Sylvia's Journal

Packing for a two week trip to Maine was both delicious and stressful. I was trying to anticipate what I would like to do – in line with the doctor’s advice from earlier this week I was thinking of couch potato kinds of activities. We left the kayaks and bikes home. Even if we had wanted to take them we couldn’t have as the car equipped with the racks and space had died and had been towed to our Subaru dealer in New Hampshire, hoping it had any trade in value.

But that hope was dashed quickly. Repairs would exceed the value of the car; with no functioning brakes we had to let go of it and say goodbye. For a symbolic dollar we sold it to the dealership and then took some test drives in various cars we might consider if we can work out the finances.

A few hours later we pursued our trip to Maine where we arrived just before dark. We settled into the quiet of Maine and started shedding all the ‘have-to’s and ‘shoulds.’  We didn’t have to do anything we didn’t want to do. Sometimes that kind of freedom is overwhelming!

Now, early morning on our first morning in Maine I watch a small squirrel eat the blueberries planted next the cabin. There are so many blueberries that I don’t need to chase it. Besides, the previous occupant of the cabin left us two quarts of blueberries in the ancient refrigerator for a baking project that never happened. She even left the recipe of how to make the blueberry crumble.

The projects I brought are mostly of the handicraft type: finishing that yellow cotton sweater for Faro before it gets too cold; embroidering a wall hanging for a newborn that isn’t even a glimpse in anyone’s eye and then lots of fabric scraps for a quilt, following instructions from the quilting book that I bought in the Shaker gift store a few weeks ago during our previous outing to Maine.

And then there is the children’s story that I started nearly a decade ago. I finished it this morning for Sita to illustrate. I also cut up yards and yards of fabric, old dresses, scraps into neat squares and triangles for a quilting project I started on today. For this reason I lugged my sewing machine along, my iron and ironing board. I am prepared for rain and even snow!

We cheated a little with the off the grid thing. The library has a cozy little bench outside its doors where we can catch the strong wireless signal, even when it is closed. This allows me to post, download audio books and my daily jigsaw puzzle while Axel is looking for cozy mysteries. We will stay busy, but in a relaxed sort of way.

More rain today. There is always a shift in weather sometime in August, but usually not this early. What? Fall already? The ferns are already turning brown and some leaves are turning yellow, oh no, I am not done with summer; we are off to Maine in a few days for 2 weeks off the grid.

It was the perfect day for going to one of our countless doctors’ appointments. Is this what old age is about? We go together to have four ears and two sources of questions. But we were not in luck with this doc, a physiatrist, a specialty most people haven’t even heard off. We asked him to explain what training a physiatrist goes through and his answer should have tipped me of. “I am trained like any other doctor, I am an MD, I went to medical school,” he said, as if we had insulted him and questioned his credentials. He did not seem to be able to distinguish between curiosity questions and an interrogation.

His answers were so short and void of any human emotion that he could have been a robot. Maybe he is very good technically, we hope he is, but in the interpersonal relations domain he was definitely lacking. He was checking on Axel’s neuropathy in his feet, the tight muscles in his legs and his back pain to see if there are connections. The news was not so good. The foot muscles have atrophied. When I asked if this could be turned around he said ‘no.’  That’s all, just ‘no.’ I cursed him quietly, between my teeth. Didn’t he get it that we are anxious about all this, nerve, spine and muscle business and wondering what now, what next? Most of the time he worked on testing the nerves with a big frown, as if he found all sorts of bad things, but he didn’t say a word. And when he did say anything he spiked it with words I didn’t understand and couldn’t reproduce.

The only time he smiled and joked a little is when we shook hands to leave. Maybe he is one of these people that find human interaction a nuisance. He did refer us to another doctor, and so the chain continues, forward we hope, but deeper into medics land and incurring the kind of costs that would have brought us to the brink of bankruptcy had we been uninsured.

His advice to Axel was to ‘be a couch potato,’ and ‘not lift anything heavier than a carton of milk.’  This surprised us as we have never in our life heard a doctor give this kind of advice.  It felt like a poor choice of words, this couch potato business – an image that is so connected with poor health and poor habits. Our couch is not suited for potatoes anyways so we will sit in straight back chairs and walk (light walking only). No kayaking, no lobstering, no shed demolition, no Faro lifting, no help with Tessa and Steve’s move. We went to Barnes and Nobles, afterwards for a Starbuck coffee and then we bought books – couch potato books for our vacation in Maine.

After a week of rain and overcast skies the weekend was glorious. We had friends over on their way down from Castine (Maine) to their home on Long Island and took a break from the horrendous vacation traffic up and down the Maine coast.

When we have visitors in the summer we enjoy our beach and waterfront more than when we are alone because there are always so many chores to do. We like having people over and enjoy our place. What we take for granted becomes very special when visitors come and stare in disbelief at our earthly paradise.

