Sylvia's Journal

No more news on the bruise. It is no longer expanding and looks a lot less scary. Maybe it was the cortisone shot that hit a vein. I am still waiting for the other cortisone shot to have an effect. My ankle has not been very painful, the result of not going for walks. Today I tried a short walk and had to turn home after 10 minutes. I am glad I made an appointment with the top ankle doc at MGH because I need some advice on what is possible. The thought of not being able to go for walks anymore is very depressing.

Today there was an electrical problem in Manchester and we were left without the juice for a good part of the day. It is a startling experience to realize how much of our daily life requires electricity. Without email and internet I was finally able to get some reading done until I needed to check something out on the internet.

That’s when I headed for the public library which has wireless internet access, electrical outlets to plug in and most importantly, electricity. I was not the only one who used the library as a stand-in office.

In burst of serious reading I explored the idea of bookmark stacks on del.ici.us and then of course got lost in other people’s stacks, in particular one on food and recipes.

Axel picked me up and we drove to Gloucester to get some fresh fish. When we returned home the electricity was still off and so the meal we had planned could not be cooked on our (electric) stove; reason to eat out. We invited Woody to join us and found ourselves eating outside in the late afternoon sun with a terrace heater keeping us warm.

The small brown spot that looked like a bruise on my upper right arm was the size of a penny last Saturday. I ignored it. Then another ‘penny’ appeared right above it and now most of my upper arm is yellow and purple.

The physical therapist thought that I was bitten by a tick or a spider but today the nurse, inspecting my arm with a magnifying glass, could not find the place of the bite. We are all puzzled and hope that the blood test will clarify things tomorrow. My right shoulder and upper arm remain a mess.

It was a beautiful evening at Lobster Cove. The rains of the last weeks have colored everything a juicy green. A hummingbird was sipping nectar from the two colorful hanging baskets that came in for mother’s day.

There is much wildlife around our house these days enjoying the new greens. The baby bunny that Sita and Tessa saved from the jaws of Oona about a month ago is hopping around happily and eating all our dandelions. There are enough of those to keep it happy for a while; we hope it won’t discover the salad greens that are just coming up on the other side of the house.

Early in the morning when the day breaks I often see a fox, one a not so healthy looking large male and the other a smaller one, the female I assume, who seems to be better nourished. They sniff at the side of the barn. We think the bunnies are nesting underneath but the fox can’t get in there.

I picked another handful of asparagus. With a little bit of sun after the rains they shoot up like rockets. The potato greens have emerged and the mesclun is like a green blanket, covering the soil with quarter inch sprouts. There are more sprouts but we can’t remember what species they are so we will wait until they articulate themselves a bit more.

In preparation for Axel’s surgery I re-read my blog pages starting on August 4, 2009; a day after my rotator cuff surgery, to find out how long it was before I was able to dress myself, drive to work and even to fly (as it turned out, not very long). I had forgotten, of course, about the unpleasantness; the difficult, long and painful nights, and why having a recliner (the one we gave away) is important for passing those first few nights. And so we are looking for a used recliner so we can give it away again after Axel is put back together.

And then we watched Obama give his Barnard speech – his forward speech – presenting his platform to eager graduates and to the world: a platform that was saturated with messages about girl power. I wondered if Michelle and Hilary (or Sacha and Malia) had a hand in writing it.

There was the usual advice, the usual inspirations about perseverance, not giving up when you are trying to do something important; about long hard work without any visible results for a long time – good advice but not very original.

My favorite part was when he urged the young female graduates to not just get a seat at the table but get the seat at the head of the table.

Today was all about tendons, muscles and ligaments. It started with a trip to Boston to the top shoulder repairman at MGH. After waiting for nearly 2 hours we got to see a brief glimpse of his majesty. It was billed as a pre-op visit but it was essentially a repeat of a previous visit: the same questions, the same demos. We wondered for what purpose we had driven all the way into the city other than providing billable time to the doctor and his assistant and overhead for an enormous supporting cast. One does get cynical about these things.

Surgery is scheduled for June 14, one day before our trip to the Cirque de Soleil (also in Boston). I bought four pricey seats – mostly a fundraiser for a great food growing program in Lynn. We may need to find a replacement for Axel.

The doctor asked if we had a recliner. We used to. We stupidly gave it away, not realizing that we’d need it again. It is the chair I lived in after my rotator cuff surgery for several days.

