Sylvia's Journal

The week that just ended changed the lives of about 70 or so of my colleagues who were laid off in an attempt to bring our overhead expenses in line with our revenues.  Aside from the shock (how did this happen to me), the loss of office camaraderie, and, undoubtedly, wonder about one’s value to the organization, the layoffs are also confronting people with the immediate worry of Trump’s campaign promise to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.

It was the third ‘rightsizing’ episode I survived in my 30 years at the organization. How long I am spared is not clear. So far I have been able to bill myself to projects a sufficient number of work days to not be a drag on overhead. But the main projects I do work for will end later this year and there are no replacement projects in sight. It is a little bit like the discussions around sustainability: you can never say something is sustainable until it no longer is – and so it is with my tenure at the organization where I have spent about half of my life. Onwards we go with the understanding that when it is time to go, it is time to go. Hopefully by then Medicare will still look after our health care needs.

To make the departure for a trip overseas more acceptable to Axel we usually eat out the evening before I leave in a restaurant nearby, without worrying too much about the cost of what’s on the menu – a luxury that comes with still being gainfully employed. Last night we ate in a small intimate restaurant in Gloucester (the Franklin) where a jazz band (base, guitar and singer) was playing in a corner while we feasted on oysters, fish and good wine. It is the kind of small restaurant where one easily gets into conversations with neighbors whose table is just inches away (of course only if your table neighbors are as extrovert as Axel). They turned out to be very knowledgeable about jazz and knew the singer as well as the origin of many of the songs (with some help from the Soundhound app). We asked where they worked – ‘the swamp’ they told us, referring to the Washington swamp Trump claims to be draining. But so far we have only seen him populating this alleged swamp with alligators.

I have been busy knitting pussy hats, for Axel, for a friend and myself, all of us planning to march in Boston after inauguration day to show our unhappiness with Trump and his antics; especially as it concerns women (reproductive rights, here and elsewhere, harassment, legal protections, etc.). I will have just come off the plane from Yaounde (Cameroon) via Paris the day before if all goes as planned.

Axel’s pussy hat looks more like a piggy hat or a pink Viking hat as some of our FB friends told us – now, after knitting 3 hats I am getting better and the ears look more like pink pussy ears. One writer who does not agree with the frivolity of the pussy hats, the issues we protest about or not at all frivolous, described the effect of 1000s of pussy hats as a pepto bismol lava stream. I think it will be quite striking on a grey winter day.  I also like the lightness to accompany the seriousness. We have to keep laughing, if only to make a contrast with this new president of us who no one has ever seen smiling.

There was this poem playing inside my head, teasing me. It was about being behind bars. But what do I know about that? I could not retrieve the words but the imagery remained: words tumbling down like water, too fast to read, down a steep mountain, thinly layered over rocks and boulders, whole chunks disappearing underneath grassy parts and then reappearing again where the mountain meets the sky. Something wanted to come out but remained stuck behind bars.

The ‘being behind bars’ part kept me wondering, what was that all about? All was revealed when my friend and ex-colleague Liz, during lunch at the enormous Wegman’s complex in Burlington, told me about the documentary 13^th.

Last night Axel and I were supposed to go out to a new year’s party but Axel is sick again and so we stayed in and decided to watch the documentary.  That’s when I saw the bars, hundreds of them.

The most surprising part to me is how oblivious (if we are being generous) or how evil (if we are not) the powers that be are about how ‘the system’ (all actors together) will or might act when something  somewhere in the system changes. Wicked problems have been ‘solved’ under much fanfare as politicians tend to do, only to be a temporary illusion, generating over time even more wicked problems. Every administration deals with ever more complexity. Trump doesn’t seem to think so..”believe me, I can fix anything!”

Most notable are the contributions of all administrations (since Bush the elder), and yes, this includes the Clinton administration, to the worsening of the prison problem. It now has for generations torn apart families and emasculated young black men. So should we be surprised about violence, crime and drugs? It is not as if we don’t know about the stabilizing influence of whole (complete) families and how self confidence comes from being (and being seen as) a productive member of society.

If all this is about ignorance of system dynamics it is bad enough, but of course it is also about economics; there is money to be made, billions in fact. And then, buried way beneath all this, the fear of ‘the other’ which is as old as mankind – the fear of black men raping white women, while of course, the reverse was much more prevalent.