Early in the morning I facetimed with Faro to see him ride on his walking bike – in two months he has grown enough that he can now reach the ground with both feet. After that I facetimed my brother who has finally moved in with his love in a lovely house after waiting patiently for their respective children to leave the parental home and selling their two houses. He gave me a facetime tour of the house and it felt as if I was walking through it with him. How wonderful we can do this now so easily.

The son of my friend Lydia showed up with his family (to enjoy the beach) and a friend (to go spear fishing). They wriggled into their wetsuits and then departed with the red and white diving flag floating in tow to keep them out of harm’s (i.e motor and speedboats) way.

They swam all the way from Lobster Cove to Singing Beach, spearing a view tautogs and cunners (bottom dwelling fish I had never heard of) and flounder along the way. They like these fish because they hang out on the bottom and are, I was told, more easily speared than the fast moving fish at the surface. They also make for good dinners. But it does require you hold your breath, that is part of the sport and the challenge. They returned hours later with their catch and filleted it on the beach, leaving us with some of the fish by way of thanks.

While they were hunting, we did the same in a more relaxed manner looking for oysters. Mother nature has deemed it necessary to compensate for the loss of our mussels after she realized that the green crabs, as ingredients for crab bisque, wasn’t appreciated as much. Turning crabs into bisque requires much effort and wading into the cove to empty the trap twice a day. It has been sitting on the floor of the cove for weeks now, serving more as a playground for crabs than a trap. They have figured out how to go in and out with ease.

Axel snorkeled in the emptying cove to places I pointed out from my kayak. The water was very clear and I could see the oysters clearly. We had seen some shells on the beach lately which gave us the idea of taking a closer look. We harvested about 10.

Still, we haven’t given up on our mussels. We transplanted more mussels from Ipswich Bay and expanded the colonies of last years’ transplants. They seemed to have fared well except that the baby mussels keep getting eaten by something, green crabs or, what we learned yesterday, maybe the tautogs and cunners which have sharp teeth and can easily pierce the brittle shells.

Good news awaited us inside as email and phone messages alerted us to progress in Faro’s potty training and Tessa and Steve house buying saga. The poops are landing in the toilet and Tessa and Steve will become homeowners on August 28, becoming residents of New Hampshire, the state where people want to live free or die.

Axel is now 68 and one week. I used to think that 68 was ancient but now of course I think it is young. However, I am acutely aware that my father died when he was 69 and my mother became a widow at the age of 67. Now that we have arrived in that neighborhood it seems unthinkable that suddenly there would be The End.

When we are with others in our age cohort we cannot help talk about this or that ailment. We have become our parents, something we didn’t want, and laughed at, way back. But now of course we understand. Health is the most precious thing we have, to do what we most want to do. Maybe this is why youth is associated with impatience and old age with patience. We have to accept and do things slower than we used to do them. Except my older brother who seems to be in a reverse trend and at age 67 bikes from Holland to Finisterre in Basque land and then does some more with his son(s) to other destinations in Europe that take them out of the flatlands. I am impressed and humbled.

We celebrated Axel’s birthday last week for two days, the second at a Castle Hill picnic enlivened by a salsa band. We danced and ate and met friends. Then Tessa presented a birthday cake fit for a king or queen. She had made it with unmentionable amounts of butter and sugar. I knew that but Axel did not. He surely would have received some demerits from Weightwatchers if they had found out. I was told that when you know the ingredients of something it affects how you digest it. Empirical evidence showed this to be true – I felt like I had a brick in my stomach while Axel felt just fine – we had consumed the same amount.

It seems silly to take a break from Lobster Cove during the height of its best season; to leave on a Friday afternoon with everyone else from Boston, on a sunny day while moving towards rain and dark skies; to sit in traffic and do a one hour trip in 2 hours. But we did it for a reunion of former colleagues who I have known since 1983.

We used AirBnB to find a room during the Beacon to Beach race and Maine’s busiest time, when all other places were either full or very expensive. To our big surprise we found a room for a very reasonable price and a delightful hostess.

After a fabulous dinner, the first one is to re-acquaint and get updates, we are getting ready for the second which is when we can all pretend to be 30 years younger and hold our rowdy/raucous annual general meeting and decide where we will meet next year and call members of the group who can’t be with us, even if the time zones don’t match and people get woken up. It’s punishment for not being present. Another punishment for not being present is being the object of gossip.

Saturday everyone roams around freely until it is dinner time again. We went with Alison to the Shabbat Day Shaker village where the last 3 shakers in the world live. Some of our misinformed stereotypes about he Shakers were corrected. We got to see several of the hundreds of patented inventions (the circular saw, the flat crib brush, permanent press fabrics) that came from this industrious, god fearing, egalitarian and very entrepreneurial community that is now on the brink of extinction.

