Sylvia's Journal

The reflection of the sun in the Putnam windows caught me straight in the eye. Before it woke me up it mingled with a theme in my dream that was about doing several things concurrently. Holding the sun in my eye and continuing the dream turned out to be too much. Wanting to, but not able to do several things at the same time is probably an accurate description of my state of mind as it relates to my workload. I have to be creative, and ask for help, in order to manage. I tell Axel to do this, so why not apply it to myself.

Yesterday I took over the facilitation of the virtual leadership course from Morsi. He has been facilitating the course for three weeks non stop and was rather tired. Taking over meant that I had to review all that had happened in the last three weeks, where each team (of 11) is, checking correspondence, their progress on tasks, etc. The module I am leading will continue till the 28^th of March, when I will already be on my way to Kabul. That too I have to sort out.

There are two other virtual events that are happening or in preparation that ask for my full attention plus a whole host of non virtual stuff that require writing, thinking, designing, telephoning, etc. At times I feel like I am skating on the edge of panic. The feeling was intense enough yesterday that I decided to reserve all of Tuesday for another day of working at home. I get more done that way, being able to have long stretches of time during which I can work without interruption, something that is impossible when I go in to my office. Working from home also saves me two hours of commuting time for more productive use. Why not work from home all the time? Some of the work is being in meetings and I do love working with my colleagues and hearing the stories of people coming or going. I missed that part of my work from July till November and it is one of the reasons I do not want to be a consultant.

Yesterday afternoon Axel and I went for a walk around the loop again, hoping that it would get Axel’s muscles out of their knots. He continues to be in pain and we keep trying to figure out what happened that caused all this. Today he will see his physical therapist again and we hope the visit will bring some relief.

After our walk, in between snow and sleet an hour of mild spring weather seduced me into the garden where I started to clean out the winter debris. There are tiny green sprouts poking out of the ground everywhere; the onions are already half a foot high and one tiny Swiss Chard plant has survived the winter. If last year the garden was abundant, this year it is going to be magnificent. After I had removed the debris I stood for awhile, leaning on the rake, surveying my handiwork and contemplating this little patch so full of promise. I know this, but have to re-discover it again and again, that gardening – or any physical activity for that matter – is a good way to subdue waves of panic and neuter the stress that comes with it.

I woke up in time to write but stayed in bed until there was no more time. With this I squandered the chance to write in great detail about my dreams that included a trip with Joellen to somewhere that took forever to get started and some brilliant thoughts about my work. These have gone back to the place where all the other brilliant thoughts live, in complete obscurity and irretrievable.

I biked to Quaker meeting and counted the empty beer cans along the way. If I were to pick up all the empties, in each direction, it could buy me one gallon of orange juice each month; there is money lying on the street! It makes you wonder what happens at night on these stretches of road.

Our youngest Quaker attender was 2 weeks old, little Gemma Louise. She handled the one hour silence like a pro. I suppose that after 9 months of silence in utero, this one hour is not much of a challenge.

While riding my bike I thought much about cleaning and clearing out clutter, an ancient spring ritual that is badly needed in our house. Back home I added deed to word and started un-cluttering a very small space. It quickly became a silver cleaning chore and took much longer than intended. In the end, I realized I was just moving clutter from one place of the house to another. There is a system dynamic at work that is stronger than my or Axel’s will; it is much like putting a policeman in one neighborhood to discourage criminal activity and the crime simply moves to the next neighborhood.

I did throw out some little things without asking permission. No one will notice the missing pieces of glass, rock, sand dollars and other neat stuff that, I know, will automatically slip back into our house as soon as someone comes back from the beach.

Yesterday we went to the Flower Show in Boston to see Woody’s exhibit and cheer him on to great sales. Those have mostly been absent. He tries to sell 400 dollar plus planters and basins, wedged in between 10 dollar Christmas ornaments, an all purpose gardening tool and tubes of udder balm sold as miracle hand cream by a woman and her, now free from eczema, boy. You get a squirt if you want one. While massaging it into our hands we discovered the saleslady is also a nurse at UMass Memorial Hospital in Worcester, which led to a long conversation.

