Author: Hilarie Page 21 of 31

The big show

On March 31, 2012

“We’ve gotta have a great show.” Thats what Judy Garland told Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms, a 1939 movie. And this past week I got a chance to work on another great show – the Planet under Pressure conference in London.

The show has been in the works now for over a year, keeping a number of my co-workers at IGBP pretty occupied for a long time. But I only really got involved with it after returning from my mom’s funeral in January. Together with my boss, Owen, IGBP’s Comms director, I designed all the exhibition displays and standing banners seen around the venue. I also helped organize and design the booth that we shared with our fellow Global Change organizations – IHDP, WCRP, DIVERSITAS and the ESSP. I know its a bit of an alphabet soup but look them up if you don’t know who they are. Together with my co-worker Charlotte, I designed the layout of the 6 meter by 6 meter booth that all 5 organizations shared at the conference. Getting everyone to agree on what the booth should look like was quite a task, stretching my diplomacy skills, which everyone who knows me, knows that they are not very well developed. I was aided by the fact that time was running out and a decision had to be made so the booth could be built. I also designed the 4 posters to have on the outside of the booth following the same branding used throughout the conference and identifying who the booth belonged to and an additional poster for the inside of the booth. Finally, right up to the day before I left for England, I was working on the Powerpoint slides that were to be used in all the plenary sessions in the auditorium.

Then, on Saturday morning, March 24th, Håkan drove me to the airport, picking up Charlotte on the way. There we met our co-worker Wendy and the 3 of us headed for London’s Heathrow airport.

For almost 2 hours we schlepped ourselves and our luggage through the London Underground from Heathrow to the ExCeL Center at the other end of the city. This was pretty much all I got to see of London in my week there. We arrived at our hotel just in time to check in, meet up with a group of others involved with the show and join them for dinner. The dinner was Indian food at a place just a stone’s throw from the hotel. I’m not a big fan of Indian food – would have preferred Chinese of course. But it was close and quick. And here started what for me was one of the best parts of coming along on this trip. I got to meet and talk with people I never have a chance to meet in my real life. At dinner I sat next to my boss Owen and across from Lidia Brito, one of the co-chairs of the conference. Like me, she had very curly hair so I felt we had something in common right from the start. She comes from Mozambique and is the Director of Science Policy and Capacity Building at UNESCO. Listening to her discuss ideas over dinner was the best part of dinner and she and I got a chance to talk about the UN and what she feels its purpose and its successes are as we walked back to our hotel. Truly an inspiring woman.

A breakfast meeting at 7am on Sunday morning in the hotel restaurant and all the madness started. By the way, the breakfast at the hotel was great! Every morning I had scrambled eggs, fried ham, delicious cumberland sausages and potato patties and sweet, fresh orange wedges on the side. And, of course, lots of much needed coffee. The sausages were great and in true Seinfield/New York diner fashion, I wish I could have eaten that breakfast at other times of the day too.

At this point, my prime duty was with the set-up and organization of the booth. The construction guys were putting up the booths and we wouldn’t have access to them till 2pm. But Charlotte and I checked out our delivery of stuff and discovered that our roll-ups and the posters I had made specially for the booth didn’t arrive with the rest of the stuff. Major depression on my part. Charlotte, using her logistics skills, set to work trying to track them down. Meanwhile I sat in on discussions regarding the plenary sessions.

Two pm arrives and together with staff from the other partner organizations we start moving furniture around in the booth, putting out brochures and setting up the computer and monitor that will show samples of Powerpoint slides from all 5 organizations. Still no posters or roll-ups. By 7:30 we had to vacate the premises and go back to the hotel. Dinner was eaten in the hotel restaurant this time since no one felt like going any further away. After dinner I was asked by Wendy if I could take on the job of being in charge of running the PowerPoint slides during the Plenary sessions in the Auditorium. Of course I said yes. This was the type of stuff I had been doing for over 30 years. Maybe not necessarily on-site but doing AV. And because Håkan had worked so many conferences over the years, I knew in theory what needed to be done. Also, I always have liked working and hanging around backstage with the tech guys. So then Wendy and I proceeded to work through the slides needed for the first Plenary session – staying up to 1:30 in the morning to get it done. The hotel staff very graciously helped me to print out the running orders so I could give them to the tech guys in the morning.