They are still recruiting and it occurred to me that they offer an interesting alternative to our hectic life. They are living in the world, so it would not be a retreat. Like the Buddhist monks we saw in Sikkim, there is internet, they do online sales of their branded products and you can communicate by text. The only thing that may give some people pause is the ban on the intermingling of the sexes and their very deep faith. But maybe that is exactly what would be attractive to some. axel, who we nearly lost to the singing monks in Vezelay (France) more than a decade ago, was not interested.

We had Sita and family over for a few days. She and her friends are preparing a memorial of their friend Shelby next week that includes an extensive show of her artwork.

We benefitted from having Faro over to watch up close his amazing development, especially his linguistic progress. Faro, in his turn, benefits from being at a house that has its own beach and a shallow, self- cleaning, pool – no matter what the tide is – with all sorts of interesting stones and critters.

It was a beautiful day on Saturday. We went to Rockport for its charming Farmers’ Market and got a good supply of maple syrup and pickles; the latter from a company in Salem that makes the best pickles (Maitland), in a spicy and medium spicy version. The juice is a key ingredient for a wicked good dirty martini.

We had our picture taken at Sweet Remembrances, a dress up portrait studio where Sita worked during a summer some 15 years ago. You can pick a style and then the props to match (or not) your theme. We had done this in the past, using clothes from the roaring twenties. Since the choice of clothes for a 2 year old was a little limited we agreed on a mixed Pilgrim/Native American theme. It was quite a production and Faro managed remarkably well, primarily because he had free access to lots of interesting props to play with while we dressed.

In the afternoon we checked the lobster traps and pulled in two lobsters. The crab trap was empty. The crabs have figured out how to escape if we give them enough time. We were told to check them twice a day but we don’t. The carcass of the 40 pound striper caught during Tessa’s party, was eaten clean. The full-bellied crabs were grazing somewhere else in Lobster Cove. Only a handful of tiny hermit crabs remained in the trap. We are actually not that motivated to catch them because the preparation of the crab bisque is a little cumbersome. We should be more diligent as they continue to eat the baby mussel population, offspring of the mussels we transplanted from Ipswich Bay.

Tessa, Steve, his sister and boyfriend and the dogs joined us on Sunday for a glorious morning on the beach. When it started to rain everyone left and we withdrew into the New York Times Sunday edition and the New Yorker for some quiet time after the invasion.

You may not believe in Mercury retrograde, but three plane crashes in one week, two of them from cities I frequent (Amsterdam and Ouagadougou)? Although they have nothing in common with each other (seems two were weather related), I do fly through some bad weather occasionally and the Sahara is famous for its unstable air.

People who do believe in this phenomenon point out that it is about magnetic fields. I know, from putting my hotel key card next to my cellphone in my pocket or purse, that magnetic interference disables the card, requiring a trip back to the reception to reset the card. So why would this not happen on a grander scale. Has my internet connection been off a bit these last few weeks?

I am recovering from my pneumonia in fits and starts; it is definitely not a straight line up. Still, like the rates of stocks seen as a graph over time, the trend is overall upward.

I have started to do some work, adding about an hour every day; one a program that is part of a local foundation’s interest in advancing leadership skills for women in Japan – the brainchild of a former MSH executive (and my boss) who passed away unfortunately. But in this initiative her influence continues. I was asked to be part of this because of my work in Japan. It’s exactly the kind o work I love.

I was supposed to have been furiously writing this week about our work with ministries of health around the world on such things as good governance, leadership and management. A series of meetings took place which I missed, making the writing task a little harder as I am missing a lot of context. All this is now postponed till next week. I may do the writing from home where distractions are less than when I am in my cubicle in our ‘office garden’ in Medford.
All

I have been convalescing at Lobster Cove since Sunday afternoon. Axel fed me the healthy diet the doctor prescribed: sun, fresh fruits and vegetables. He didn’t prescribe the lobster that Axel had caught on Sunday morning but we had them anyways. Axel has been catching a lot of lobsters lately and so we eat a lot of lobster.

For the fresh vegetables and fruits, the garden is providing us in abundance: lettuce, kale, bok choy, raspberries, and herbs. The blueberries and tomatoes we get from the farm stand as our own crop is not yet ready for harvest.

Today is a day of mourning in Holland as most of the bodies are transported to the town of Hilversum where the identification will take place. In that town two entire families got wiped out. When 200 people fall out of the sky, for a small country like Holland, it affects just about everybody. I followed the Dutch news and saw the memorial at Schiphol. One of the messages read ‘klootzakken’ which literally means the plural of scrotum; a name you give to people you are very angry with.

And then I read this morning about the coup in the DRC with attacks on the airport in Kinshasa, and other strategic points. The attacks came out of left field and took everyone by surprise. One of my colleagues is stuck in a guesthouse. She has a one year old and a husband who are no doubt anxious to see her home. Scary, and a reminder that things are a bit topsy-turvy in the world at the moment.

