Sylvia's Journal

I was woken up this morning by the twitter of a thousand birds at a very early hour, sunrise probably (4:06 AM, early indeed). The twitter is amplified by all the little baby birds that are beginning to leave their nests and join the chorus. One such nest is just outside Sita and Jim’s door to the studio. Of the three robin’s eggs two hatched. One stuck to the mother’s wing as she was startled when the door opened, and it fell out, the embryo visible, not ready to be a bird. The remaining sibblings survived the constant coming and going into the barn, raised by an increasingly neurotic mother. You could see their heads sticking out of the nest with beaks wide open, squeaking and begging for food. Of course while we were standing there contemplating the feeding regime, the upset mother was waiting at a distance with dinner dangling out of her beak.

Yesterday I dropped Aimee off at Harvard Summer School with hundreds of parents and nervous teenagers from all over the world. Harvard has mastered this annual ritual into a seemless drill, staffed with hundreds of peppy young girls wearing colorful T-shirts like camp counselors, their heads full of knowledge. There was much walking between the various buildings near Harvard Square and the Radcliff Quad (her dorm) where this or that part of the registration routine was completed. As the papers had told her, there was not much in the dorm except for a desk, chair, bed and pillow. We had augmented this with some overflow from our house which is entirely at the other end of the clutter spectrum. It occurred to me we could do a thriving business setting up a roadside stand with stuff that is missing in the dorms and redundant in our house.

Aimee’s roommate is a Chinese girl from California who was clearly prepared for managing the stark dorm experience with a huge suitcase full of stuff. Two parents had accompanied her and were busy settling her in. This reminded me of us settling Sita into her dorm room in New York, now eons ago. I think that there is an element of parents vicariously reliving their own college experience. Of course I had never had a dorm living experience because when I studied in Holland there was no such thing as a dorm. I only knew about dorms from American movies; those were either frightening or romantic experiences, many with bad endings. My only dorm experiences now are those that occur during the annual OB Teaching Conference, but that is only for a week at the most. At least at Babson we had a wastebasket, which came in handy when I was sick. Harvard does not provide these, so plastic shopping bags will have to do for Aimee, sick or healthy.

From Cambridge I rushed back to Beverly to talk about money with my plane co-owners. We are finally out of the enormous debt that had accumulated relentlessly, starting before the accident and not helped by it. The new plane is beginning to generate some income for us that then gets spent on maintenance and repair. It’s not a money making enterprise by a long shot. I was reminded again that flying it an expensive hobby and that the hobby may need to end when my mother’s inheritance has been eaten up. The bottom is beginning to show. After our meeting I flew for about an hour practicing my landings in increasingly windy conditions. Suffice to say I landed 8 times on the correct runway; sometimes I hoped nobody was watching.

The rest of the day I worked in the garden with Joe, hilled the potatoes with straw, added several wheelbarrow loads of soil to the asparagus bed (4 spears are up) and then cooled off in Lobster Cove with the children of visiting friends. The little boys thought they were in heaven (I know we were) and did not want to return with their parents to hot Cambridge and some boring adult party. I was very conscious of our luck to be able to stay. I spent the next few hours alternating napping and reading that I Am A Strange Loop (Hofstadter), while Axel and Joe were preparing dinner in the background. This included a striped bass that had been swimming happily somewhere off the Rockport coast only a couple of days ago. Hofstadter would not have approved, but I was in heaven.

The summer officially began yesterday, precisely at 1 minute before 8 PM according to Tessa; she knows about such things. At the moment supreme we were sitting on hard benches waiting for our table at the Fish Shack in Rockport. That included Joe who had returned from a pharmaceutical company retreat in Worcester which had ended with 450 employees drumming to experience alignment with each others’ and the universe’s heartbeat, or something like that.

We let the coming of summer pass unnoticed. We had nothing to toast with. In Rockport’s restaurants you can only order alcohol after you have placed your meal order, and you can only do that when you sit at a table. At any rate, Aimee who is 19 years old, would not have been allowed a drink even though in Holland she is considered old enough to have a glass of beer or wine.