Monday morning arrived too early and after the hotel breakfast, I dashed over to the ExCeL center to meet up with the AV techies and deliver the slides for the day. Rushing over is a bit of a misnomer. The ExCeL center was huge!! It took at least 10 or 15 minutes to walk from one end to the other. And we had to walk through the entire place to get to the area our conferences was held in. I got a lot of excercise last week. After last minute discussions, I took up my place in the front row of the huge auditorium, put on my headset and listened to tech chatter. Nisha Pillai, the moderator, went up on the stage and the show began.

Lightning flashes and the movies

By Hilarie

On January 10, 2012

In Uncategorized

“How are you doing?” people ask me. “Are you OK?” And in all truth I can answer them, “Yes, I’m OK, I’m doing fine.” I suppose they expect that I should be feeling grief, or great sadness or be suffering a terrible case of mourning after the death of my mother. But I don’t really feel that way. I sort of feel… just…normal. I think it has to do with the fact that for many years now I have lived so far away from her – across an ocean. I maybe only got to see her once a year for about 2 weeks at the most. While we often talked on the phone during that time away, she wasn’t a constant physical presence in my life. I find myself still thinking and acting as though she is still just “over there”. But sometimes I see something or hear something or do something and like a lightning flash through my brain, I think, “oooohh, I have to tell Mom that.” And equally fast, I realize, “Oh, I can’t.” Then comes this deep sadness washing over me momentarily. But soon enough I am once again back to normal until the next time lightning strikes.

I have lived so far away from old friends and family and for such a long time now that I’ve become like one of those old movie projectors. And I have become a repository of old films. I carry around in my head short clips from movies recorded during my life – in Budd Lake, in Brooklyn, in Manhattan, on trips upstate to the Catskills or to Maine or California or back to New Jersey. They replay suddenly against the inside of my skull without warning. I’ve been collecting those clips a long time now – scenes of friends and family I rarely see – frozen in time. A few years ago I met someone who reminded me very much of an old friend in New York. The friend here in Stockholm was in her late 50s but the friend she reminded me of is now in her 70s. If I were to tell the Stockholm friend she reminds me of someone in their 70s she might get insulted. But in truth she reminds me of my friend as she was 20 years ago before I moved away and when the image of her was captured in the movie in my head.

Until I can capture new scenes upon my next visit to the States, I just replay the earlier versions I have stored in my memories. But now, I’m starting to gather a small collection of films that no longer can be updated. My grandmother, my father, and now my mother are among those films. There will be no sequels made of their stories. They remain the same, etched in time and memory – classics. Waiting for me to turn on the projector light and replay them.

Mom

By Hilarie

On January 4, 2012

In Family

Today was my mother’s funeral. The service was at Brigadier General William C. Doyle Veterans Memorial Cemetery, Wrightstown, NJ, where she will be buried alongside my father. It was a very cold, crisp day but sunny. Here is the eulogy I spoke at the service.

My mother was an artist.

Unfortunately, she was born into a time and a family where being an artist was a luxury that a girl couldn’t afford. The time was the Great Depression and the family was ruled by my grandmother Bertha Littman. When Mom was a young girl, getting a new dress that cost a whole 5 dollars was a major expense and she felt grateful that her parents bought it for her.

WWII was just ending when my mother was about to graduate from High School. She considered the possibility of going on to Cooper Union, an art college in New York City that you didn’t have to pay for. But you had to take a test and you had to have a portfolio to show in order to get in. And you had to believe in yourself. But if you had a mother who believed that the only thing a girl should do was get married, then what was the point of going to College? So, being the good girl who listened to her mother, my mom got a job right after high school and packed away any dreams she had of art school.

She went to work as a secretary for the Navy department and continued to live at home, contributing to the family budget with her salary. But a fellow co-worker suggested they run off and enlist in the Navy, in the women’s division known as WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). She considered it but she had just met my dad and she had my grandmother breathing down her neck with so? so? So instead of going off to see the world she got married and settled down in Jersey City, New Jersey.

