Sylvia's Journal

There were only a few days to recover from our roadtrip vacation, a few long days at work, beforfe the next event arrived. Yesterday Axel turned 70.  We decided some months ago that we would not let pass this opportunity to have a big celebration. We’d have a Hawaiian Luau, mostly because I wanted to have an excuse to make ‘Flaming wieners in pu-pu sauce,’ a recipe out of one of our favorite cookbooks (Square Meals by the Sterns).

There is a chapter on Luau at home, which featured the wiener dish, among other tantalizing recipes. It required a large cabbage, a sterno can, bamboo skewers and tiny wieners. The sterno can is put in the hole carved into the cabbage, the wieners put on bamboo skewers and the cabbage leaves turned to resemble a flower. A pu-pu sauce put next to the cabbage and voila, you have an exotic dish, at least people in the fifties thought so. I unnecessarily multiplied the recipe by four: a lot of cabages and a lot of wieners. Our friend M was getting pretty good at ‘roasting’ the wieners over the sterno fire.

Fatou, our amazing Senegalese caterer friend and animatrice-par-excellence went all out with several Hawaiian dishes plucked from the internet (Hawaiian macaroni, coconut crusted lime shrimp, Char Sui chicken skewers and kimchi that will last us until the middle of the winter). Tessa did her fair share of cooking and prepared Okinawa sweet potatoes, sweet rolls, and three macademia tortes. Tessa did most of the party planning – something at which she is very good, temporarily interrupting her own wedding planning.

The square meals cookbook chapter on Luau’s at home was also the inspiration for our offerings of Hawaiian cocktails: Trader Vic’s Babalu, Leilani Grass Hut, Hawaiian punch (the real thing) and Pineapple drops. We needed someone to mix those complicated drinks and Tessa found a friend with a good sense of humor and a willingness to learn. He got some help from another guest and the duo stayed behind the bar which was Axel’s upside down lobster boat, mixing and pouring for the 60 or so guests who joined us in the celebration.

Tessa had organized Hawaiian leis by color (“Get Ley’d”) , depending on which of the preceding 7 decades the guests had met the birthday boy. The yellow leis were for the people who knew Axel (then Richard) the longest, meteing him for this first time between 1946 and 1966. They sat in a circle most of the night, until the mosquitoes chased them home, recognizable by their leis, trading old stories.

With Sita and Jim the musicians, and me the poet, we were able to organize a singalong describing each decade of Axel’s life in a few lines. We printed 30 sheets and invited everyone to, if not sing, then at least read along. It was a formidable team effort of those nearest and dearest to Axel that brought him successfully to tears.

And now we are in the after party mode. Everything is cleaned up and the enormous amounts of leftover food distributed (for Tessa, for Sita and for MSH). There is enough booze to last us through the summer; not just what we bought but also what Axel received as gifts. When people get older and should stop drinking, booze appears to be the default gift. We will be good for a awhile in the hard liquor department, especially rum. I see many dark-and-stormies in our future.

Another week is racing by bringing me closer to the start of our family vacation in California next Thursday. It seemed so far away (as did the summer enveloping us now) when I made the arrangements back in December and January. I am going to have unfettered access to our two grandkids. I am excited. It is the kind of excitement I remember from grade school, when the summer school trip to the zoo or the beach came into view.

In the meantime headquarter work is getting my attention. I get up early (now it is dark again at 4:30 AM) to beat the traffic and arrive at a dark office – springing to light automatically when I enter. I am the only one this early but a few people follow quickly. Around 6:30 there are a handful of us. It is quiet in our open space. I get much done.

I have a lot of desk work to complete before my travel will pick up again, later in the summer. It is the kind of work that keeps me billable through stretches of time when there is no travel. I design events on the horizon. I review what others have written. I revise what I have written before based on feedback or pilots. I check a French translation of something I wrote many years ago. Sometimes I am surprised about what I wrote years ago, impressed with myself (“I wrote that? Wow!”). And sometimes I write new stuff or turn something I read into a short training session. Some of the work is creative and some is not but overall it is fine.

