to the many whose leadership we need to make the small changes, the incremental changes that can happen in a year, making things better on a small scale; but Sanger, Snowden and so many others are in a different league, their vision is way out there and their courage and perseverance commensurate with it. They have earned the right to be called Leaders rather than leaders.

By the way, don’t forget to register to vote if you are an American citizen!

The Japanese ladies have gone home with plenty of ideas in their heads; Axel and Sita returned from Norway, excited about their first foray into Scandinavia. The wedding set up has been taken down in the Pembroke woods and life is returning to the usual rhythm of fall, with its countless chores and accompanying sense of loss.

While I was alone I went on a fall cleaning spree – removing everything out of one part of the cellar, cleaning the cobwebs and mouse droppings and then being very selective about what to put back. As I get older I am less and less attached to stuff I brought back from my travels, or, to go even further back, from my student years.  Everything was put in bags and sacks and boxes and carted off to Beverly’s Bootstraps thrift store. BB is a great organization that helps people do what their name says.

Some stuff went to MSH, African artifacts I once wanted so badly but which have been relegated to the basement over the years, having lost their initial attraction, accumulating dust and mildew for nothing.

Then came this closet, then that one, then clothes, more kitchen stuff and tchotchkes – oh how liberating this de-acquisitioning.

I was left with two piles of things that will go elsewhere. One bag I filled with my pilot gear. I wrote to the director of the flight center that I was hanging up my pilot headphones – which I actually had done a long time ago, and he figured as much. The bag full of headphones, knee boards, airport maps and Beverly Flight Center T-shirts are for new student pilots who cannot afford all the gear. The other pile consists of various post-orthopedic surgery gear: several boots, slings, and braces – I need to figure out how to get these to my rehab center colleagues elsewhere in the world who have none of this stuff. The clean up of all this was also liberating, the closing of a chapter of my life.

When Axel came back from Norway he found one entire car full of boxes and bags I had not been able to drop off at the donation center. I told him if he was going to take anything out it would have to live in his office. That tempered his drive to salvage stuff and in the end he only took out a few items. I am sure in a month or so they will find their way to Beverly.

Everyone is gone. It was both sad when the last left, including Axel who left with Sita for Norway, and exhilarating. What was I going to do with all these hours alone after work, with no expectations, no obligations, no need to think about dinner? As much as I relished our busy two weeks, before and after the wedding, I now relish the total freedom of doing as I please.

The first few days I was busy with an event at MSH that is part of the Japanese Women’s Leadership Initiative, an annual program that brings promising young Japanese women from the public and private sectors (for profit and nonprofit) to Boston. Here they spend an entire month learning about the ins and outs of leading change, nonprofit management, fundraising, and what it means to be a woman working for social change in a society back home that has few role models for them.

It is my candy land version of work: I am in charge and given total freedom to design the program as I see fit and invite whomever I want from my colleagues to contribute. I bring interesting colleagues in and listen to their stories. For three days we sit around a table, talk, listen explore, experiment around the notion of leadership. I ‘feed’ them tools and instruments to learn more about themselves and about the dynamics when people come together. It is my favorite activity of the year that doesn’t require travel, just 3 very long days. Next week there will be the final presentation practice runs, sushi and celebrations before they all go home.

In the meantime my calendar is beginning to fill up, albeit it a bit late, with promises of trips to faraway lands before the year is over.

It is now exactly one week ago that we gathered at Tessa’s house and were in the midst of worry; would or would the groom be able to attend his own wedding? Once the ceremony had been postponed to day 2 we could relax and take the day as it came. It did come, the groom was in good enough shape to participate in the postponed ceremony and we had the wedding that Tessa had envisioned some 5 years ago. Months (years?) of intense preparation and poof, all is past.

My brother and his wife went west with Sita and Jim and then further west to be the lone tourists at Naumkeag, the Field Farm of the Trust for Public lands, the Clark Institute, the Norman Rockwell museum, and Mass Moka. Axel had prepared a list of attractions which they followed to the letter, to everyone’s delight. Axel should have been a tour guide and we should have been with them, as most of these sights I have not seen myself.

In the meantime we entertained the ever diminishing crowd of Dutch travelers at Lobster Cove and in Gloucester; first in the rain and then on 10+ autumn days. One left on Monday, two more on Tuesday and two more today.

Despite the fact that it is now officially fall we swam, cooked up a storm and remembered family history – amazingly different depending on who does the talking: the oldest or the middle child or me, the before last one. We just sat in the sun, reading or playing with old or newly acquired iPads. I forgot nearly completely that I have an employer 30 miles south (I am one of the few in this company) and had a wonderful time doing nothing.

