Sylvia's Journal

If I hear the words ‘the final stretch’ one more time I will throw up. I am tired of hearing the stale rhetoric. The only thing that is still fresh and funny is Tina Fey Palin. After Tuesday I will miss her act.

I had been listening to the radio for hours during the day and watched some TV in the evening. During the night the bites and pixels reconfigured into dreams about eruptions of Rwanda-like race conflict, nasty and violent and a family drama (not anyone I knew) in Technicolor and multiple languages (French, English and Dutch). I also dreamed of a visit to an MSH office that was only a short ride from my home. I considered a transfer and was going to follow up later. And finally there was the classic needing-to-get-someplace-but-not-being-able-to-get-there dream. The main problem was the barricade – erected because of the race riots – and my inability to get the right car window down to receive driving instructions from inflexible uniformed men. The trip to Afghanistan is coming into view.

On Sunday Axel went campaigning for Obama in Southern New Hampshire with a bunch of guys. Their marching orders were to visit all the people who had been missed in countless earlier strikes through towns and neighborhoods. Nothing is left to chance. He came back full of energy and quite hopeful.

I am ready to cast my vote. Axel thought it is fitting that my first presidential vote will be for a Kenyan American, the grandson of a Kenyan farmer. It is wonderful and amazing. There is something unknown in this, the roots (or tentacles?) reaching into another continent. I wonder about the expectations in the extended Obama family there. In most of the rest of the world having a president in the family is a bonus. I am trying to imagine the hordes of relatives that will come out of the woodwork. The newspaper already reported on an aunt (an elastic concept) who is living in Boston. Some people are trying to make hay from the fact that she may be here illegally. I hope that everyone is too tired to invest much mental energy in small stuff like that.

I attended Quaker Meeting and tried to subdue my overactive left brain that was busy making to-do lists and chatty commentaries about every thought that fleeted through my head during the hour-long silence. No silence in there at all. I think I see some meditation lessons in the future.

I biked the half hour distance to Meeting against a cold wind, both ways, under blue skies and a canopy of yellow leaves. Sometimes I wonder if I should start to catalogue what I encounter on my bike trip, other than the many (empty) liquor bottles. This time I also found a pink baby sneaker, size 6, right foot, a large and perfect piece of plywood, enough to make a table out of, and a fancy dog leash. There was the usual assortment of returnable cans, none of which I picked up even though it could have earned me a handful of dimes.

Packing for my trip to Afghanistan is a bit more complicated than all my other trips. For the latter I have a routine and the packing is easy. For this trip I have to think hard: warm clothes that cover me from wrists to neck to toes plus plenty of scarves. I went to the second hand clothing store in our town and picked up a pair of slacks priced at 35 dollars. I asked why the price was so high, double the price of all the other slacks. My question exposed me as a fashion heathen. “Too much?” the saleswoman said incredulously, “Look at the label! Do you know how much these go for new?” I then learned that the previous owner paid some 300 dollars for them. So, it was a bargain after all. I am going to be quite fashionable in Kabul. The only other items I need to buy are tops that are both warm and will cover my bottom. Not a standard item in my closet but, it seems, on the racks as the new fall fashion at Target where they will no doubt be less pricy than my new fancy slacks.

Once again I swiftly surfaced from the depth of the subconscious on the sound of stereophonic alarms going off on either side of the bed (his and hers); two different tones rudely interrupting my active and intense dream state. I was teaching in a workshop that was culturally homogenous but for me. It was a steep hierarchical culture and I tried to read the mood in order to determine whether I could question practices related to how one approached the chief. The workshop swung from chaos with no one listening to a rigid and hierarchical affair with no one speaking but the boss. Luckily the boss was a woman and I felt I was making some headway, explaining to her something about group dynamics. But I never found out whether I had overstepped my bounds or not and whether my intervention made any difference because of those two loud alarms.

Some of the elements of the dream I could connect to my upcoming trip to Afghanistan, others to the movie about Idi Amin I saw last night; and all has some meaning against the general backdrop of my work that takes me, by definition, into deep cultural currents where the surface says little about what happens underneath.