Yesterday was a workday for all of us except Steve and Aimee. While Steve slept to recover from his drive down from London, Aimee explored the neighborhood which included the experience of being envelopped in a fogbank, alternated with bright sun and rain. She also checked out the bike that she will take to Cambridge and which blew a tire, as on cue, on her way into town to the bicycle repair shop. Later in the afternoon I did spot her bike by the icecream store as I drove out of town for an appointment.

That appointment was for my last acupuncture session. The sessions come in fours and we are going to let the chi work its magic for awhile without needles. John, the acupuncturist, is still trying to sort out what is happening in my right foot. It is getting increasingly sensitive to the needles. This time I even asked him to take one needle out because it hurt too much. He considers this a good thing because the abnormal sensitivity of my foot (I still feel like I walk on a wad of cotton balls) is one of the presenting symptoms. He believes that most of the rest of my symptoms were/are related to the misaligned sacrum and the PT’s work will take care of that. I sure hope so.

Sita called from Kentucky where it is raining all the time – they are on the outer fringes of a series of weather calamities hitting parts of the central United States. They are lucky to have a cabin but their travelmates have a tent. There are some tensions and dynamics in the traveling foursome and I have a feeling that the best part of the trip is coming home. This, of course, is no news to me.

With the summer weather arriving the memories and images of last summer are bubbling up from the recesses of my mind. Soon, every day will have a corresponding day and memory from last year, when the universe was both limitless (in its grace) and tiny because of our restricted movements and preoccupations. Part of me is dreading this daily comparison that I expect to start on the 14th. Part of me is celebrating. During my acupuncture session, when I usually fall asleep, I had this expansive feeling of joy, gratefulness and deep gratitude that envelopped me like a blanket and that stayed with me throughout the rest of the day, all the way into summer.

Yesterday was like driving with one hand on the steering wheel and the other cleaning the dashboard with spit. But first there was a trip to my eye doctor (20/20 vision, only a slight creep up in reading glass strength), who sent me home good to go for another 2 years.

Back home I kept one of my healthy eyes on the computer for emails washing in over the transom, especially from the countries where there are people who want something from me right now. The other eye/hand had started to clean out the mess in my office and do something akin to the reset button on a screen or computer program.

I finally threw out the coursebooks of MSH training courses I gave 10 or more years ago as well as anything else I had not touched for a few years. Sometimes I did not even open the file; it was easier that way. I am not an accountant so I don’t have to worry about stuff you have to keep x number of years for the taxman. In the process I also got rid of aged dustbunnies and untangled nests of wires.

I also rearranged the furniture so I can open my file drawers again; the last vestige of the calamity arrangement in my office, which used to serve as my sickroom, is now gone. With three more weeks to go to the first year anniversary, the symbolism of all these moves is hard to miss. When I picked up the biohazard bag with the keys of the plane that is no more I started thinking about what to do with them on July 14th. I am thinking of something splashy.

All this activity was triggered by the arrival last night of the 19-year old daughter of my friends Mariette and Dirk from Holland. Aimee is here to study economics at Harvard Summer School until mid August and I am delivering her to her dorm on Saturday morning. She is spending today at our house to ‘get used to being in America.’ A soft landing of sorts. Speaking about landings, I have not offered to take her for a plane ride as I am very sure her mom and dad would not approve.

It was the state trooper at Logan who alerted me to her presence (“Where are you ma’am?” – “I am standing by the reception railing outside customs.” – “Turn around ma’am!”). Aimee has passed through immigration and customs very quickly and I had arrived much too late, because of a brain only half turned on after the great clean-up. Her Dutch cellphone did not work. She had struggled with the coin-operated phone and given up, putting her fate in the hands of our state police, who delivered her into my hands. Not a good way to arrive. It was exactly what I had wanted to prevent. I learned something about the neo-cortex and my reptilian brain; the latter to be mistrusted and shut off as soon as possible after it kicks into gear.

