Sylvia's Journal

I find myself balancing on the head of a pin these days, teetering. Leaning to one side I appreciate what the calamity is bringing us, the care and concern, the freedom of not needing to pay attention to how I look, what I wear – I can be in my robe all day, we can eat beans and not worry about visitors entering our house and sniffing the air.

And then I teeter the other way. That feeling is painfully familiar from our plane crash. That first hour of panic and feeling so totally alone and bewildered. And then later, the despair, will I, will we, will things ever get better? 

Within minutes after the crash I knew I was not alone and there were helpers everywhere. I know this to be true in any calamity, close by or far away.  The bewilderment stopped as soon as one of the nurses told me I had only one task and should concentrate on it: get better. Healing is hard work and requires all hands on deck – no place for bewilderment – teeter back in position.

But now this bewilderment is there again, because the task of healing is too diffuse to get my head around. I am not sick, but maybe I am? When one of us coughs or sneezes, the other looks up. Is this reason for suspicion or simply part of an innocuous winter cold, a spring allergy?  

And then all the do’s and don’ts’s. Our daughter reminds us that anything coming from outside the house can contain the enemy because we don’t know where it has been, who has touched it. Our newspaper is delivered in a yellow plastic bag with an elastic band to keep the paper inside, on rainy days like today. Should I get the newspaper with cloves on? Remove the plastic bag and elastic band with gloves on? 

We know we are vulnerable, in a physical sense.  You learn that quickly when you fall down to earth. It’s reasonable, and reason is a thing of the mind. The feeling is more difficult to grasp. Right now, I don’t feel vulnerable although our daughters think differently. And that’s when I start to wobble on top of this pinhead. 

Today I am very restless, which is mostly in my head, as we are blessed with sufficient indoor and outdoor physical space to deal with any twitching muscles. I use Headspace, the meditation app, for the inner restlessness, do my yoga with Adriene daily and ride my stationary bike – but the restlessness remains. The entire world, or whatever part we let into our house in the form of newsprint and bits and bytes, is restless. I cannot imagine having restless small kids and a big dog and living in an apartment in a big city in addition to mental restlessness. 

Our kids are checking in on us, always a few steps ahead of what the authorities tell us to do, or rather not to do. The selectmen of our small town called a Zoom meeting yesterday and decided to cordon off the beaches and public spaces because people where not heeding the 6 ft distance. I was told that last week, our famous Singing Beach had several hundred people on it, and kids and dogs playing together as if it was a regular sunny spring day, few keeping their distance – which would be hard on a beach that’s not that big. Our own Lobster Cove beach was also full of kids playing together and adults, everyone bunched up. It is now closed to the public.

Freedom of movement outside one’s house is now over. If people can’t police themselves, the police have to do it – it’s a sad refrain that we have heard since the beginning of the outbreak in China, then Italy, then Spain, France, Holland and so on.  A friend who retired to Spain said owners of second homes at the beach or in the mountains were sent back to their first residence by the police. 

Are people angry or bristling, I asked? Maybe, she said, but Italians and Spaniards are also giving ovations to the people who keep them safe or helping those in need, every evening at 8PM, from their balconies; and the police was ‘sirenading’ the hospital. It’s good to know that calamity does bring out the best in people. I believe that it is only a small minority of people who serve themselves first, those profiteers who quickly bought up needed supplies back in January, or government officials who quickly bought stock in Citrix and Zoom, when they learned that people were encouraged to work from home. 

I was supposed to have my first violin lesson on Zoom today but the timing didn’t work out. My teacher wrote to me that he has been teaching his students over Zoom, Hangout and Facetime, with good results. Who would have thought an online music lesson possible? We are inventing our new lives as we go. Necessity is the mother of invention. Although I actually read Plato’s Republic (in Greek, in high school) I can’t remember that phrase and even if I remembered, it would have meant little to me then. I looked it up and found that lots of other people had different opinions about inventions and necessity, some I agree with and some I don’t.

The joyous 40^th anniversary celebration in Holland is canceled. What part of the already incurred expenses will remain depends on how the small print is interpreted on our travel insurance and whether COVID19 counts as an exception. Insurance is always about exceptions.

The other joyous celebration that always happens at the time of our anniversary is the welcoming of spring in Massachusetts, our Easter celebration/find-your-goodies-hidden around Lobster Cove. We hadn’t sent out the invites yet. They may still come but for a virtual celebration, in spirit, and possibly on Zoom or such.

I attended one of the sessions on Sita’s site but had to pull out because of a very poor connection. It was a poetry reading about “Lost Words,” with music and video. Kids had brought their instruments, and so I did too, the violin and the ukulele, but the poor connection left the instruments unused and me disappointed – there it was again, disappointment upon disappointment.

We had a virtual cocktail hour with friends in the neighborhood who we often hang out with over the weekend – it kind of worked. We made our own cocktails, toasted each other and our health and didn’t need to worry about drinking and driving.

