Sylvia's Journal

I woke up empty as opposed to waking up with my writing for the morning already spilling out before I have put my hands on the keyboard. That allowed me to take my time, make coffee, read the newspaper.

I did not have to rush out into the dark to beat the traffic, even though it is a Thursday, because I am seeing the shoulder doctor in the middle of this morning. I took the awkward timeslot from the hard-to-get-an-appointment-with-doctor because I am travelling again next Wednesday. I hope to get another shot of the miracle drug that will temporarily fix the rotator cuff problem like it did a year ago. I am not ready for anything more intrusive than that but I need something to stave off the possibility of a frozen shoulder.

Waking up empty is something that Rumi described in a poem that I happen to have stored on my computer:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

It is quite fitting that I take my cue for starting the day from a 13th-century Persian poet. I am busy learning his language from CDs as I commute in and out of Cambridge. If he lived now I could ask him in his own language whether he wants a glass of tea or I could ask him where the main road is in Balkh, his alleged birthplace, in what is now Afghanistan.

I want to learn the language of Darius (Dari) because I want to express myself a little bit more when I am next in Afghanistan. How close the Farsi I am learning is to the Dari that my hosts in Kabul speak is anyone’s guess. I am negotiating with an Afghan woman who lives in Boston to help me sort that out but we can’t seem to get the timing of our lessons right, at least not before I leave again.

So, taking Rumi’s advice, I think I will strum a little on my ukulele and practice some new chords before I kneel and kiss the ground.

I am reading HBR to find out how management is reinventing itself while waiting for my computer to self check and restart. I am underwhelmed with the so-called ‘new thinking’ of a famous management guru. It is hard to overwhelm me this early in the morning. It’s not even 4:30 AM yet (but by the time I am writing this it will be). In a week I am leaving again on a trip and even that does not overwhelm me.

After a mildly productive day at work I left early to go to the dentist and have my tooth looked at, the one that has lost three chips over the last few days. It is falling apart, finally. It is the one that is mostly filling, stemming from my childhood days when the dentist’s philosophy was to remove as much as possible from healthy teeth as a preventive measure.

But I never made it to the dentist because I had a flat tire. I don’t know if it was simply punctured by a nail or other sharp object or someone slashed it. I will find out later today when I pick it up again. I had slipped into a rare free parking space in Cambridge, along the side of the street next to my office. The prize was mine because I had arrived so early. Did I upset anyone?

AAA came to the rescue although not right away, so I missed my dental appointment slot. I could, of course, have changed the tire myself but I was glad I did not, watching the mechanic zip one tire off and the other on in just a couple of minutes with his power tools. I would have had to work with tools from the stone ages, practically hand-hewn, that would have required a lot of force.

I arrived home early and hungry with no one there to feed me. I just ate stuff standing in front of the refrigerator and our ‘carbohydrates’ cabinet (as Alistair once called it trying to figure out the organizing principle behind its contents). I ended with something that actually needed cooking, a soft boiled egg just when Axel returned. He scraped together his own meal while I took a bath. I had a fantasy of going to bed before 7 PM or watch a movie. We did the latter and watched the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency movie. I think it will be one of my favorite movies, not the least because of the great singing and the wonderful lilting Southern African talk.

I woke up one minute before my alarm went off at 4:30 which means that my internal clock has been reset. It took 9 days.

I woke up from a dream in which I was relying on accounting information from a certain Mr. Rambutan and had a very quick immersion into project management accounting that I should have had about 20 years ago. All these years I pretended I knew. I actually don’t know a Mr. Rambutan but I got to know a delicious fruit by that name during my last trip in Cambodia. In the dream I was about to be discovered as an accounting fraud and had a great deal of anxiety about that.

