Sylvia's Journal

The doctor stopped calling about my temperature. I must have convinced him that I was in the clear. But I am not telling people anymore. This is of course the unintended side effects of the panic.

My brother and his wife came for a brief visit, in between visits to both our daughters where they got to see how they live in beautiful New England places. And our beautiful place of course. They mostly lucked out about the weather and got to see a fall festival in Rockport with cooks (female Italian and male French)competing on how to turn mystery seafood (only disclosed when they were at their stations) into a prize winning meal.

Of course we ate lobster and other seafood and then sent them off on a romantic weekend on deserted Cape Cod. When the big storm came they retreated to Boston and skyped me from a noisy Irish Pub to say they had a great time. They are off today, flying back to Holland.

Yesterday I took the train to New Haven for two workdays with Yale’s School of Public Health which is a partner on one of our global projects.

I took the train to avoid rush hour and long rides in the car from Boston to New Haven and back. It was both pleasant and scenic, along the Rhode Island and Connecticut coast. The train delivered me in rainy New Haven where an Egyptian taxi driver helped me practice the remnants of my Arabic while driving me to my AirBNB, an old Victorian house on a tree-lined street not far from the university. He had come 15 years ago in pursuit of the American dream. Had he found it, I wondered. “I now have what Americans have.” But it did not include a wife and children, nor his own taxi. He had gone from shipping containers in Egypt to driven a taxi in New Haven. I wondered what he had given up for this but the ride was over and I will never know,

My hostess was not home and she had instructed me to let myself in through the backdoor. It is a weird experience to sneak into the house of a total stranger like that. As it turned out I surprised the boyfriend who was fixing the media center; just like in the olden days when boyfriends fixed the stereo.