This too was the case, some forty plus years ago, in my years in secondary school in Haarlem, in a class that looks very homogenous except for one girl from China whose parents had settled in Holland. One of my former classmates has been finding people on the internet on various social websites and has brought us all together, at least virtually for now. I am following the back and forth emails full of memories with increasing amazement as my former classmates come to life in ways I never knew them. I discovered that some are dead – which shocked me a bit since I do not consider myself of a generation in which peers are dying already. Others, I learn now, came from very disturbed families or were disturbed themselves. Some can be googled and I learn more things I never even suspected: books written, canvasses painted, music and drugs.

These complex and multidimensional lives were already in full bloom when our paths crossed in the old Latin school tucked away in the center of Haarlem behind the central market square. But I had no idea. There was Emile. I knew that something was wrong because he could not look you into the eye and plucked his eyebrows incessantly with his fingers in one continuous nervous tic. We knew he was odd and we treated him like that – ruthless, without any grace or compassion. Now I think he probably had Asperger’s Syndrome or something like that. He was brilliant and died much too young. I was pleased to see that somewhere on the internet he was honored and that his books live on. Funny, that may not happen for the most adapted of us.

I don’t have many memories of my time at the school, and certainly not of the students. I had found my best friends elsewhere, at the rowing club where I spent all my free time. No one there went to a stuffy Latin school and I always envied their much cooler schools. As a result I never got to know my classmates well and certainly did not appreciate the diversity we had there and the fascinating lives that were unfolding. I am catching up now, with much curiosity and some regret.

I woke up from a deep dream exactly when it was time to ‘go to work.’ This only means going downstairs to my computer and start preparing for a phone conversation with someone in South Africa. But before I could do that I had to write down the dream.

I was in a court room that could also have been a theatre room or an old fashioned physics classroom. I had my day in court, together with Axel and a third party who I did not really recognize. His name was Jeff and he was vaguely familiar. Sometime he was present and sometime not. The courtroom was full of people I did not know, spectators I assumed. It was hard to find a place to sit, which made the uncomfortable plastic chairs look appealing. There was a woman in mini shorts; I assumed she was the judge because she took charge. She took us out in a limo. We had to visit places. Axel was still in his plastic corset and, albeit in high spirits, looked crippled even though he walked OK. I can’t remember much about this Jeff other than that he was tall and slender, healthy looking and vaguely familiar.

We had to wait for our friend Lynn from New York who was a witness. She showed up huffing and puffing and annoyed about her bus trip from Manhattan on what was a very hot and steamy day. Lynn too wore hot pants, like the judge. Lynn and I started chatting. I told her we had just come down from upper New York State ourselves where we had been in a B&B. We were reprimanded for chatting and not paying attention as this was a serious moment. A new character had entered the room (and the dream). He, or it, wore a large alligator head and stood on a high platform, like a preacher in a gothic church. I noticed that all the woodwork was painted white. He demonstrated a trick with two frogs in a cage at the foot of the elevated platform. They that had their legs tied to electrodes. The alligator man did something on one side of the cage that involved fire and water. The otherwise dead and rubbery looking frog started to pump its leg on that side; then the trick was repeated on the other side. Now everyone crowded around the cage. I tried to figure out whether the frog was real or not. There was a number stamped across his body, like you’d see on a plastic toy, indicating some manufacturing data, but the legs did move quite vigorously.

Then we were taken to a side room where there were very lifelike mannequins, like the baby dolls advertised on Facebook, lying or sitting in various positions. One was in the middle of childbirth – I gathered it was for a trial about mismanagement of delivery. In a corner was our exhibit, three life-sized rubber dolls in various positions related to our positions in the crash. I was going to be asked a question but never heard it, because I had woken up.

My waking up felt like ascending a very long and steep staircase out of the underworld. Luckily I had remembered to program the coffeemaker which had a cup of coffee ready and so helped me download the images from my head via the keyboard into my computer. Some are lingering on but the details, or what I imagine to be the glue between the various scenes, is gone.

And now I am sitting here wondering what that was all about. Maybe the crash appeared in my subconscious because I had my hair cut last night. We always talk about life, which includes husbands, children, and what happens when things go wrong. For me the ‘going wrong’ is always about the crash and then the community that rallied around us which turned it into something good. For my hairdresser what is going wrong is the economy, she is hanging on by a thread. Luckily we are not, but the dream seems to indicate that I am conscious that one more calamity could jerk us like the poor frog’s leg.