The dream was triggered by a telephone board meeting that lasted 2 hours and that was, for a good chunk, about how to present financial data, a conversation that went entirely over my head. I listened in silence to people who teach accounting and financial management to business school students for a living, and yawned a lot in between feeling totally inadequate. Luckily it was a phone meeting and the yawning was not visible to my fellow board members (and I was not the only one silent). There was much else I did not get and I felt like a cheat since I have been on the board for three years and am about to go off it in June, hopefully before they find me out. My particular job, which does not require accounting knowledge, is to get ourselves renewed each year and follow proper elections procedures; this year that includes getting someone elected to replace myself.

Yesterday morning I saw Tessa and Steve off to work, leaving Axel, myself and Chicha behind to do the work of running the household, bringing in the bacon and chasing squirrels. Halfway through the day we took Chicha into town, leashed of course, saying ‘heel’ a hundred times while doling out treats if she complied (it’s all about the treats says Joe who knows a thing or two about dog, and human, nature).

Walking by the mass of ducks was particularly exciting but the leash restrained her. The ducks are in withdrawal after a stern local newspaper article berated townspeople about their feeding behavior and how bad that was for the town, the entire ecosystem of ducks and of course the ducks themselves. The ducks ignored us and stared at the cold water, some of them standing on ice floats. I am glad I am not a duck.

I did more cooking in the afternoon, semi-Indonesian, and alternated it with writing a book chapter assigned to me that has due a date in late April. I have written half of the required pages and I am making good progress. This is a good thing because planned departures are firmed up: to Ethiopia next week, and late in March I will probably make a quick visit to Ghana before dashing off to Zambia, the latter not so firm right now.

I traded the meditative and silent experience of Quaker Meeting for a morning of elaborate cooking that culminated in a brunch for all six of us with quiche, falafel, salmon/spinach pies and an upside down German apple pancake. After having lived in hotels for several weeks I have this urge to cook. In the evening I cooked again something rather convoluted and complex that got even more convoluted and complex when Tessa and Axel started to insert their own directions (too many cooks in the kitchen) and we ended up with a variation on a Mongolian hotpot that will serve us for the rest of the week. There was also a craving for vegetables.

Sita had brought her own, slightly bigger, ukulele, and after brunch we played together and I had a few more lessons. I am starting to remember the one and two finger chords and my playing is beginning to sound like something although the chord transitions leave much to be desired.

It was a gorgeous day and we joined hundreds of other dog owners and dogs on Singing Beach for a long walk; everyone was enjoying the balmy weather with its temperatures in the 40s before it sank down again in the 20s this morning.

I had a long conversation with my sister Ankie who travels a lot, for fun, not for work. She just returned from Mali. I had enjoyed her pictures on facebook – she has seen a part of Mali that I have not yet seen, le pays des Dogons; it is on my wish list but I have never made time for it on my frequent visits to that country. We are planning a trip to China sometime in the near future, with our daughters, girls only.

In the afternoon Jacek came by with a bag full of camellias that grow in his living room/greenhouse that, long ago, was grampie Magnuson’s greenhouse. Aside from camellias, Jacek also always brings along a bag full of stories. Yesterday’s were stories of his grandfather because a book about him will be published soon, in Polish, in Poland. They are stories from another world. It’s actually a miracle that Jacek even exists. His father, a young officer in the Ukrainian czarist army at the time of the Bolshevik revolution, fled over the steppes with a handcar stacked with bags of flour and salt, a more tradable commodity at the time than money. He was also the first pilot to graduate from the Polish pilot academy, flew bombing mission on the Eastern Front and was, 80 years ago, president of LOT Polish Airlines.

Dreams of Cambodian foods, mostly noodle soups, dominated my sleep as if to explain the rumblings in my belly. I may have brought some hitchhikers along.

I am nearly done returning night hours to their proper place in my 24 hour cycle. It seems I am less than two hours off, still enough to wake me up too early on a Saturday morning and make me yawn while our dinner company was still there last night. I think that chased them away just when they were getting into heated discussions about town budgets, advocacy for special needs children and speculation of why we have so many of them in this new generation. I was only thinking of sleep.