The trip to MGH took the whole morning. In the afternoon I had shoulder physical therapy. I walked from home, something I realized I can’t do at the moment. While my shoulder was warming up I asked for an icepack for my ankle which is still inflamed – the cortisone shot did little to relieve the swelling and the pain.

In the evening we went to a lecture about ankle and knee problems given by two orthopedes from MGH. I have made an appointment with the top ankle doctor from MGH for a second opinion, or rather the question, what will help me walk without pain again?

The lectures were excellent and I (re) learned a few things I already knew, but the illustrations of torn ligaments and tendon tears where quite compelling: if it hurts don’t do it; stretch and warm up and keep the joints moving. MGH gave us a light box lunch by way of dinner (the talk was after all from 6 to 8PM) and a (non alcoholic) drink exchange for this very educational infomercial. We noticed the competing hospital is now putting on a similar series. I image there are enough ankle and knee injuries to keep all the north shore orthopedes in business for years to come.

The girls pulled out all the stops for mother’s day. It was a two day event that started with dinner ‘en plein air’ (at Lobster Cove), followed by a concert in Rockport’s spectacular Shalin Liu Performance Center where we enjoyed a wonderful concert by the Parkington Sisters from Wellfleet, violin virtuosae and not unaccomplished on an assortment of other instruments.

Today, on mother’s day proper we had a high tea in Rockport at the Heath Tea Room. I was treated to an English high tea: a pot of Darjeeling, finger sandwiches, a scone with clotted cream, and some other dainties, all presented on a 3-level étagère.

Sandwiched in between those joyful events was another celebration but this one of a life that has passed. We drove to the South Shore to join a few colleagues in expressing our support for our bereaved colleague who lost her second son in three years. Life can be very cruel.

Our grandson-to-be was not delivered on mother’s day – it would have been a lovely mother’s day gift but he’s decided otherwise. He has maneuvered himself into the launch position. His mom is certainly ready to let him go.

We said goodbye at the end of this wonderful weekend hoping for a speedy reunion. Since the future mom and dad were each born 8 days early we calculated that we could be meeting our new grandson as soon as next Sunday.

The girls pulled out all the stops for mother’s day. It was a two day event that started with dinner ‘en plein air’ (at Lobster Cove), followed by a concert in Rockport’s spectacular Shalin Liu Performance Center where we enjoyed a wonderful concert by the Parkington Sisters from Wellfleet, violin virtuosae and not unaccomplished on an assortment of other instruments.

Today, on mother’s day proper we had a high tea in Rockport at the Heath Tea Room. I was treated to an English high tea: a pot of Darjeeling, finger sandwiches, a scone with clotted cream, and some other dainties, all presented on a 3-level étagère.

Sandwiched in between those joyful events was another celebration but this one of a life that has passed. We drove to the South Shore to join a few colleagues in expressing our support for our bereaved colleague who lost her second son in three years. Life can be very cruel.

Our grandson-to-be was not delivered on mother’s day – it would have been a lovely mother’s day gift but he’s decided otherwise. He has maneuvered himself into the launch position. His mom is certainly ready to let him go.

We said goodbye at the end of this wonderful weekend hoping for a speedy reunion. Since the future mom and dad were each born 8 days early we calculated that we could be meeting our new grandson as soon as next Sunday.

I feel like I have been lifted up into a creative cloud and I am happier than I have been in a long time. It has indeed been a long time. For the last few years I have not been very creative (knitting and embroidery doesn’t count as it is done from a pattern someone else created). My poetry had dried up (no new entries for a long long time), and I found myself reacting perversely to all the exhortations to ‘think out of the box,’ by crawling deeper into it.

My facilitation of a virtual course, my work on proposals, my writing of an e-learning course are combining to have a cumulative effect that has propelled me into the kind of creative thinking and exploration I had forgotten how to do. This is the funny thing about creativity (or innovation for that matter): it cannot be harnessed, it cannot be summoned.

Now, with what looks like enough work to fill my eight hours a day, I am released from that anxiety. And without travel on the horizon (not until after the Fourth of July) I am able to plash around in possibilities and ideas, and it changes everything.

It may not only be the work conditions that are responsible for this change. I have started to make a habit of doing a 15 minute silent meditation early in the morning and it is starting to have its effect – 15 minutes now passes by very quickly where at first it seemed like an hour. I can actually silence the verbal chatter. The visual chatter is still there but I can even shut that out for a few minutes at a time. I can slow my breath (and heartbeat to follow in tandem) and when I am done I feel like I can take on any challenge in the world with a calm intentionality.