7 years later the family moved to Budd Lake in Northern Jersey and there, my mom stayed for the next 34 years. She wasnt idle during those years: she worked full time. She raised 2 kids. She was very active in Temple Shalom, the Reform Synagogue which my parents helped form, several times holding the post of president of the Sisterhood and working hard to raise money to erect a building to house the new congregation.

But she never really forgot the art thing. When I went off to Pratt to study art I think, in a way, I fulfilled the dream she once had for herself. But she used her visual creativity in other ways. She, with my dad’s help, totally transformed the house in Budd Lake after we kids moved out. She used materials in unusual ways. I remember back in the 60s helping her hang wallpaper on the ceiling of our dining room. What a job that was – so unusual and it looked great. She hung exterior wall lamps on a textured, bright red living room wall creating an exciting focal point. She had my dad put up ceramic tile on counter tops in the dining room. Each piece of furniture she chose was different but everything blended together to make a beautiful unified whole. She did the same thing when she and my dad moved to their new home in Homestead. She had the ideas and my dad with his meticulous craftsmanship made it happen. I think she could have been a very successful interior designer in a different life.

I think of her and the generations that have gone before her. Our generations overlap. They are like a part of a revolving relay race through time. Each generation handing on the baton to the next. There on the track ahead of me has been my mom. She had the baton. She got it from her mother. I see mom coming around the bend. I enter the track, jogging towards the hand-off zone. We both run together for awhile until finally, the time is right and Mom hands the baton off to me. I’m off! Running my race through Art School, then life in New York City, then the really big curve – moving to Stockholm. Mom, of course, doesn’t stop running immediately after the hand-off. She keeps on going, slowing down gently, but still running along, until she slows down to stand on the sidelines cheering me on as I run my race. But now my mom is gone. Her race is done.

My mother loved ice cream. She loved potatos. Mah Jongg was her life-long passion. I remember as a child falling asleep to the sound of the tiles being shuffled downstairs in the living room. She liked reading. She liked to write. She wasnt so interested in sitting and discussing the big questions of life that I often tried to engage her in. She would rather be doing things with people. At the end of her life she got to do something she really enjoyed. She edited the Monroe Village Residents newsletter for 18 months. In that she got to write, to fix other peoples articles, to layout the pages and to draw the covers. me and mom

I remember way back in High school I had to read a novel called ”The Bridge of San Luis Rey” by Thornton Wilder. Now 40 some odd years later, I admit that I no longer remember any characters from the book or what even happened in it. But through all these years, the central theme of that novel has always remained with me: No one is truly dead and gone as long as there is still someone left who loves and remembers them.

I love you mom.

Resting at last

By Hilarie

On December 31, 2011

In Family

December 29, 2011

My cell phone rings on the night table. I fumble for it thinking it must be time to wake up. I look at the screen, without my glasses, trying to make out where I push to turn off the alarm. But then I realize its not the alarm but a phone call. I have no idea what time it is – but its still dark outside. I push the wrong button and accidentally hang up. The phone rings back. I say “Hi, its Hilarie” to the phone. The phone says, “Hi this is Karen down in Health Care. I’m sorry I have to tell you that your mom just passed away.” It is 1:30 in the morning and December 30th has already started

Karen asks me what I want them to do. I tell her I will throw on some clothes and will come down there. They are very kind when I get there. I go in to see her. I walk up to her bed. I put my hand on her cheek. It is cold but so smooth, as I stroke her face. This is what I came here for – now there are things that need to be done.

I am told that Hospice and a doctor have been called. My cell rings – it is the Hospice Rabbi, Rabbi Kraus. He tells me about my mom but I say that I already know – Health Care found me. He says he has just called my cousin and by that I know that I can also call her. Karel and I talk for a bit then I say that I have to call my husband. Its morning already there in Stockholm. I call him and we talk for a bit. He gets to work making plans to come here – ordering astronomically priced airplane tickets for him and our son.

The funeral parlor is called. They will send someone to come for her. I return to mom’s room and sit in front of this screen. I wait.