We wandered through the main horticultural displays where Axel’s father used to show his talents and wares some 30 years ago. The experience of walking on concrete for several hours reminded us of our ill-advised trip to IKEA several months ago. We can still not do this very well and we arrived home limping (me) and Axel in great (back and hip) pain. We cooked ourselves a light dinner and ate it in front of the TV. It seemed fitting to watch Moore’s documentary about the US health care system (Sicko) to forget our pains by immersing ourselves into the bad (health) luck of others. The operative phrase is ‘so you think you are covered?’  I learned about all this in my early years in the US when I delved into the world of insurance and discovered nothing but scams.  We made it about halfway through the movie when we called it a day and got our tired and sore bodies into bed.

I woke up to grey skies and rain. Axel woke up to a terrible pain in his back which required emergency massage. I settled him among pillows with a hot pad and made breakfast. It seemed like a good day for breakfast in bed; no appointments, no need to be anywhere for anyone except ourselves. While Axel’s back was calming down under the heatpad I made French toast from Italian bread, the kind that ends up like custard in between crusts of cinnamon toast. While we were eating the rain turned into snow and everything is turning white. Now there really is no point in getting up. I reserved a plane for 12:30 but I think I will let it go. There is more tea to drink, a newspaper to read and a book to finish.

Yesterday was another intense and long workday, and the juggling continues. A somewhat edgy three-party phone call with partners who we also compete with at times ended up producing strong feelings that drain people but also spur them into action; more or different than expected. This is why rational planning often underestimates time – we simply leave out such scenarios, and yet they happen all the time. I ended up spending half the day on something for which I had budgeted only an hour or so.

It was good that the St. Johns called in the middle of the afternoon to tell us that they were going into Cambridge to a comedy show; would we want to join them. Such prods from outside are good and put an end to the possibility of contemplating work beyond five o’clock. We bought the tickets, drove into town, had a bowl of Chinese noodles and sat down in the tiny third-floor comedy club, and laughed, which is what we paid for. I had not realized there were so many styles of stand-up comedy. I could not understand everything, sometimes because of accents and language and sometimes because I am a little dense or could not imagine that jokes could be made about such things. For example I did not get the KKK jokes from the black comedian and this was, how embarrassing, publicly acknowledged. Katy-Blair offered my Dutchness as an excuse which then led to more jokes. It was a tiny place and I was sitting at 2 feet from the host so every facial expression is picked up and potential material for more jokes. At least I was not asked to get on stage, that would be have been the ultimate embarrassment.

Back home we tumbled into bed, tired from the long day. And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, I relived the last few seconds before the crash; the plane veering off to the right and out of control, the trees rushing up to meet us and the sense that this was it, game over!

It took awhile to shed the image and let it go, partially because I wanted to understand why it suddenly appeared. It is true that on the 14^th of the month the crash does tend to come back to the center of my attention, depite the work and other distractions. Also, Axel and I talked about his EMDR sessions with Ruth. They don’t talk all that much about the crash but yesterday they did.

What was left after the crash image disappeared was the realization, and surprise, that I think nothing of getting on a plane again.

I woke up from a long night full of dreams about juggling. This is not surprising since I am juggling what feels like a 1000 balls at work. In November I could not have done this, holding this much stuff in my RAM (random access memory) but things are better now and there is more space available although I am bumping up against my limits. Axel, on the other hand is still experiencing the after effects of his concussion: he is forgetful, easily distracted and has other symptoms that require specialist attention. He will soon see a head injury specialist at Spaulding Rehab Hospital. The doctor is Chinese and does acupuncture as well, so we are hopeful.

I just got off the phone with William in Ghana who reported to me about the second leadership workshop that the team we created in Ghana for this purpose has successfully led. He was enthusiastic and reported that all participants returned with reports of progress and that a healthy competition is fueling the commitment of participants to do even better next time. It warmed my heart to hear that teams had gone out in their districts to consult with groups they otherwise would not have. They collected data about the true state of affairs (rather than assuming they know) and engaged their peers who stayed at home. The coaching visits were critical and made people realize that this program and the commitments they made are for real and they will be held accountable for producing the results they said they would. It was a great start of my day!

Yesterday was another intense and long day with new tasks coming over the transom as soon as an old one was completed. I drove home exhausted. When I turned into Masconomo Street I saw people walking and enjoying the extended daylight hours. At home, Axel suggested we go for a walk as well and celebrate daylight savings time.

Going for such a ‘constitutional’ was one of those intentions from last fall when we could only contemplate a walk around the Masconomo/Proctor Street loop but not actually do it; now we can and have been able to for some time now. But the pace of our life has picked up; we need to be more intentional about this walk, otherwise it will never happen.