Our brand-new gleamy new lease car stands mostly unused in our drive way as we don’t need any more driving, or very little. We could have done without a 2^nd car and saved ourselves a bundle – how different things are from just a month ago, when people were led to believe this corona thing would soon be over, everything was under control and it was a Democrat hoax. Our country’s leadership must be dizzy from all the spinning it is doing. 

My semi-retirement is now starting to look like full retirement. I no longer wake up at 5AM and go to bed later than I have done for decades. I used to go to the gym to swim or ride a bike at that early hour but all this is now a thing of the past. 

I now do what other retirees are doing: projects in the house. I knit socks or whatever fits the amount of wool I have available. I am re-fashioning my mother-in-law’s braided stair runner that was half consumed by carpet beetles. It’s a huge project that will occupy me for years to come – or not if we are told to stay at home and the electricity/internet goes out.

My other occupation is being a member of the coaching program team of EthicalCoach which focuses, for now, on organizing a year of free coaching of Ethiopian NGOs by world class coaches. I know they are world class because I interviewed people who were coached by them and were transformed. It has strengthened my resolve to continue to coach and promote the coaching profession.

And now there is Sita’s creative response to the new normal of (working, or trying-to-remain-working) parents at home with young children. Her platform allows for what she calls ‘community learning,’ using the expertise, passion and skills from one person to be flowing, like a river, into places where there is interest or even a dire need.

I signed up for next week to talk about Mongolia, a country I visited some years ago. I will put together a series of pictures of this faraway land and contribute to this opening-of-the-minds initiative. I also contacted an actor friend to see if he is willing to read my (as yet unpublished) children’s book about a school bus’ journey to Africa. I wrote it years ago and looked for a while for an illustrator, and then, being unsuccessful, left it languishing on my computer. Maybe this is the time for a world premiere.

When my trip to West Africa was postponed, most of us were indeed thinking of temporary postponements, not cancellations. But how quickly things changed. 

Between arriving in DC and leaving everything seemed to be upended – VUCA times indeed: volatile (yes), uncertain (yes), complex (yes) and ambiguous (yes). Our daughters felt we were socially irresponsible to even be away from home, ride the Metro, visit musea. We didn’t think so. They rolled their eyes – baby boomers were not taking the corona virus seriously – we thought we were safe and careful. Sita took her kids out of school – I didn’t see why. Now I do,

We are humbled of course because we didn’t see the Draconian measures coming, but also proud that we raised kids who are more socially responsible than their parents. 

We have friends who overwinter in France who are now imprisoned in their AirBnB. Europe is locked, as much as one can lock an entire continent.  Now our much anticipated trip to Holland to celebrate our 40^thanniversary is hanging by a thread. The hotel manager and I are in contact about whether to cancel or not. He wrote me, “if you don’t know what to do, it’s best not to do anything.”  We will go one week at a time – but even that may be too slow, the landscape seems to change by the day.

I have already canceled our AirBnB and plane trip to Grand Junction where we were to attend the wedding of a dear friend at the end of May. The couple canceled rather than postponed the event. They made a trip to their townhall where there were pronounced husband and wife – no party, no honeymoon. Oh, all those disappointments, or as John Adams wrote in his diary: “Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.”

On March 6 I should have left for a two week trip to West Africa. The trip was postponed which was both a relief but also complicating my life and reducing my first quarter earnings by a considerable amount of money. 

It was not a difficult decision to make. Imagine being on a jumbo jet with a few coughers or sneezers and maybe even someone with a fever. Canceling a trip costs money and so people get on a plane when they shouldn’t. I was trying to imagine the public health officials at Niamey International Airport as we stream out of the plane and one, it only takes one, person turns out to have a fever – would we all be quarantined at the airport? Would we have to camp out there, or only the people who can’t afford a hotel? I decided that I didn’t want to find out how that would work.

Axel had planned a trip to Washington DC to see some friends while I was away – and maybe enjoy some spring time which is still so far away for us here in Massachusetts. Since my schedule was all cleared for my West Africa trip I decided to join him. 

After a failed start on March 7, (Axel forgot his wallet), we tried again on Sunday, International Women’s Day, with a woman at the wheel!

We drove to DC in our new car, an electric blue Toyota RAV4 Hybrid that we leased after our Subaru lease was up. After nearly 40 years of being a Subaru family we stepped over to the competition for the simple reason that Subaru didn’t have any hybrids within our budget. We are now the owners of an SUV, I am embarrassed to say. It seems nearly everyone is now driving SUVs; the carmakers must have listened to Americans who seem all to want big cars – this makes being in a small car increasingly dangerous. Our new car feels like a tank. 

New to the Hybrid experience, we competed with each other about who got the highest ‘eco’ score, a feature we don’t really understand yet, but higher seems better. We drove to DC on one single gas tank, which is no bigger than the one in our Crosstrek, which would have used two.