Joe is coming back later today and then we will have a full house again with all the rooms in our house occupied. The idea of Lobster Cove Inn is not so strange as it may have sounded before, except we like having people we know rather than paying strangers. And as I write this there is another arrival. Steve and puppy Chicha have arrived after a long drive through the night straight from London (Canada). There is much hugging and yelping as Tessa is reunited with her man and dog.

Yesterday I was chauffeured into town again by Joe. While he was skilfully manipulating powerpoint (‘noodling’) to perfect the conceptual framework of CHS, I attended to other business, mostly related to our partnerships. It felt more like partnershits and mid-morning I was getting in such a funk because of all the hiccups in those relationships that it was time to get out of the building. Luckily the rowing club is across the street, so I left Joe to his noodling and went rowing on the Charles River for about one hour, down to the Elliott Bridge in Watertown and back. That got things right and the rest of the day went well.

After lunch we had another meeting with some staff from CHS in Cambridge and one on the phone from DC which produced iteration 8, sent out before we left the office for one more round of comments. That will be it for now. This morning Joe slept in; the early risings were starting to get to him. He is off to another job in Worcester to be back with us tomorrow night. On Monday we have one final meeting on the framework to put that baby to bed and Joe on the plane back to San Diego on Tuesday.

We left MSH late; too late, because of two goodbye parties that I wanted to attend. Thomas is leaving for business school in California. We travelled together to Nepal a few years ago. I will miss all 6 foot 10 of him. I read him a short poem and handed over lots of money from all over the world that he will pass on to a friend in Nepal. Kathleen is off to Belgium but she will come back in 3 months, speaking fluently French, at least that is her plan.

Our commute back was our slowest sofar and took us nearly one and a half hour. The worst part of the commute was that it was NPR fundraising week so the people who would otherwise have given us the news to distract us from the traffic jam were busy telling us why we should give them money for most of our slow ride home.

Back home hausfrau Axel was waiting with ‘mood adjusters’ and a chicken on the grill. Tessa joined us soon returning from a hard day of selling leather goods in Rockport. We sat outside as long as the mosquitoes let us, which was not very long. We ate our meal inside while outside continued to be a glorious evening with mosquitoes looking for blood.

After dinner we watched the movie Pucker Up which chronicles the run up and climax of the international whistling championships in Lewisburg North Carolina. Sita does not order hits or popular movies from Netflix. This is how we learn many things about the world we had no idea existed. Among other things we learned that Geert from Mierlo in the south of Holland was crowned the world whistling champion (in 2005 or 6). The movie follows him around in his native town which was fun as I could check the translations. Axel could too. I was also fun because none of the Americans could pronounce his name. We think Geert won because his last whistle was the American national hymn and the audience rose from their seats, hand on heart, deeply moved. After the movie was over everyone who could was whistling throughout the house for a little longer as he/she went about the business of getting ready for bed. The house was full of happy whistling sounds. I also puckered up producing a puffy sort of sound, not a whistle, but happy nevertheless.

Yesterday Joe and I started out again at a very early hour. Once again I was chauffeured to work. I could get used to that. Joe calls it ‘driving Miss Sylvia.’ I particularly like it on the way home when I can totally relax, nap a bit and then, if all the stars are lined up right, come home to a husband waiting with a drink and the perfect meal.

Last night that perfect meal was grilled squash (courgettes), grilled asparagus and salmon accompanied by a light summer wine overlooking Lobster Cove at full tide in the late afternoon sun. It was heavenly and worth every minute of the one hour commute each way, chauffeured or not.

Joe and I are making some progress, we think, on the model and positioning statement of the MSH center that has hired us, although we haven’t had that much input from the technical folks since they are all on the road. We are not too worried about that because we are distilling text and model from the, fairly raw, material from a retreat that was held earlier this year. We are building on that, not re-building from scratch. The model spontaneously turned into a key and a key hole; those sitting with us around the table liked it. We’ll see if it does anything for people who were not part of that conversation. The biggest handicap has been that we have not been able to have even one minute with the center’s chief and the deputy is now on vacation, so we are playing alone in the sandbox, without any supervision. It’s fun!