Our new administration from hell will be taking over in less than two weeks. Its members and adherents are making pronouncements that the documentary recognizes and cleverly matches with scenes from America’s past. This is a past that I cannot imagine anyone in his or her right mind would want to go back to. Yet, here we are. Vigilance is in order. I hope that our sane and reliable decision makers who haven’t already done so study history and get wise about system dynamics. Imagine if we had elected mostly historians and system engineers….  Sigh.

We spent the first day of the year 2017 in our pajamas, never left the house. We learned halfway through the day that Faro had strep throat as well, and so I probably have it too. In hindsight I think we practically asked for colds by going to the Aquarium and the Museum of Science during Christmas vacation week with all the snotty nosed children of Boston and surrounding areas. It’s good business for the makers of tissues. I buy the nice soft ones in bulk. Every few feet there is a box.

In my mind I had all these things I wanted to do as the end of this vacation nears but I have no energy to do anything other than reading. I have been completely enchanted by a Dutch writer, by Annejet van der Zijl. She has extensively researched and chronicled the lives of interesting and mostly Dutch and very colorful people who did amazing things, socially and art wise. Some of these people were alive and well (others not so well) at a time that I was trying to be a good student and color between the lines, preparing for earning a living. These people did not. They were either born into money (and usually squandered it) or married well, and when the money was gone they just survived. They certainly did not color between the lines. They partied a lot and managed through ups and downs, sometimes in a haze of alcohol and other stimulants. All of them, the ones that died young and the ones that lived beyond 50 became famous through their writing and illustrating the stories I read as a young adult.

It is easy now to give in to my addiction to this writer. With a few key strokes I can download her books from a Dutch book website and then read them on my iPad. I haven’t read this many Dutch books in more than a decade. It is too bad these books are written in Dutch. I have to enjoy them alone as there is no one around me here who can read them.

I accompanied Sita to the vet in a tearful farewell to her beloved cat Mooshi. The end of 2016 would also be the end of Mooshi.

Mooshi first showed up as an adorable peachy white kitten in Sita and Jim’s life in Salem. They lived with a bunch of friends next to the ‘real-cream-Bismarck’ donut shop on Bridge Street. I did buy the Bismarck once to make sure it was real cream (it was). I ingested its delicious 1000 calories. It resembled what is known in Holland as a ‘roombroodje.’ I used to consume these often when I was a high school student in Haarlem. I biked to and from school every day so those calories were used up daily – the Salem variety would take longer to burn up.

Mooshi traveled across the country when Sita and Jim tried out San Francisco. I remember the phone calls home along the road with Mooshi whining in the background. He stayed in their tent on some nights and on others was smuggled into cheap hotel rooms. The three of them then lived in their pricey one room apartment in the Castro section of SF. Half a year later they traveled back East, Mooshi still not liking road trips, and Sita and Jim preferring the East Coast after all.

Over the years Mooshi, always an indoor cat, moved less and less.  He messed up some nice couches sharpening his nails (for God knows what) and interrupted his sleep only to find a more comfortable (sunny) place and for taking care of essential body functions.

He didn’t care much for humans, especially not little ones and was very particular about who could pet him. Still, all those years, before the real babies came, Mooshi was Sita’s baby. Jim eternalized them in a lovely portrait.

Mooshi’s hairs and dander made it hard for Axel to stay overnight. He had to take special pills to manage the allergens.

Over the last few years Mooshi had developed diabetes which Sita and Jim valiantly managed with costly daily injections, making overnight trips more complicated as caretakers were needed who could do the injections. I remember the first time I did those and gave Mooshi 5 times the prescribed dose by mistake. Whether he got the injections or not, and in the right dose or not, they showed no visible difference. He kept peeing and pooping all over the place making life very difficult for everyone in his household. The cat was old and sick, and the decision to let him go seemed obvious to all but Sita and Jim.  They just couldn’t ‘play God’ as Jim called it.

Eventually, as 2016 came to an end, Sita and Jim had come to the same conclusion as all the parents that Mooshi had had a good and very long life but that it was time to go. I accompanied Sita to Mooshi’s final visit to the Northampton cat hospital. It was very sad; all those memories. We hugged and left Mooshi with the nice lady who gave Sita a box of Kleenex, understanding how hard it is to say goodbye to a beloved pet. On a happy note, Mooshi will never know what it is like to live under a Trump administration.