I am turning 65 this year. Some people, especially in Holland, are asking, “are you retiring?” Our CEO, who is from the same vintage, is stepping down as the chief. I don’t have retirement plans yet. By and large I enjoy my work, a privilege I am very conscious of.

My official workday is 8 hours, although I am often putting in more than that. Because I start early I also leave early which gets me home in the afternoon, with hours left before nightfall. Last year at this time I would change into my bathing suit, put my goggles on and swim across the cove and back. This year I haven’t been in the water yet. It is very cold (52F or 11C). If it hurts my ankles when I step in the water I turn around.

This summer’s weather has been funny – from very warm (hot even) on some days to spring temperatures on others. Last night it was like winter in the southern hemisphere – I needed to wear a cardigan in the evening. The warm afternoons, the unseasonably cold water makes for thick mists drifting in from the ocean at the end of the day, lowering visibility to as little as 30 meters.

On my commute home I am listening to a fabulous novel about Malaysia, the Garden of Evening Mists. When I pull up to the house and the mist pushes in from the sea I have my own misty garden.

There are three sides to this world: this side, the other side and in between this side and the other side.

On this side something good happened as Tessa turned 31 during this year’s long holiday weekend. We started celebrating on Friday night just the three of us at a restaurant in Gloucester. In the morning I thought about that momentous event when Tessa made her way into the world, remembering it as yesterday. Tessa arrived while the remnant of burned croissants was still lingering in the air. Axel had put ‘heat-only’ croissants in the oven of the birth center.  The oven thought it was getting cleaned, locked itself while the temperature increased to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. This activated the fire alarms and brought the firetruck out with screeching tires and probably a hefty bill for the hospital; it should have replaced the oven. Did tiny Tessa smell something was awry? Nothing in her life shows she did, unless it is her obsession that everything should be right.

The festivities of this 31th birthday continued in the morning with our birthday ritual – a festive table with all the tchotchkes we can find in the house standing to attention around the plate of the birthday girl, flowers on the chair, cards and presents. A brief interlude followed to prepare for the annual birthday bash at Lobster Cove: tents, a keg, fireworks, barbecue, potluck, fire on the beach, silent disco, late night fishing and eating it the next morning, cooked over the still burning fire with fresh eggs from Steve’s and Tessa’s Ladyland Farm chicks. Tessa counts among her friends a highly sought after DJ who reserves this event in his full appointment book year after year.

And then from 2Pm onwards people trickle in, accompanied by the gear they need: fishing rods, canoes, kayaks, tents, fireworks and booze. The latter two I don’t care that much about but I usually retire before they get activated.

That was on this side of the world

Once in a while you get news that puts everything in perspective. Sita and Jim’s brandnew niece, hardly 7 weeks old, has been diagnosed with a terrible birth defect and is undergoing her first operation today at Boston’s Children’s Hospital. It’s a condition that is more common in Asia than in the US, rare here, a chance in thousands, a case of really bad luck. She is undergoing a procedure that was developed in Asia. It is probably one of many surgeries she will need in her life. It is both scary and very sad.

The baby would not have lived long had she be born in a developing country, so we should count ourselves lucky, but we don’t know what’s in store. I am thinking about the pain and worry of her parents and grandparents, two sets of which we share with Faro and Saffi.  It is rearranging all the things that I thought important and worth fretting about.

Today was Memorial Day, and it rained. This rarely happens. We showed up when the seaside ceremony was already in full swing. This is for the navy, I imagine. A wreath is thrown into the water from the back of a motor boat by a uniformed man. The wreath is attached to a thin white string. I guess this is to fish it out of the water afterwards when everyone is gone, and, hopefully, give it to someone to hang on their door. I am sure in the past the wreath was simply tossed into the water and then left to drift wherever the current took it. But the environmental police must have put a stop to that. It is still a ritual and it is the ritual that counts, but I liked that there was an unscripted part to the ritual.

Every year I sit (with occasional standing) through the ceremony which after the seaside part is done at the cemetery, where Axel’s ancestors lie as well. We had spiffed up the graves of his grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles and now also one niece, with geraniums.