Axel spent another half day travelling to and fro for a half hour appointment at Spaulding’s Rehab in Boston. Three of those appointments a week eat up a considerable chunk of his time; and this is only the speech and occupational therapy. His dizzy spell in the car on Saturday has now been labeled as a vestibular disturbance that requires another therapeutic intervention. Tessa is trying to get Axel to do Kundalini yoga instead or at least start doing, on his own, one of five Tibetan rites. It certainly sounds better than going to rehab. However, what she demonstrated made me worry about finding Axel at the end of the the day crashed into the antique full length mirror in our bedroom. It requires circling 20 times with arms outstretched while keeping one’s eye firmly fixed on one’s index finger or something like that. It’s a nice idea but knowing about Axel’s pre-existing balance problems with this new dizziness on top of it all worries me a bit.

We are discovering over and over again that recovery is not a linear process – as in getting a little bit better all the time, a graph line that goes only up. We are finding new defects in our bodies that either went unnoticed or that were caused by one misalignment or another during the last 11 months. Yesterday I went back to my physical therapist because of a variety of pains and aches. That was a good thing. She discovered that my sacrum was ‘off’ as she called it. “That is no problem,” she said as she pressed and pushed it back into place. I was amazed that she could do this just like that. With the help of my breathing (“take a deep breath in – hold it – let it go”) she manipulated the bottom of my spine back into alignment. Whether it will stay that way is doubtful and so I have a new set of exercises to strengthen and stretch muscles on one side to keep the sacrum in place.

There are new therapy schedules in our appointment book on the kitchen counter. I also need to get back to the ankle doctor because the swelling of my ankle has not changed since February and it is about time to be back to normal. Axel too is going through this; a dizzy spell on Saturday is sending him back to the frontal lobe doctor again. Overall the line of recovery moves upward but there is some looping back.

The word ‘recursions’ came to my mind and when I looked it up in Wikipedia it turned out the wrong word however one sentence in the description of the word resonated, “Are we done yet? […] Without such a termination condition a recursion would go on forever.” That’s sometimes how we feel.

Joe and I went to MSH early and sorted out how best to help one division of MSH in its identity search, for which they had hired him and blocked some of my time. Usually I am not in on Mondays and I stayed under the radar by being on another floor; several people never realized I was there. This was a good thing as it turned out because the assignment took all our attention for the day. Joes stays with us in what he calls ‘Sterling Towers East.’ It was nice to be chauffeured to and from work by Joe; I fell asleep twice on the way home and he took a nap when we got back home. After all, for us the day had started early. I had not been getting up so early for over a week and it takes a bit to get used to the day starting at 4:30. It means that I am ready to eat at 5 PM (dinner is never ready that early) and to go to bed at 9 PM. We did not quite stick to that schedule once home for the dinner portion. The lateness of our dinner had something to do with Sita and Jim’s setting off on a trip to Kentucky to attend a music festival

Axel’s new grill, a Father’s Day gift from me, was used for the second day in a row. My being pressured into this gift went something like this: Me: “Why should I buy him a gift? He’s not my father.” Sita: “He’s a father because of you.” So now there is this shiny new Webber charcoal grill; a replica of the one Sita and Jim burned up by putting wooden logs in it – as if it was an outdoor fireplace. Sometimes I wonder how they can be so dumb and smart at the same time.

We started father’s Day with a Tessa-led yoga exercise in the living room for all but Sita and Jim. I have not done any yoga for years. I knew I had gotten very stiff but was dismayed at how bad it was. We did two sun salutations which is all Axel and I could handle. I repeated it this morning on my own with an intent to do this every day.