But while I was still fully awake we did have a wonderful dinner with Tessa, Steve and the St. Johns, all seated around the big table, with a large pork roast in the middle, accompanied by an enormous pot filled with roasted winter vegetables and warm applesauce with a hint of cinnamon, vanilla and rum. It was the right dinner and the right company against a backdrop of frozen snow and temperatures below pleasant.

I had my annual physical and passed it with flying colors, mostly; including the pre-diabetes screening that has become routine because of the increasing prevalence of the illness in the US (that also has touched some of my family members in Holland). Some of the blood values were a little too high or too low, nothing serious I was told until checked again later in June, and we speculated about the influence of my unusual three-week Cambodian diet on the numbers, especially the large quantities of fruit, duck and goat (cut off at the knees).

After nearly two months I am taking to the skies again with Bill today. We plan to fly to Upstate New York’s Ticonderoga via Hartness State and Rutland in Vermont with a stop at Glens Falls. On the return, if the clouds will not allow us to go over the mountains, we will fly south to Williamstown in Western Mass, and then fly straight east to Beverly. Before that I am meeting with my fellow plane owners about not having a plane and money in the bank that is not sufficient to get another one. It’s a dilemma that has no clear solution yet.

I have been up since 3:30 AM, drinking green tea that reminds me of South-East Asia. Getting up that early was not difficult since I went to bed at about 4:30 PM yesterday afternoon with a raging headache and nausea that had plagued me all day, leading to an early dismissal from work. It is not because of the spiders I ate, these have long been removed from my system but because of something else that is out of whack. My annual physical later today may reveal the cause if it is not simply my re-entry into Eastern Standard Time.

I am slowly reducing the 12 hour gap between waking and sleeping in Cambodia and in America, but last night set me back by a few hours. I guess there were just too many adjustments to make: diet, temperature, humidity, work hours and sleep. I hope that my body will store all these adjustments for the future, making next returns a little easier.

Before the headache got so bad that I started to look cross-eyed I was able to put in some early morning quality writing time in the office that was deserted for my first few hours there. But at noon time I was rubbing my forehead so much that I couldn’t type anymore. Without any obligations to others in meetings or scheduled conversations there was nothing to keep me at work and I drove home.

Back in Manchester Axel and I went for a brisk walk to Singing Beach with Chicha leashed on her choke collar (strict instructions from Tessa and Steve). It was a beautiful but very cold day; even the sea water was frozen on the rocks, looking like translucent frosting on cupcakes. The walk interrupted the headache for awhile. It came back when I settled in on the couch to watch a movie, the only thing I felt able to do. Five minutes into the movie I gave up on that as well and retired to bed, to emerge 11 hours later, sans headache, at least for now.

Sita should have arrived back home yesterday from Davos where she rubbed elbows with the high and mighty and drank in some of the doom and gloom by listening to people who are supposedly in the know (or can influence) what will happen to the world economy. Not a pretty picture I gather. I saw some of her amazing artwork and wished I could have only a 10th of her talent.

Yesterday I made a slideshow of the Cambodia trip consisting mostly of pictures. I think that is the only way that I can convey to my colleagues the enthusiasm of this new cohort of facilitators that I left behind in Kampong Cham and Phnom Penh. I cant’ figure out how to upload it here but that was the idea (this is where Tessa’s talents might come in handy).

It has been quiet in the office – many people are travelling and so things are rather low key. This suits me fine as I am trying to get back into the US/East Coast groove.

After work I went to yoga class again, after a hiatus of 3 weeks, and found it rather strenuous. The rotator cuff injury is troubling me more and more which made me a less than stellar participant in many poses that required stretched arms, up, down and sideways. After the accident I never had an MRI done of my right shoulder because just when the doctors thought something was seriously wrong I was suddenly able to lift my arm again and made them think all was well again. What ails me is somewhere in between right and wrong and may well be a small tear that is getting irritated again. One year ago a cortisone shot in the shoulder quieted things down and it has lasted till now. I think I need another one.

Axel too is having a relapse in his arm– as if to remind us that it’s only 18 months since the accident, and what would we expect? We have gotten rather undisciplined about our exercises, me in particular (hence the yoga).