Christmas came and went. We were incomplete, without Tessa and Steve. Things simply did not work out, which was a shame. We may have come to the end of our traditional Christerklaas. The poems will stay, but not the frantic preparations on Christmas Eve and reading poems and hunting for gifts into the early morning hours. With Faro four, and for the first time understanding what happens at Christmas, the experience will be different from now on.

I still would prefer to be out of the country for the entire month of December, and maybe next year will insist on it, going off to some place, if such exist, that isn’t contaminated by the obsessive buying and gifting, especially for people who already have everything.

Maybe our best Christmas gift, which we gave ourselves, was to offer Faro a week with his grandparents at Lobster Cove so that his mom and dad could take care of a long list of work related to-do’s. They remembered that having one child is a hobby but two is a job. So we offered to take Faro. I ordered a bunch of museum passes from the library and drew up a schedule: Monday was zoo day; Tuesday was Museum of Science day, Wednesday was for the Aquarium, Thursday a trip to the Peabody and Essex Museum and Friday with grammy in Beverly before heading home. We also got two movies from the library: the BFG (Dahl/Spielberg) and the remake of the original Dumbo. Both were good fun for ages between 4 and 70.

On Monday we discovered that most zoo animals don’t like winter. Many of the cages were empty with signs that said ‘seasonal.’ The Stoneham Zoo was a sad affair with only a few animals that could stand the cold: a brown bear, a flock of chattering flamingoes, and animals that were asleep somewhere and invisible). We were done in about 45 minutes. We continued to downtown Boston for a hot chocolate and then on to the Franklin Zoo which had a few more animals, including a family of Gorillas living in a tent – I felt sorry for them, they looked so very bored. But there was a nice playground which was probably the highlight, plus a cow being weighed (1660 pounds), chicklets and a duck hospital.

We had a hotdog lunch (“my parents let me eat meat now!”) and then headed home. On Tuesday we visited the Science Museum together with all the children of Boston. Faro pushed every button, turned every wheel and had an average attention span of about 20 seconds. I would have liked to go there myself; there are some great exhibits for adults. On Wednesday we packed everything up for another trip into Boston where we met Sita at the Aquarium – another place where all the children of Boston had converged.

Faro was given the choice to return home with mom or with us; he choose us, probably because with us he had more chocolate and more movies than at home, and at night he had the bathtub to himself rather than having to share with his little sister.

Friday night I drove Faro back to Easthampton, leaving Axel with a persistent streptococcus infection in bed – which is also where he will transition from 2016 to 2017 tonight.

Yesterday, on my way to work, all the 12 or so stoplights between my home and work were green. It was a nice experience of flow, a good start of the day as a superstitious person would assume. Today all of them were red. It would be a bad day. If  you predict that something will go bad or end bad it probably will. Such thoughts can easily become reality as the mind is focused on all those things that could qualify as ‘not so great.’ There is usually a lot of these in one day. And then you were right, it was a bad day.

Looking back over the last 3 months – this is after all a time to look back – I can see the green and red stoplights all through the year – periods of high and periods of low; periods when I was in the flow and periods when I despaired.

One of the things I do in my coaching is getting the people I coach to take a step sideways and look through another window at their reality. I try to coach myself in the same way. Simply by stepping aside, and looking from a different vantage point, a bad thing can suddenly look good. Or, when we step back and look at what happened after the immediate ‘bad’ is over, still moving to the next window or the one on the opposite end, we see all sort of other things come into view, possibilities we had missed before.

I am quick to label something as bad but I have learned to catch myself. Before, when something bad happened everything got tainted with the ‘bad’ brush. It’s a bit like Axel’s silk painting – the tip of the brush touches the silk and whoops, the ink spreads wide and far.

Artists look at this not as something bad that happens (or something good for that matter) but with wonder. “Geez, look what is made possible now!”

My red stop lights today were moments of repose – of brief meditative experiences. I didn’t mind them. I think of Mark Twain’s wise words often in such circumstances: “If you are patient you can wait much faster.” I also think of this poem from a South African poet, Benjamin Mo Loise:

“In our whole life’s melody the music is broken off

here and there, by rests.

And we foolishly think we have come to the end of the tune.

God sends a time of forced leisure, sickness,

disappointed plans, frustrated efforts,

and makes a sudden pause in the choral hymn of our lives.

And we lament that our voices must be silent.

Our part missing in the music that goes up to the Creator from the

world.”