Sylvia's Journal

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.

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.