Sylvia's Journal

As if the week wasn’t already full enough between two trips, I registered for a two day workshop offered to MSH staff, Fierce Conversations. It was a remarkable distillation of psychology and practical tips and techniques for holding team, coaching, delegation and confrontation conversations, expertly packaged and turned into an industry. It shows what ‘productizing’ can do.  I marvel at how critical pieces of my 250 hour coaching training were condensed into a two hour session. Now that is focus!

Participating in an 8:30 to 5 workshop every day, when my alarms goes off at 4:30AM, makes for very long days. The early morning hours were for finishing tasks that were due by Friday and for taking care of other business before I head out for an entire month on Sunday. Even though I am in an 8 hour workshop, the rest of my work life doesn’t stop – this is the early morning shift, a variation on the late night shift when I am 12 hours ahead on the other side of the world.

Still the workshop was worth ervy minute, very handy, not just for me but also for my teaching others. I got some good ideas and enjoyed the hours I spent with colleagues, mostly younger, who I didn’t know that well.  They are so lucky to have this opportunity – I wished I had known about these techniques when I started out. I learned things the hard way, as most others of my generation.

On Friday I ticked off nearly everything on my deadline list and closed my computer to go on a shopping spree with Axel – we are having our annual spring ritual, an Easter egg hunt that has roots deep in my childhood past. We haven’t missed a year, since we restarted the ritual in the US, in 1985.  But this year we are making one big change: the cheap Easter candies that we usually put in the bags to be hunted for across our property are replaced with seed packets. After my sugar conversion I couldn’t get myself to buy these candies for others. Some sugar is still in the bag, but of a slightly higher grade: a couple of mini stroopwafels, ginger cookies and dark chocolate almonds; the bags need some weight to stay put.

We cashed in on another Christmas present, this one from Tessa, and attended a concert of Chick Corea and Bela Fleck, two virtuoso musicians, one on the piano and the other on the banjo. They have been playing together for 10 years – though I only knew them as soloists. The concert was in Concord (NH) which required that I head up north with thousands of car commuters who work in Boston and live in New Hamsphire, exactly at 5 PM. First Axel got to commute at rush hour by public transport and now I got to check out the road system at the high point of rush hour.

Well prepared I had a good story on, the final moments of the threesome that gave us Wonder Woman, a wonderful book (The Secrete History of Wonder Woman) that brings three strands together: feminism, the birth control movement and the comic book industry. Enthralled by the story, the one hour and 45 minute commute to Tessa wasn’t so bad, though I wouldn’t want to do it daily.  I gather that would make one angry, as I watched driver behavior in stop-and-go traffic. I tried to keep a distance with the car in front and for that got the finger and much angry eye darts thrown at me, and a bit of road rage.

The concert hall in Concord is hidden behind a new and beautiful façade and entry way (pattern language at work!) but is itself old and funky. Decorated in faux Egyptian style (much teal, orange and ochre) is it enormous. Tessa brought down the average age by a tad, but I gather it was probably still around 60 – good whistlers and shouters (in a nice way) who know the repertoire of the two together and separate.

We were treated to a nice mix of old, new, classic and modern music, all complex as Bela reminded us. He didn’t need to. Unfortunately the front row seats Tessa got us where on the wrong side and we only got to see Bela’s back, and the back of the concert piano obscuring Chick. We didn’t get to see any of the fanciful finger work that both displayed – we could only hear it. Still, it was a phenomenal concert and I felt very lucky to have seen them live, playing together with so much joy.

The next morning I got up at 4:30, as I would have done in Manchester (MA) and throw myself into the morning commute from Concord to Boston. This time I was ahead of the rush and it took only one hour and 15 minutes. Bless my ordinary commute from Lobster Cove, a mere 40 minutes.

Yesterday was our 36^th wedding anniversary. We cashed in the Christmas present Sita and Jim had given us, a gift certificate to the restaurant Bergamot in Somerville. I don’t know how Sita picks these places, I guess Millenials are good at this as I know from my travels with Millenials, triangulating.

Sita’s pick is always exactly the right place for our wedding anniversary (no pressure) – a creative cook, a nice atmosphere and good libations.

To avoid having to drive home with two cars and one of this chauffeured by a very tired me, Axel came into town by train. He had to fight his way against the current of Boston commuters going home at 5 PM . Apparently swimming upstream is not for the faint of hearted, and especially when there is something wrong on the orange line. His description reminded me of the infamous pictures of the Tokyo metro system some decades ago with specially hired pushers to fill up every empty space.

We had cocktails to forget about this and later found out that these cocktails were offered on the house because the sommelier is the partner of the sister of a dear colleague of mine who left MSH just a few months ago to start a new life in Zimbabwe. The sister, who owns her own restaurant in Newton, recognized Axel from a dinner there, while I was in some faraway land, and came by to say hello. Two other colleagues (one current, one ex) were sitting a few tables over.

We feasted on skate wings,  pork belly, duck pate, sweet potato gnocchi, turnip cream eclairs and old ripe cheese; wonderful combinations both for the palate and the eye.

