Sylvia's Journal

Once again I landed while it was snowing in Boston, though not a blizzard like last time. But it is the third time this year. It has been a mild winter and has hardly snowed, except on the days I am flying in, it appears.

Trip number 3 is now behind me and 4 and 5 are on the horizon, this month and the next.

I arrived a day before Axel returned, by car, from a one week event in DC. I can’t imagine driving 10 hours by myself – I would fall asleep on any of the highways. But Axel prefers it over flying.

I didn’t think I would like to come home to an empty house but it wasn’t all that bad. I cranked up the heat, did a laundry, bought milk and a ready-made meal, took a long shower and slid into bed at 7PM. It snowed again and the world was, once again, round, soft, white and silent when I woke up on Saturday. This is my image of heaven.

Despite the snow if feels spring like already. In Switzerland the primroses and narcissus were already in bloom; in Holland they are long gone. Here in Manchester-by-the-Sea the crocuses are at their best on the south side of houses. The magnolia buds are getting fat and a bush at our neighbors is filled with tiny yellow flowers (something other than forsythia or broom). There is something in the air that gives hope and speaks of new beginnings; every year we get a new chance.

I celebrated Jim’s 36^th birthday at his sister’s with the extended family: cousins (there are now four children under 5, and soon a fifth), uncles, aunts, parents, and eight grandparents. I think these will be some of Faro’s finer childhood memories.

Sitting in front of his usual veggie burger he watched his cousin wolf down a hot dog. I think he liked the ring of the word and requested a hot dog for himself. So far he has been raised a vegetarian, though he doesn’t know it. He mom cringed at the idea that his first experience of meat, other than one cat food event, would be a hotdog. Still, she is realistic enough to know that sooner or later this was to happen. He liked it. Since it was a birthday party I also derailed a bit from my straight and narrow path of the (processed) sugarless diet, but the sweet stuff was hardly satisfying, unlike Faro’s hotdog.

Our local newspaper, the Cricket, had a write up and an advertisement calling on the town’s frequent travelers to share their adventures abroad with students during the school’s annual International Week in March. I answered the call and wrote that I could cover any number of countries. The foreign languages department chair received my proposal with great enthusiasm. I proposed two presentations and was asked to fill 3 periods, one repeat for a different group of students. I am taking the day off for this on March 11. I am excited; I haven’t taken my travels to school since Tessa was in 2nd grade.

Axel and I will present on Afghanistan. We suspect that most kids, if they know anything about Afghanistan, probably know only the worst. We want to show them some of the more endearing and magnificent sides of Afghanistan.

I will also do a presentation about Mongolia. It is a country that is seldom in the news. It would have been in the news, if there was such a thing, 800 years ago, when it was the world’s superpower. I will ask the students a series of questions and have them compete in teams. The prize? Bank notes from around the world that have no value anymore because the featured head of state is no longer among us; or that have become worthless for other reasons. Now these notes are only curiosities. Hopefully they provide for those kids that have never seen anything else than dollar bills a brief moment of feeling like a millionaire. Runner ups will get a handful of random coins, no longer in circulation.

I made my presentation on Prezi, a presentation application that I have always wanted to learn – I took the time to do so, a steep learning curve but fun. I hope it will work. I will have a PowerPoint as a backup, just in case.

I will be in Geneva when the primary elections are held in Massachusetts (and many other states as well). I voted last week using the absentee ballot option. I voted for Hillary. The rest of my family does not, following the demographics: women over 50 will generally vote for Hillary, men over 50 pick Bernie, and those millennials who registered as democrats (many are registered as independents) are also most likely to vote for Bernie. Our family is right in line with these prognostics. Axel, although on the democratic town committee (I voted for him too) forgot to vote by absentee ballot – he will also be out of state, which is too bad for Bernie. But he will be a Bernie delegate at the MA state convention later this year.

I did have some spirited discussions with Tessa and Steve last week. They are not just for Bernie but vehemently anti Hillary; they don’t trust her. I am sorry that Madeline Albright and Gloria Steinem’s stern exhortations to young women backfired.

The election season certainly keeps us entertained, although may be a little less so now that a Trump nomination isn’t as farfetched as it seemed at the start of the campaign season. I am trying to imagine what it would be like to live under a Trump regime. It reminds me of many of my friends who live under regimes in Africa and Asia – so we’d be just like them, biding our time until it’s over, like a dentist visit, hoping that the damage won’t be too bad.

We attended the opening of the new exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum, which was done in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum. It is called Asia in Amsterdam and is on display till June 5. We contribute a little bit to the museum’s upkeep and were invited to come for a preview before opening day. The invitation included film and food, against a modest payment.

As it turned out the film was about the restoration of the Rijksmuseum and had nothing to do with the exhibit. This was disappointing as I had already seen the entire film on one of my KLM flights. It’s a great movie, but the 20 minute excerpt didn’t do it justice.

The exhibit itself was nicely done, by category of people: innovators, fashinistas, explorers, trendsetters, etc. The exhibit also covered how the treasures of Asia were (sometimes ill) begotten. For example I learned that one of our national heroes, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, was actually not such a nice guy, who decimated most of the native population of the island of Banda to get at their spices. The exhibit shows film footage of an annual dance ritual, still happening in Banda, that reminds people of this massacre. Needless to say, we didn’t learn about this in elementary school.