On Sunday we skipped Quaker Meeting and went instead to the Gloucester Democratic Committee’s annual breakfast. Most of the speakers were women, strong and articulate women like Elizabeth Warren, State AG Martha Coakley, State Auditor Suzanne Bump, State Rep Anne Margaret Ferrante. I was so very proud of how these women presented themselves and their platforms so well. The fact that the women outnumbered the men, both in speakers and in the audience, didn’t go unnoticed.

But the rah-rah speeches don’t get me to stand up and cheer rah rahs back. I can’t stand the simplistic rhetoric of polarization – good versus bad – which is why I would never be a good politician.

After having done our democratic duty we devoted the rest of the day to our garden. The beets and chard are in, the snap dragons, the primroses. Axel was responsible for the vegetables, me for the flowers.

Axel caught an asparagus beetle which he promptly scanned and crushed under the scanner cover. We have to be very alert as they can do much damage to our precious crop. Sunday’s and Monday’s sunshine brought forth another whole meal.

Friday and Saturday evening Axel and I presented a slide show of our time in Afghanistan. Friday’s event was for our Quaker Friends.

We showed up in our Afghan outfits. Axel in his embroidered white tombon peron with waskot. He had already worn this as the father of the bride at Sita and Jim’s wedding. I wore a dress that Razia Jan had made and Axel had gifted me for my birthday in Kabul – black with red and gold embroidery. Underneath I wore the lace-edged pantaloons that S. had made for me to go underneath the burqa. I did bring the burqa but didn’t wear it. It would have created a bit of a stir on this quiet middle class Beverly street.

Each time we present about our experiences we realize how constricted and negative people’s image is of Afghanistan. A word association game would probably always yield words like Taliban, violence, war, guns, corruption, Karzai.

On Saturday evening we presented the same slides to our closest friends and realized how little we had talked about our time and work in Kabul. When we came back we re-integrated rapidly into the old life of our friendship. Or we told stories without pictures, a very different experience.

In between these two events Axel perfected his meditation technique – meditation having become easier since he got off much of his medicine. I travelled south to pick up Nuha at the airport. She was my student at Boston University some years ago and is now a PhD student at Johns Hopkins after having returned to her native Saudi Arabia where she is a public health lecturer at a progressive university where men and women study together.

I had seen the start of her blossoming into an assertive young woman, a process that has continued over the last few years. Although she hasn’t reached her thirties yet she now comes across as very mature. And she is even more assertive. The coffee shop where we had our tea provided our drinks in paper cups. She walked up to the counter and demanded real cups, since we were consuming on the premises. I don’t think she would have done that when I first knew her. Although she didn’t believe me, I noticed how her English had also improved as she provided me with breathless updates about her life after BU and now in Baltimore. When I called her to say that I was nearing the airport and that she should wait on the curb she texted me back ‘what’s a curb?’ At least I taught her one more word.

This was the happy-sad-happy week sandwich week.

Although I am no longer actively celebrating the (Dutch) queen’s birthday on April 30, this day has the fondest childhood memories attached to it. There was the excitement and anticipation of the march (in my girl scout uniform) before our town fathers and mothers (which in some years included my mom). They stood on the elegant balcony of the town hall, waving at us, the children of the town, marching along behind a flag or a sign that explained who we were.

It was always a holiday with much to do. There was the fair and the guilder and riksdaalder (now together the equivalent of a euro and change) we got from our parents and grandparents to spend on anything we wanted: rides, cotton candy, sweet cinnamon sticks (zuurstokken).

On May 4, 1958 my baby brother was born which means the week got extended with another exciting event. As the older sister, I put myself in charge of his parties and felt big and important. I also was his teacher, confidant and little mother.

Then in 2001 something very sad slipped in between these two happy events. On May 3 Sita’s best friend, a spunky, slightly older girl, we were all very attached to, died of an overdose. It was probably the scariest day in our life. The memory of that phone call, the rush to find out if Sita was OK, the confrontation with the reality that we would never see Jennee again is as deeply etched in our brains as the plane crash that was to follow a few years later. We planted a beach plum for Jennee. It flowers every year on May 3, even after having been uprooted for a new septic system.