It felt good to get the stiffness out of our limbs. We both tend to get very stiff when we sit in one position for some time. Axel was stiff from sitting at his desk the whole afternoon and I was stiff from sitting in the car for an hour.

While Axel cooked I read him the latest entries from Mike Morris’ sixcense blog (see blog roll on the side) about the elections. We prefer to listen to Mike on stage but reading his entries as an aperitif for dinner is pretty darn good! Sita and Axel then settled down for a movie but I had nothing left and went to bed around 9 PM.

All you have to say to two 22-year old boys is that a girl currently holds the record. They want to break it, no matter what. And so, yesterday, on that blustery Sunday, with winds up to 40 knots and the temperature below 40 degree Fahrenheit, Pieter and Huib donned their bathing suits (why they brought these in their luggage is beond me) and immersed themselves in the frigid waters of Lobster Cove. Axel went out, dressed in a warm coat, to document the event. Documentation is important. You have to have proof. Here is is.

The previous record holder was my niece Willemijn who immersed herself in early May many years ago. This was never documented since she did not set out to create a new record. Our own first immersion is usually not until sometime in June and even that I find too early and much too cold.

It is fun to take the boys places and try to imagine the experience through their eyes. The things we take for granted, find normal, are not for a visitor. I am familiar with this feeling as it happens each time I leave the country.

I biked to Quaker meeting, heading into the fierce wind on my way to Beverly Farms. It was hard work but felt great after a Sunday morning breakfast with too many calories. On my way back it was smooth sailing with the wind pushing me home. I think I may have fallen asleep in Meeting, the hour went very fast and I enjoyed the quietness after having to be ‘on’ and constantly anticipating about what next for the last two weeks.

We took the boys to a performance of Chorus North Shore for its annual spring concert. This time it was ‘An American Quilt’ with some locally produced music. The piece de resistance for me was Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms which I found very moving. The children’s choir was an essential part of that rendering. Later Pieter and Huib (and everyone else) got to sing along with “This Little Light of Mine,’ and ‘America the Beautiful’ which must be an odd hymn for them. This would-be American national anthem is so very different from our Dutch (real) national anthem in which we sing lovingly of serving our Spanish King. After the performance we headed over to our favorite coffee place for a cup for tea/coffee in the Atomic Cafe.

The boys also got the American Sunday afternoon grocery shopping experience; this too is full immersion, followed in the evening by a very unamerican fajitas dinner. We watched in amazement the enormous quantities of food that these rather skinny kids take in (must be the bicycling!).

Back home the swimming challenge was unwittingly created by mentioning Willemijn’s feat some years ago. And while Axel was documenting the event I called Tessa in the hope to get her out of her funk, or at least for some temporary relief. They had just gotten another 2 foot snow dumped and the winter appears without end. No wonder she is thinking about finishing her studies in California! When everyone was back inside Ankie called from France and between Axel and me kept her on the phone for over an hour. This is a normal length conversation; there is always so much to talk about, even though she faithfully follows my journal. She knows much more about my life than I about hers, which is why we need at least an hour.

At the end of our very late dinner I was ready to go to bed. Sita was working against a deadline (still up at 3 AM I noticed), Jim was jamming with a friend in a music studio in Danvers and Axel and the boys sat down to watch ‘If,’ a movie Axel last watched in the late sixties. He remembered it as significant but now realized that may have had something to do with his not so mental clarity at the time (remember, the sixties!).

I am still on Tanzanian time and thus wake up early. The weather is bad; again, no flying today.

Yesterday I was supposed to have flown to Concord and Laconia with my flying buddy Bill but the weather was too bad; three weather systems are colliding over New England. Instead I met with the other three co-owners of my plane and we discussed upcoming repair needs and how we are going to pay for them.

Late in the afternoon I picked up my nephew Pieter with his friend Huib, both medical students in Leuven (Belgium), who had bussed in from New York for Spring Break. In a pouring rain we drove straight to the Shriner’s Hall in Wilmington to watch a Roller Derby. In my 26 years in the USA I had not seen such an event in real life. It is very American and seemed like the appropriate way to celebrate International Women’s Day. After all, the sport is about assertive women racing on wheels to break through logjams and get ahead. I loved the way all the women, as well as the referees, some of which were male and one a canine, used the concept of a uniform loosely: there was lots of room for individual expression and creativity around the theme of sexy shorts and net stockings. What better way to way to celebrate women’s liberation and empowerment!