This is our personal (pre-)memorial day ritual. When we are done with the planting we take a little rest on Grampy, Grammy and Ester’s’s grave and drink a toast to all. We thank Penny and Herman for life given to us and then we dribble a little bit of vodka over the grave stones. Axel’s grandparents were teetotalers but their offspring were decidedly not and so we hope the elders don’t mind this little bit of vodka.

This year’s ceremony was held at the legion with major parts left out because of the inclement weather. The master of ceremony told us to imagine the parts of the program that couldn’t be done indoors, like the salvos, the marching, the school band and the taps. As a result everything was done in no time. We shook hands with some folks and I had to ask Axel, who’s that and who’s that? I got introduced, as I am always on this day, to the same people again. I can never remember their names or their faces.

And then I get to vent to Axel, also a ritual because I do it every year, about the glorification of war and the death of our men (and now women) in uniform. I do understand the rituals and the commemoration – thinking of people who died in uniform, and I like the small town community feel, but I could do without the military flavor and the presence of all these uniforms.

What bothers me in particular is the idea that they died for an ideal. This may have been true for WWII but I can’t find the noble goals in all the other war that came afterwards.  I hear people say that those who died, died for the ‘American flag and everything it stands for.’

To me, all those who died (this includes the enemy as well who were alegedly just as patriotic and fighting for their own noble goal) did so because of the psychodynamics of their leadership, the ones who waged the wars; those few men at the top, all driven, in one way or another by childhood traumas, egos under assault, hurt pride and having a surfeit of testosterone.

What were we fighting for in Vietnam, exactly? Having just been there and seen the particular flavor of communism that allows Vietnam to sign the biggest trade deal ever with America, one cannot help wonder what all the fuss was about, a ‘fuss’ that wreaked havoc, both here and there. Why? Because a beloved American president figured it was better to stay put in that part of the world to uphold his image of being tough on communism until after his hoped for re-election. But he didn’t live to see the day, and then everything spiraled out of control. I firmly believe that our messes are for the most part self-inflicted; this is true for individuals and the spheres they govern, whether families or whole countries. Just watch Trump.

For the second or maybe third time in a row I am missing Faro’s birthday. Early June seems to be traveling time – though I suppose every month is traveling time these days.  We decided to spend a good part of Memorial Day weekend with Sita and Jim so I could give Faro his present. As it turned out, I also got enlisted to assemble his parents present to him.

Our present was a little nostalgic – a scooter.  Not the dinky little foldable one with the tiny wheels, but one with air tires. It looks like the scooters that were around when I was a child, except much fancier. It has handbrakes (my brakes where my feet) and a skull and crossbones on the step plate. It came in a box on Thursday and I assembled it under the watchful eye of Axel and Woody and with the help of a martini and some wrenches.

Scooters, in my youth, were called “autopeds” or a “steps” though sometimes we called them “autosteps.” They are actually neither autopeds nor steps as there is nothing auto about the propulsion. It’s actually very hard work, especially when going uphill (no uphills in my childhood), and even more so when Faro decides it is much more fun to stand on the plate and let Oma do the ‘stepping.’

We spent two very hot days in western Massachusetts, sometimes wishing we were on the eastern seaboard and cooling off in Lobster Cove – it would certainly have been several degrees cooler there. But Western Massachusetts is an attractive place to be. We (including Sita) sometimes fantasize about renting out our house on Lobster Cove for oodles of money and getting a small place in western MA. The fantasy is postponed until I don’t have to commute to work anymore – maybe within the next 5 years.

For kids Sita’s neighborhood is wonderful. There is Look Park in Florence, with its train rides, picnic areas and playgrounds. There is also the river with its perfect river beaches and swimming spots that have enough of a current to stay relatively clean, a sandy bottom and little fish to chase after.  Faro has been going to swimming lessons, a Christmas present, and I was curious to see his progress, which was not as great as I had hoped.

Faro’s parents gave him a Bucky climbing structure that needed assembly. We worked on that with sweat dripping down our brows – it was a little bit too hot to do so in full sunlight – but we persevered and had it up in less than 24 hours.  The structure is about 10 feet wide and 6 feet tall. Faro got the hang of climbing on to the lower parts in no time, still a little anxious about swinging like a monkey. I would have loved to have a climbing structure like that when I was his age. We used trees instead.