Day two of the wedding arrived. Steve was up for a bit and looked decidedly better, though we shooed him back to bed after a brief time in the sun. After some final touch-ups to the décor the guests started streaming in; over a period of hours, more than a hundred people descended on 750 Cross Country road, with their dishes and tents and dogs and babies. Today was thus the real wedding day, a last chance.

Faro created a bit of a stir after being bitten by a dog who felt threatened by the little boy walking around with a big stick. The bite, right above his eye, produced a lot of blood and had all of us imagine hours in the emergency room, producing Disappointment number 2. Luckily we had a whatsapp group and were able to send a picture of the cleaned up face to the 3 Dutch family doctors in our party who signaled back that, with all vaccinations being up to date and the cut above the eye, there was no need for an emergency room visit. With a bandaid and the panic gone, Faro rejoined the party and was good until he indicated he was tired; a very rare thing for a 4 year old.

Sita and family lodged in one of the 3 RV campers parked on the field. It was quite cozy and convenient. I had rented an entire house via AirBnB house a short distance from Tessa and Steve’s, for most of the Dutch contingent. It was built in 1794, expanded, upgraded, with retrofitted bathtubs for small people, undulating creaky floors and good beds. It was perfect for us, slow wake ups, staggered breakfasts and late evening reviews of the events of the day, while sipping Cointreau out of egg cups.

Steve was roused from his sick bed, dressed up, in ways Steve does dress up, and positioned once more on the deck, and the ceremony took place exactly as Tessa and Steve had planned. It was lovely. Axel gave the bride away, Sita and Jim played their harvest moon song, we clapped and cheered, the sun was out; all was well. Later, after dinner, speeches and before the bonfire and silent disco, we sang the song that Jim and I wrote on the tune of Norwegian Woods about the couple’s courtship and 11 year runup to the wedding. Sita and Jim tried their level best to coax the 100 or so chorus to sing in tune and in tempo. It was a poor performance from a musical standpoint but luckily everyone had the words and nothing mattered anymore now that the couple was up front, beaming and married.

The potluck was fabulous. Some people had created the dishes that they submitted to the Harvest Moon cookbook that Axel and I put together. Others had parents with a restaurant (Woodman’s famous clam chowder) or ice cream parlor (Down River Ice cream in Essex) – and brought in the kind of large containers usually provided by caterers.

All the while Saffi darted around emptying the mason jars that Sita had so nicely filled with battery operated light, and refilling them with stones. The bottom of her diaper and back of her lovely pink dress covered with leaves and dirt. She was happy to be picked up by anyone giving them her winning smile. And so we forgave her instantly for the re-work she was creating for all of the decorators. We retired to our AirBnB when the party became a party of young people, had our Cointreau, massaged weary feet and retired.

We are turning our heads towards the next event, which is an Indonesian Rijsttafel tonight back in manchester by the sea; for me it is one more week of vacation.

After five years of planning this event, waiting for the harvest moon to show up at their wedding night, Steve was sick. Tessa and her friends nursed him as best as they could, while Steve got sicker and sicker, partially from the stress caused by his illness; as if a wedding day wasn’t stressful enough even for healthy people.

The day before, with Steve out of commission, the long to-do list was even more daunting and so we, the Dutch contingent pitched in for this do-it-yourself wedding.  But first we had our nails done, that is, the women in the party. Having your nails done before a work party is not such a great idea. I was glad I had not done my fingernails as they would all have chipped.

The nine of us descended on Sophia’s hair salon in Concord, some from as far as Brussels and Amsterdam, straight in with Delta, or from San Francisco, New York and DC.

I had supplied the Prosecco, colored plastic flutes, cheese, crackers and other goodies to keep us entertained and fed while the four Vietnamese nail technicians did the pedicures and manicures with smiles and in broken English.

Fridays was the big day but Steve remained sick. We brought him out for a bit on the little marriage platform, a dock supposed to be over the pond but now next to it because of the drought that had turned the pond into a mudflat.

He sat in his robe next to Tessa who held his hands as if to pass some current to hold him up, uncomfortably facing the 50 or so invitees for the intimate ceremony, who, in their turn faced him uncomfortably as he should be in bed.  Steve is not someone who likes to be the object of pity.  It was clear that the carefully orchestrated ceremony would have to wait. Luckily Tessa and Steve had had the good foresight to have two days of celebrations. There were more tears as Steve stumbled back to bed, leaning on his brother’s arm. It was not what anyone had imagined.He was joined by his also sick sister and they watched movies and drank Theraflu while outside we partied as good and best as we could.

The whole day was characterized by Disappointment. It wasn’t until after our fabulous macaroni and cheese dinner (of various kinds, including jalapeno and gluten free) that Tessa could relax. We sat around a bonfire and Tessa was finally able to laugh watching her Dutch relatives figure out the idea of s’mores with giant marshmallows precariously attached to flammable branches. It was a lovely night, except for the missing groom.