This reminds me of the day of our plane crash, now exactly 7 years ago. We were told that these kinds of accidents and untoward events happened because of Mercury Retrograde. This is what I know about Mercury Retrograde: Sometimes the other planets appear to be traveling backward through the zodiac; this is an illusion. We call this illusion retrograde motion. Mercury’s retrograde periods can cause our plans to go awry. However, this is an excellent time to reflect on the past. Intuition is high during these periods, and coincidences can be extraordinary. When Mercury is retrograde, remain flexible, allow time for extra travel, and avoid signing contracts. Review projects and plans at these times, but wait until Mercury is direct again to make any final decisions.

So I continue to stay at home and lay low, avoid travel altogether and don’t sign any contracts.

The team I helped to set on its leadership development course less than 2 months ago in Cote d’Ivoire is doing the second workshop in the series of 4 on its own. I am in frequent contact with the team and marvel at their enthusiasm. Despite being in a place with poor internet connections, they insisted I be part of the workshop.

After trying various ways to connect we finally settled on Skype and I found myself live in the workshop, presumably projected on a screen and with my voice amplified. It is weird to be in a workshop and yet not – they could see me but I was looking at my own video picture – remembering to look at the camera on top of my screen rather than the screen itself. I received the beloved West African clap (someone hollers ‘triplet’ which is followed by three small claps and one thunderous one with hands pushing the clap to the object of the clap) – twice even. I received them with a smile, knowing I was on camera. I am awed, amazed and honored by the way this community has boarded the leadership train.

I left work early to enjoy Lobster Cove on another beautiful summer day, before heading out into the steamy Sahel on Friday. Axel had not checked the lobster traps yet, which he had baited with the remains of the 40 pound striper. His 12 foot dory isn’t quite made for two adults and hauling in lobster pots– he usually does the lobstering on his own – but I decided to be his lobstering mate, more ballast than help. The ocean was choppy with big swells, which made for good exercise for Axel the rower. His months of exercise at the gym are paying off. It felt great to be out on the water and I counted my blessings – what a place to come home to.

Four of the five traps contained only undersize lobsters which we threw back to grow some more, replacing the two day old striper bait with freshly caught and still bloody herring. Wondering what we would have for dinner we hauled in the last trap which contained it: 3 lobsters, two of them a pound and a half. It is the time of the year when lobster start to molt, shedding their old hard shell and growing a new one that is soft for a while. For this they come in closer to shore.

One of the large lobsters still had a very hard shell, which required a hammer to open; the other large one had just molted and thus had a very soft shell. It splashed liquid all over me after it was cooked. We didn’t touch the third one yet; it is neither hard nor soft.

The perfect day was completed with a massage by our friend Abi who worked hard on my sore foot – the healing process of my ankle seems to have stopped for a while, even made a turn for worse. I have picked up my PT exercises again which seems to help a bit. I was told by the orthopede’s assistant that it is not unusual for such regressions, what with the other joints and muscles having to work harder with the main joint being fused. It may be the equivalent of a strike, a protest against the extra work.

We had caught many crabs in Axel’s new trap, with the tailfin of the 40 pound striper as bait. But the crabs are smart, especially the larger ones. One of them opened the hatch and all but the small ones escaped after having filled their bellies with decomposing striper meat, yum.

We returned the trap to the middle of the cove and caught another load. There is no lack of green crabs in our cove, which we already knew as the new generation of mussels have been eaten, leaving us with the same elderly mussels and thus diminishing returns. I suppose that eating the crabs is just another way of enjoying our mussels, a second hand way.

Steve and Tessa cleaned up the estate, we had one more meal, using up the leftovers from the party and then we parted. It was a wonderful celebratory weekend. Steve brought the crab trap up and I turned the inhabitants into crab bisque, an improvised soup that included all the vegetables in the refrigerator that needed to be put out of their suffering. It came out perfect and will feed us for a few days.

In the afternoon we went to the funeral service for Sita’s friend Shelby. It brought together the old high school group of friends, uncomfortable in their funeral attire and still grieving deeply about one more friend who was no longer there. It was a very Catholic service which to some was soothing and to me a source of distraction. The language was about joy and hope and reuniting with Christ; the imagery of sitting at the same table as God. It doesn’t work for me but I can see how these beliefs can be a comfort to others. Knowing Shelby I imagined her looking down and giggling about all the hooplala.

After the service there was the cemetery and then the Franco-American club where food and drink awaited us. Sita and Jim had driven out and parked Faro at his grannie; so we didn’t get to see him. His presence might have lightened up the mood but he was napping, saving the mood for later during the long ride back home.

Shelby was an artist and a very creative mind. Her portfolios were on display and her mom and I shook our heads, acknowledging how death is such a waste of talent.