We celebrated Father’s Day in a way that was a little different from what was planned. Tessa had organized an outing on a Schooner from Rockport but the crew had called off all scheduled departures because of inclement weather. It was actually not that inclement except that the sun was not shining. Instead we went to a restaurant that claims to be entirely ‘green’ and has the best sushi in Gloucester. For the occasion Axel ordered a ‘one daughter’ sake that came in a small wooden box (nothing but sipping possible) while the girls competed for who was the one daughter. He could have ordered two drinks but he did not, getting quite disciplined about alcohol consumption, especially at midday. All our foods were served in small (tiny, according to Axel) quantities, cleverly displayed in three dimensions and unusual combinations.

We took the scenic route to Rockport, Tessa’s second home, and did the Bearskin Neck loop. We entered several shops, touching at least 20 things exclaiming how nice or how pretty or how cool and then walked out again. Tessa hates people like that. Axel counted the fathers who had been taken, like him, on a Father’s Day shopping adventure by their daughters, wives or girlfriends. You could tell they had been sold a load of goods; billed as if it was fun or lured to Rockport under some pretext or another, you could see whole bunches of them leaning against shop windows or doors, looking bored out of their minds. You could tell that they wanted to be home watching a game or rummaging in their workshops or doing something else, anything but shopping in tourist knick-knack stores.

Eventually our path lead to Val’s store and then to DJ’s leather goods store and we girls made sure we touched at least 20 things there as well. DJ is one of my faithful blog readers so he knows everything about us, sometimes even before Axel, Sita and Tessa know. Axel started saying that we had just come back from a conference but did not need to finish his sentence as DJ said, “I know.” It makes for efficient conversation as there is no need for preliminaries; you can cut straight to the chase.

Back home Axel received his present from Sita, an oil painting set. He has been admiring the paintings by John Walker (also at Bearskin Neck); we are hoping for an as yet unrevealed talent. I returned to the garden and ‘hilled’ the potatoes while Axel got the guestroom ready for Joe Sterling who has returned to the East Coast for a short consultancy with MSH and another in Worcester. The place where he built the ramp last year is still somehwat recognizable but the grass is growing nicely in, covering up memories of being wheelchair-bound.

It was heaven to wake up in a real bed and not have to walk on a scuzzy damp carpet to get to the ‘men-only’ bathroom that was the only one on our dorm floor; or to worry about the mice and giant ants that shared the space with us; or entertaining the possibility of being locked out of one’s dorm room in a flimsy nightgown with cellphone and car keys inside the room. All that is now past, until next year in Charleston where we will throw ourselves into such an adventure again.

Yesterday Ed Schein delivered the closing plenary in the conference with a reflective piece, what else could one expect, on teaching. He had sketched out his own learning journey. Sita was stationed in the back of the room and recorded his journey on two foam board panels while he talked. She had her own group of fans and curious people sitting close by watching intently as she turned Schein’s words into pictures and key words. Right in line with the conference slogan (we’ll blow their minds), she blew everyone’s mind there. For Axel and me it was an experience that is hard to turn into words: to see your child doing something that is so truly masterful is the best gift one can get as parents. Many people here knew Sita and Tessa from Caringbridge and greeted Sita as if she was a relative or close friend. OBTS was another one of those communities that circled its arms around us, eleven months ago.

Going home after such an intense week is both wonderful (own bed, own stuff, kids) and a let down. I was also intensely tired from having been ‘on’ for an entire week. I was also nervous about the coming two weeks and all the work that has to be done between now and then before I take off for two back to back trips to Ghana and Haiti. I did not dare to open my mailbox which had filled up to overflowing again, just as I had been getting the contents down to below stress levels.

I ended up gardening and had my first mosquito bites of the season. I discovered another two tiny asparagus spears which raised our success level in getting the plants started to 25%. I thinned the seedlings and put them in a salad with the romaine lettuce that had reached adult proportions. It was the first meal from our garden this year.

I still have not seen Tessa who came home after I left for Babson a week ago. She has a Father’s Day plan that brings us all together for an outing on the water. Right now it is raining which is good for the garden but not for the outing; still, being together in the rain sounds better than being separated in the sun.