Sylvia's Journal

I feel like I am on one of those fast trains like the TGV in Europe. I am getting so fast from point A to B that everything outside is a blur. When there is a stop, all I can see is a whole bunch of little creatures jumping up and down on the platform outside my window. They are trying to tell me something and it is not about wishing me a good journey. Instead they are yelling, “hey, what about us?” When you go off on a trip, especially a two–week trip, all the loose ends and unfinished stuff appear in front of you, asking for attention and completion. This is on top of getting ready for the trip.

And then there are the people, the ones around you that you love and care about. They too need attention. The stress of getting everything done makes me rather self-absorbed. I have to make an effort to acknowledge the things they are doing to make my life easier, like cooking and cleaning and doing the laundry. There is a risk that this act of acknowledgment becomes yet another task, adding to the stress.

There are a few proven ways to get off this fast train, such as writing in a journal, meditation, going for a walk, or any other form of exercise or yoga. Over the years I have learned that watching TV, drinking or smoking pot are not good ways to get off the train. These activities give the illusion of a break. Staying with the train metaphor, these are more like going to the bathroom on a train; at first it is clean but as you get farther and farther it gets messier and messier.

One of the challenges of any effective form of stress relief is to avoid that the activity itself becomes yet another set of tasks or appointments. The idea is the opposite: it has to trigger the quiet reflection that stops the train, for a long time, in a field with buttercups and daisies, and cows grazing lazily in the sun.

This morning, while on the massage table at Abi’s the tears started to come freely. Stress, from all its other side effects, makes me stop paying attention to the signals from my body that all is not well. I have been worrying about Axel who has been in a lot of pain lately. He takes medication for the pain that appears to have an effect on his ability to focus. He becomes forgetful, stuff, lots of it, doesn’t get done, especially the things that he considers important, like spending some quality time with Tessa before she goes away again. Depression is a tricky state; solutions that appear simple to someone who is not depressed are unsurmountable mountains ranges for the depressed person. Often I get irritated, then angry and this morning it was clear that I am also very sad. The state he is in is not of his own choosing. And so I find myself, on the day of my departure, immersed in strong feelings and torn between paying attention to those, or get back on the fast train that is my to-do list. The conductor is whistling frantically for the train’s departure.

Yesterday was like the day before yesterday; too full. I had four long conversations with various people in Ghana, each speaking English with a different accent. When you have to listen to accented speech it takes a lot more effort and energy than when you listen to someone who speaks like you do. After that I went from appointment to appointment: shoulder doctor, physical therapy, mind doctor (EMDR). Luckily the ankle doctor canceled the appointment. I canceled another appointment, a committee meeting in the evening, so that we could have our last meal together as a family, before everyone heads out again: I off to Ghana, Tessa and Steve off to Canada on Sunday and Sita off to Davos to scribe as the rich and famous discuss the world’s troubles at the World Economic Summit in a couple of weeks. Only Axel is staying at home all the time, like an anchor.

Through my journal I have already received two threads that have or will connect me to people in Ghana. This is probably the best part of this community that has knitted itself around us and that has stuck with us, more invisible now, on the receiving end of these journal entries.

I, in turn, am tugging at the threads that connects me to people in Kenya in the hope that these pulls will do any good. I know others who read this are also connected to people in Kenya. The church burning tragedy echoes what happened 14 years ago in Rwanda. I liked to think that Kenya had passed that stage of unbridled mob violence, ethnic or not. I wish I could will those in power to stand up and use their power to unite rather than to divide. But instead I see a self-righteousness that reminds me of little boys in a sand box; unfortunately the stakes are so much higher than a bucket full of sand or an obstructed dump truck.

This is the first time I am writing my journal entry late at night. Actually, it could also be an entry written very (very) early in the morning, having missed an entry for January 3, the second day I have missed since July 21. This may be a sign of things to come. I barely had time to come up for air, on this first work day of the New Year. Now, with my exercise regime in the morning, I need one and a half hours to get ready to leave the house at 6, before the traffic starts streaming into Boston. And once at work, one thing led to another. Axel calls these self-generating tasks. They come on top of tasks that were already on today’s to-do-and-to-finish list. There was not much that could be postponed. I may be up to 90% of my old energetic self, but the pace required 150%.