I nearly managed to fly around the world in business class on this last trip. Except for the legs Bangkok-Vientiane and back and Amsterdam Boston, I was able to get those coveted b-class seats through a variety of means: an e-certificate (Delta’s reward for being a frequent flyer), a successful bid on a b-class seat, and a purchase with miles. The only one missing was a complimentary upgrade – such things have become very rare now. Traveling in b-class is an entirely different experience, making air travel not only painless but quite enjoyable.

I have another mega trip of ahead of me (some 20.000 miles), starting on Sunday. It is not quite a trip around the world, though going halfway around and back. After I make it from Dares salaam to Malaysia, Axel will join me in Kuala Lumpur where I will, with two colleagues, contribute to advance the wheelchair agenda in Malaysia and hopefully get support for the newly trained wheelchair service providers.

After that we were slated to make our way to Bangkok for another week of work but that part of the trip has been canceled. Not wanting to change Axel’s ticket nor mine, we decided to embrace this forced vacation and are making plans to spend some time in Vietnam, a country on our bucket list.

Right now the sun shines red through the second flowering stem of the Amaryllis, blood red. We are told to brace for another snowstorm, after this raw and rainy week, but right now it feels like spring.

I have completed my morning ritual of nearly 18 different exercises to regain strength in my left shoulder. I have decided to bring along the right shoulder which has never quite recovered from having lost one tendon in our accident now nearly 10 years ago. I can lift two pound weights during most exercises without triggering a tendinitis. It is about time because the left shoulder surgery was a year ago. I can put away stemware and plates from the dishwasher on shelves over my head, with less and less recourse to my right arm as a support. I am gaining strength. Even the defective right shoulder is benefiting from the special attention, within the limits of its 3-tendon arrangement.

I finished reading Anita Diamant’s Boston Girl which made me think of my in-laws, both gone now, who grew up in more or less the same places (Boston, Cape Ann) in the same time period (early 1900s and through the depression, 2^nd world war). Such narratives are a reminder of the new immigrant struggles and how far their descendants have come.

For contrast, The dark side of Camelot (Hersh) keeps providing me with a stark counterpoint; a reality test of sorts (is this stuff really still going on?). Yes, says the Big Short movie we watched last night.

The 2^nd blood-red Amaryllis bloom exudes energy and possibility. The old stem with its faded flower and yellowing stem is gone; it gave up (or gave in, to entropy). Today is a flaming hot red day!

We had a busy weekend – much too busy for the beautiful day that beckoned yard work. First we visited an old friend of Axel, a widower, and his new wife who brought their (his) grandkids to Lobster Cove – reminding me that there are always new friends to make, no matter at which stage one is in one’s live.

Then we went to a lecture at the Cape Ann Museum, about the Folly Cove Designers, a collaborative of women of Cape Ann who made extraordinary art between the 1940s and late 1960s. At the time it was considered craft, not art, but now we recognize it as art. It was a lecture about the social history of Cape Ann that was heavily influenced by its immigrant Finnish population, who came to Cape Ann with their predilection for communal action, misrepresented, at the time, as socialism, and abhorred by the American establishment.

From there we drove to New Hampshire to spent this night that is one hour shorter than other nights as we shift to daylight savings at Tessa’s. She had arranged for us to have Sunday brunch at the Currier museum in Manchester (NH) and a visit to the exhibit on high heels.

By the time we came back to Manchester (MA) there was enough daylight time left to clean the asparagus bed, the flowerbed and get ready for the burning season.

One hundred years after Margaret Sanger opened her birth control clinic in Brooklyn, I learn that ISIS’s system of rape relies on birth control – the irony of it all. We are listening to Jill Lepore, American history professor at Harvard, who is reading to us her book about the secret history of Wonder Woman – a story that includes Margaret Sanger, the emancipation, voting rights and feminism at the beginning of the 20^th century. It is a fascinating documentary about the things most people now take for granted. We have come a long way in 100 years.

I am reading, in parallel, another secret history, which is the Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hersh, a book published two decades ago. In 10 short pages it toppled, at least for me,  the statue of JFK as an eminent statesman and upright man, which I thought he was. Clinton’s affair with ML, if it was the only one, is a minor trespass compared with the behavior of someone so revered by so many. I sometimes run into men named Kennedy, as a first name, in Africa. If only people knew.

On Friday Axel and I presented three slide shows at the Manchester Essex regional high school during International Week, for 7 to 9 graders, about Mongolia and Afghanistan. I had responded to an ad in the Manchester Cricket, for speakers from the community who travel a lot. I included a trivia quiz on Mongolia and the two best teams received (worthless) banknotes from around the world (first prize) and a bag of coins (second prize). It served the double purpose of relieving me of stuff I don’t know what to do with, while rewarding students with things other than candy.

We showed up in burqa and the coat best known from Karzai, which Axel received as a gift from his students at SOLA. The preparation of the slide show about Afghanistan brought back many wonderful memories.