Sita and Jim’s friend Fred is dating one of the stars (‘Maura Buse’) from the Boston Massacre, the team that won from Maine’s Port Authority team and the more fearsome Bronx Gridlocks (dressed in cute yellow and black/white checkered outfits). Pieter and Huib got their picture taken with another one of the stars (‘Clare D. Way’) after the prizes were awarded.

I had always assumed that Roller Derbies were somewhat gothic and dark, with people full of tattoos, wearing leather, spikes and black or fluorescent hair. The name of the Boston team suggested so much. How wrong I was. It was a joyful, noisy and irreverent family event. The sport itself suggested strong women hitting each other off the track, brute force with a sexy feminine veneer (‘this is a contact sport’). Again I was wrong, although there was a lot of jostling, pushing and shoving and some bad falls, all followed by the most amazing recoveries. Axel and I shuddered at the sight of some of those falls.

The sport requires finesse, good balance, strategy and endurance. It was fascinating and exciting. We watched three ‘bouts’ of half an hour each. The Boston team won each hands down. Basically there are two teams of five women who circle around on old fashioned four-wheel roller skates, at high speed on a concrete floor in a rink marked by pink fluorescent tape. Two of them are ‘jammers,’ one from each team. Their helmets are marked with a star. They have to brake through a wall of four fast skating opponents, in which they are helped by four of their own team members. There are as many referees as there are skaters because there is an elaborate set of rules and everything moves very fast. The referees communicate with hand signals to the public and to a whole battalion of people, most sitting on the side of the rink in front of laptops and a gigantic scoring board, and some inside the rink writing check marks after people’s names with blue markers on a small white board that sits on an easel. There are also people with clipboards, some sort of way station between rink and laptops, maybe. One of them, to my great surprise, was a colleague from MSH who left in the great clean up back in May (Alex).

You need to be away from home from time to time to appreciate what you have. I am lucky in that my frequent departures automatically produce frequent homecomings. These are the best moments of all. No matter how often I have done this, I never tire of this final part of my journey: first the landing and the joy of touchdown, then the phone call to Axel while taxiing to our gate; the impatience of going through the immigration line, the seemingly endless wait for my suitcase and then the last obstacle of the agricultural inspection (coming from Amsterdam I always carry food: cheese, sometimes herring and licorice). And then comes the best part of it all: going through the opaque doors of the customs area and stepping out into the arrival hall while scanning the waiting crowd for that one particular face that is so very (VERY) dear to me.

My arrival this time did not quite follow the script. For one, my suitcase came out in the first batch and so I walked out into the arrival hall much earlier than Axel had expected. He was not watching and we missed each other. I walked over to the side, a bit disappointed and puzzled and left several messages on his cell phone. I finally decided to sit on a bench and read my book while waiting for him. When I picked a bench, just a few feet away, I noticed the back of a familiar head of curls – he had been sitting there all along. The reunion was sweet and all was quickly forgiven and forgotten.

I received an update on Axel’s recovery and learned he is adding two new specialists to his care team: he is seeing a physiatrist (fizz-ee-a-trist) by the name of Sara Lee. She is not a cupcake. She is a physician specializing in physical medicine and rehabilitation. Physiatrists focus on restoring function to people after the orthopedes and neurologists have done their work of diagnosing and putting the pieces back together. He is also going to see a hand doctor, which is different from a peripheral neurologist, to give advice on how his left hand can regain its full functionality. It is much better than before, but his hand is swollen as a result of, what we assume, not the right kinds of exercises. We are getting in really specialist territory now.

Sita is rapidly filling up her dance card with trips to London, Dallas, Sharm El Sheikh, New York and Bangkok. So Sita and I will be flitting in and out of the country for the next few months (my trips will take me to Afghanistan and Ethiopia) while our men will stay put, keeping the home fires burning.

The latest update on Tessa and Steve is that they hate living in London (Ont.). The poor things have several more months of winter, cold and snow and this doesn’t help. The contrast between the lively student scene in Amherst and the industrial city of London and living surrounded by agribusiness soy fields is becoming increasingly untenable to them. Tessa has one more year to go and is beginning to wonder whether her sanity can handle this. We old people know of course that one year is nothing; but when you are 22 one year is about 5% of your life and that is a long time.