Sometime during the day I realized that my email in box had quietly filled up again to 100. My colleague and office mate Jennifer asked whether email actually helped get things done. I tried to remember the pre-email days, the days of telexes and snail mail. I would simply not have tried to organize from a distance, on short notice and over the holidays, the complex event we are planning now in Ghana. We would have given ourselves 4 months to organize this, and maybe even one advance trip to set things up. Now, everything has sped up and expectations for immediate action and instant results have also risen, plus the money is tighter: do more with less and faster please. This is the tune we are dancing to. Not just me but everyone in our office. I did not get back in my car to drive home until 5:30. That made for a 10 hour workday; non-stop.

Morsi, who is also traveling to Africa, told me to take it easy; others told me the same. But how do you do that when the pace of work does not relent? Lower standards? Throw my hands in the air? Get sick again? I have yet to discover how to manage this dilemma.

One reason I worked late is to avoid having to work after coming home. When I arrived home the house was warm and welcoming, the food all prepared, a fire in the fireplace and a warm cup of tea, and the comfort of knowing that the work is done for the day. The Gorslines arrived soon after I got home with a hearty bean soup, cookies and cake. My long day ended with great and slow meal in wonderful company. What else is there to wish for?

I am writing this morning in my bed like the old days. This time I have a lap desk that Axel gave me for Christmas. It came with a long and beautiful poem about writing in bed and his waking up to the tap-tap-tap of my keyboarding. I am writing in bed because Tessa’s friend Roy is sleeping downstairs in my office which still has a bed in it.

The sky is winter blue and the sun is shining on Axel’s sleeping face. From where I sit I can see a few scattered patches of snow that survived yesterday’s rain in the yard of our neighbor Jackie. It looks like a great day for flying to Gardner.

I was supposed to have flown yesterday but the cloud ceiling was too low, 600 ft. Without an instrument rating I was not allowed up in the air. Instead I waited at the flight center with a bunch of other folks who were all hoping the fog would burn off quickly, as predicted in the forecast. I met David from Uganda who knows the US better than any of us because he drives a tractor-trailer and delivers goods all up and down the Interstates. He converts everything he earns into flight hours and has more ratings under his belt than I ever aspire to have. Once day he will go back to Africa or any other continent to fly commercially; According to David this is the place to learn to fly, especially the Northeast with its packed airways and variable weather.

Finally I gave up waiting for the skies to clear. Armed with a brand new navigation map to plan my trp to Gardner and a stylish Piper jacket that Arne gave me, I left to do some shopping. When I came out of the grocery store the skies were mostly blue. I did not return to the flight center but hurried home to get Axel to his massage appointment.

Axel woke up in terrible pain yesterday morning. I had not seen him suffer this much for a long time. It seems that anything that immobilizes his body for awhile (sitting in a car, standing up at a party) creates a terrible backlash for him, quite literally. He was able to get an appointment at the local massage place at the end of the day. He stretched and stretched until he ran out of energy and then withdrew with a book. When I got to Masconomo Street he had already started his walk downtown. I could see from the way he walked that every step was murder. We exchanged places and he drove the rest of the way downtown while I walked back home. It was my longest walk yet. I even tried a slow jog, no more than a 100 yards which left me huffing and puffing for the remainder of the walk home.

Back home I started to plan for my trip to Gardner. It took awhile to get the hang of cross-county planning again after all this time. I am excited about the trip but also happy I am not flying alone; I m not quite ready for that. When that was done I continued sewing the two baby quilts from scraps that were leftover from Sita’s two enormous quilts she made for Christmas for Tessa and me.

Roy, Steve and Tessa returned from visiting friends and cooked us a taco dinner, bickering in the kitchen about whether to add ketchup to the hamburger meat or not. Tessa got her way (with ketchup) because that’s what her dad always does. I listened in amazement at how strong her conviction was about this, and how equally strong Roy’s and Steve’s convictions were that this was not the right way. I think she won because they were on her territory. But it got me thinking about clashing cultures. I never mentioned that I was brought up eating spaghetti with ketchup instead of tomato sauce and thought that this was the right way to eat spaghetti. I had no idea.