Visitors also learn how the good were transported, how they made people rich (and who), how the items were displayed back in Holland and how the Dutch tried to copy them, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. I had not realized, until now, that on many paintings from that period you can see the master dressed in a ‘Japanse rok,’ a kind of bulky padded kimono. I also learned that the porcelain trade provided the impetus for Delft’s Blauw, the now famous Delft blueware.

The food created a bit of a feeding frenzy for those who ambled in late. There was a kind of nasi goreng with ketjap, sambal and peanut sauces available in small dishes, and something called a ‘strata,’  which tasted very Dutch (potatoes, cheese, sausage) but was not anything I could recognize. Dessert was an apple crumble cake (not very Dutch) and sugar cookies, not very Dutch either mostly because of their large size.

I was on the lookout for Dutch people who live on the North Shore. I know there are a few, but, except for one store owner in Gloucester, who hails from Tilburg and who we met before when my youngest brother and his wife were visiting, we did not make any new acquaintances. One of the big patrons of the PEM, a couple with a significant private collection of their own, has a name (van Eyck van Otterloo) that shows up on one of the coats of armor that line our Vriesendorp birthday calendar. It would have been fun to find out about our relationship, but I wouldn’t know what they look like.

Three of my family members, two in New Hampshire and one at home, are sick with some form of the flu. When I came home from work I found Axel in poor shape. Usually when I came home he is the one cooking, or about to cook dinner. Not now. I pulled out the soup bible and we agreed on a South Indian soup, called pepper water. The name is not very appealing but the picture was: a tomato-like soup with Indian spices hidden inside, including some of Joe’s homegrown Oregon hot peppers and curry leaves that date back to the Stone Ages. We had all the ingredients, including the stinky asafetida. I added chickpeas for protein and our meal was quickly cooked.

I completed the meal with a hot toddy for the afflicted and an Irish coffee, with extra whipped cream, for the non-afflicted.

These simple gastronomical delights followed an exquisite lunch at work that was prepared by some 15 contestants for the prize of best Health Programs Group salad. I submitted the only salad I could make last night from ingredients in the house, edamame, chick peas, pomegranate, and carrots with a white miso/ginger/citrus dressing. I fell outside the prizes but got at least one vote of confidence. That was the only meeting on my calendar today. It’s good to be home, even with a sick estate manager.

After my physical therapy session today I have been upgraded to a 6 oz weight for my shoulder exercises – this is a small can of tomato paste. It seems like a small victory but it is huge progress for me. It is now 10 months since I had my rotator cuff surgery, fixing the 4 massive tears. My exercise regime has been going in fits and starts. I have my range of motion back but there is no strength. Every time I do strength exercises – there are colorful rubber bands all over our living room, to Faro’s delight – I end up with a pain in my arm that requires me to stop for a while.

But now I am finally making progress – after the tomato paste can I promoted myself to the pink one pound weights and for the biceps I am up to 2 pounds, leaving the rubber bands behind. I am debating whether to pack my weights for my trip to Geneva. Once, in the Philippines, I had to argue hard with the security lady at the airport who wanted to confiscate my pink weights, as they could be used as weapons; just like my toe nail clipper that was removed in Rwanda. It is no use arguing with the security frontline workers and for the nail clipper I put up only a very weak defense; but in the Philippines I asked for the chief, and he let me walk with my weights after I pleaded that my recovery would be severely compromised without my weights. May be he had rotator cuff surgery himself.

Three snow and ice storms later (I landed once again in a snowstorm, my second snowstorm landing in Boston this year), I had to get used again to getting up in the cold and dark. This time I suffered jetlag for an entire week, going to bed at 7:30PM and getting up at 4AM. It helps to beat the traffic but it makes for poor company at home after hours.

The next trip is already booked, to Geneva at the end of the month, but until then I enjoy being at home, even with ice and snow. This included a long weekend with the grandkids.

The big event after my return was the publication of a booklet I have worked on, and believed in, since I first visualized it more than a year ago: an ABC for Managers Who Lead. It was hard to enlist others into this vision, especially those with money to fund this. Eventually we, that is myself and Marnina, a young colleague who was as passionate about the booklet, and an ace organizer to boot, got what we needed to cover the design and printing. The booklet is stacked in boxes in our offices in Medford and Arlington. We are distributing it widely. It is both a reminder to all of us ‘managers who lead’ about the various aspects of these functions and also a small gift to put in our counterparts’ hands, reminding them that this is one of our corporate strengths. The responses so far have been encouraging.

The process by which the booklet was created was maybe the most exciting. We enlisted some 18 colleagues through a kind of crowdfunding arrangement to contribute to the content: people proposed verbs for each of the letters of the alphabet, we balanced verbs that are about managing with those about leading and then had people vote, all using Google’s platform. After that we proposed content categories: a definition, a quote, questions for reflection and an application in one of our field projects. We also asked for videos to illustrate the verb. Individuals selected verbs to write about, we reviewed each other’s work, tried to ‘sell’ the concept to people who have authority over budgets and revised content as needed.

This has been the most creative work I have done and I realize, once again, that this is the kind of work I love to do. The fallow weeks between travels are now dedicated to reviewing things that others wrote – it covers my time, a good thing –  but the thing I still like most is writing new stuff or new perspectives on old stuff.