I received a lovely email note from the receptionist in ADRA’s Phnom Penh office to whom I had gifted my Emirates business class toiletry case, full of small (less than 3 oz) tubes of creams and perfumes aside from the obligatory toothbrush and comb. She wrote, “I mostly not often use perfume but now I use it every day since I have gotten from you. It smelled very nice I do like it.” At the end of the message she apologizes for “[…] any mistakes or other tasks that I did not do well.” The entire message signed with a “Miss you.” It melted my heart. Another reason to get back there some day.

Yesterday was my first day back at work in over three weeks. Everyone was busy as usual and I was productive for a good part of the day. But around lunchtime I had to get out into the snowstorm, to wake myself up. The jetlag has manifested itself as a sinus infection that makes the right side of my face tender to the touch and my eyes bloodshot in addition to lots of yawning. Someone asked why I was even at work and I did not have an answer.

Yesterday was a day filled with sadness – some of it highlighting the plight of our sisters worldwide. First there was the anniversary of the plane crash that ended the lives of our three young colleagues Carmen, Cristi and Amy in the snowy mountains of Afghanistan on February 3, 2005. They are still very much missed and we are reminded of them frequently through the pictures on the walls of our office – pictures of and by them, taken in the days before they died.

Another young colleague was induced to deliver her stillborn baby at 24 weeks and became a mother and not a mother at the same moment. It broke my heart – this baby was so much wanted.

And finally, to complete this trio of women’s grief and bad luck, my hairdresser Bonnie poured her heart out about a husband turned mean and callous for the love of a younger woman – behavior so bad and verbally so abusive that I wished I could knock him around the room and give him a piece of my mind. It was little comfort to her that I had an experience somewhat like that (not as callous and mean and there were no children involved) when I had been replaced, early on in my first marriage, by a young blond Swedish interloper some 30 years ago. I told her I now look back on that as one of the best things that ever happened to me as it led me to my own Swede (Axel). But at first it was indeed a dark experience with so much crying that there was no water left in me – Bonnie is in that place right now. What makes the situation particularly sad is that, edged on by his dad, the teenage son is joining the chorus of abuse without realizing what this does to his and his mom’s psyche. Not surprisingly he is derailing at school; a stepsister/daughter, already derailed, unfit to care for her two little boys, is perpetuating a generational drama that keeps re-inventing itself.

I lifted myself out of this morass of anger and sadness by practicing E7 on my ukulele which Sita said was nice (it is) and accompanying myself as I sung Amazing Grace, hoping that everything will turn out OK for the grieving moms around me.

What was I thinking when I assumed that my first full day at home would be a normal workday? With a 12 hour jet leg I was hardly able to concentrate and do work-work (as opposed to self-care work). I wandered out of Abi’s massage studio with massage brain as Axel calls it, rather unfocused. Finding Axel in the coffee shop next door was a significant victory.

By then it was nearly lunch hour and going out for lunch seemed the right thing to do. We drove slowly through a picture perfect winter wonderland and under bright blue skies to Ipswich, congratulating ourselves on living in such a beautiful place. I traded in the noodle soups of the last few weeks for a steaming bowl of chowder but I am still drinking buckets of tea.

Lunch made us forget that Axel had an early afternoon appointment with the brain injury specialist in Boston. Forgetting things is, apparently, quite common for people who have been whacked on the head. He called, apologized and was rescheduled. We are, once again, grateful that Axel is only forgetting things, nothing worse (like some of the patients he sits with in the waiting room).

After lunch it was naptime – something I am not all that good at usually but this time it was easy. I had planned to go for a long walk on the beautiful and balmy winter day but the waking up from my two-hour nap time took too long and then it was dark again.

Sita gave me a ukulele for Christmas. The instrument was waiting for me when I got home, all tuned and ready to play. And so the most strenuous thing I did yesterday was to practice A, C and F chords. I can now strum ‘This old man,’ ‘Amazing Grace,’ and a few other tunes. All I need is a campfire and some people to sing along. I can’t wait for it to be summer.