My numb hands held the the fist paragraph of today’s entry when I woke up. It is always a fragile arrangement. There was a phrase in there somewhere, about yesterday. Not this yesterday, but yesterdays in general, which made me think something like, “Oh, of course, that’s why I do this EMDR exploration of the past (all these yesterdays).” It was a clever phrase and I had wanted to start my writing with it. But I made the mistake of turning over and sleeping a little longer. Now all that is left of this brilliant opening is a vague outline, like a footstep in a snowstorm, the wind quickly obliterating its exact shape and form. A wind is also blowing inside my head and waking me up. It is the airstream produced by millions of synapses firing; checking out to-do lists for today, smelling the bread baking downstairs (a machine), hoping for tea in bed, and stuff like that

There is also wind in the outside world, and rain. The fog horn bleats – I asked Axel for a verb to describe the foghorn’s sound and we agreed it sounds like a sheep. It is dreadful weather and staying in bed (by now the tea has arrived) seems like a great idea. Today will probably be the last day for the remaining snow that is still visible in patches here and there. Once again my flight to Gardner is postponed. I did keep the plane reservation to circle around Beverly airport again for some practice, assuming that the weather will be a little better around 2 PM and that I manage to get out of bed.

Yesterday morning we all piled into the car, Sita and Tessa in the back, Axel and I in the front, to drive to Wareham, south of Boston. We went to visit Axel’s mother’s only remaining sibling, the baby of them all, Charles, who was born in November 1909. He lives in a small trailer park, dwarfed by a big shopping center. This is handy when you cannot drive a car anymore. His small trailer home is the most uncluttered house I have ever seen and stands in enormous contrast to our most cluttered of all homes. His house is probably also one of the few remaining houses in the US without a computer or any other electronic gadgets; unless you count the singing and moving Christmas decorations. They are only up for the holidays and won’t clutter his living room much longer. His living space represents our collective yearning for a simpler life; but it would never do for us – no car, no computer. And yet, he is fully connected to the world through his friends, family and TV.

We had meant to treat him to lunch. Instead he treated us to a wonderful lunch at Lyndsey’s in Wareham. We ate all the things that Weightwatchers warn you about, served in huge portions. And while we ate Sita illustrated on a placemat all the family information we could collectively extract from him. Each piece came with a story and a twinkle in his eye. As the youngest of seven, Charles had been a keen and witty observer, especially of his quarelling sisters Penny and Betty, and appeared the wiser of them all. It was funny to hear him refer to his young nephew when we discovered this nephew is in his eighties. If that was young, what were we, and in particular Tessa with her 22 years?

After lunch Charles directed us on a driving tour of some magnificent beaches in the area. We people from the Northshore don’t know the Southshore at all. We felt like we were very far away from home. It was a glorious blue-sky winterday. I kept thinking that flying to New Bedford would have been a lot more fun than sitting in a car for 2 hours each way. We would have seen the cranberry bogs from the sky, as deep red blotches on the landscape, rather than at eye level. They are still magnificent that way, but not as striking; but the girls and Charles declared that they’d rather stay on the ground.

On the way back we had planned to visit the whaling museum in New Bedford but it was too late. So instead we stopped at the temple of modern and cheap furniture, called IKEA and got Tessa a rug for her large and cold Canadian living room. She’s penniless and in debt but we love her so much; we’d buy anything for our poor little darling. She found herself the biggest and cheapest rug that wasn’t also hideous. It has a tic-tac-toe pattern woven into it and nothing, we think, that the puppy can get his teeth in.

At home we found Steve up and recovered from his 18 hour bus ride from Canada, with his friend Roy. They were the ones that made the small ramp in and out of my bedroom, back in July. Now Roy is sleeping in that room, which looks again like an office rather than a sick room.

We completed Christerklaas and Christmas with an exchange of poems and presents between Steve and his family and ours. We now have more than a liter of real maple syrup, some more good books and Steve has things to keep him warm (including the rug) and several puppy paraphernalia.

Everyone went to bed very late, including us; we working on various projects (Christmas cards before Easter?) and the kids playing boardgames downstairs. It was fun to have a noisy and cluttered house. I wouldn’t want to have it any other way.