…And a Few Years Later

 I have been seriously remiss these past few years, at least as this blog is concerned.but it is still here and so am I.

I have heard that Google is deleting whatever has not been used recently, so I am posting this and giving you, dear reader, an IOU.

I am still here. 

More to come. 

My Lunches with Andrew

About six weeks ago, the CEO of my part-time employment sent out an email assuring us that over the Spring Break the school was monitoring the COVID-19 situation, was deep cleaning and in general taking more care. That morning I had gone to the pool the same as usual and had even noticed that the locker room did seem cleaner and the water was warmer and more than usual chlorine-smooth, silky. The school crisis team was on top of things, the email said—until, not even a day later, his next email, per Governor Andrew Cuomo, said all SUNY and CUNY campuses would be moving to online classes. Boom. Initially the pool was not closed when classes went online, but then it was when there was no really clear information on the CDC website saying that chlorine really did kill pretty much everything, including the virus. Plus, there were the issues of the lockers, the benches…the whole gestalt.

At first it seemed like overkill and then it didn’t, and we now know that Cuomo knew before most of us what was likely coming down the line. And then the changes cascaded rapidly until everything at the school except essential services (Facilities, Security) was online, and then 100% of non-essential employees had to be working from home. Although I have disagreed with the governor, or at most thought of him with “Oh well, he is the best we have” faint praise, Cuomo is made for this time, this place: what can look like arrogance in lesser situations is exactly what is needed here. “Bully Andy,” as he is known, is focused, thorough, detail-oriented and articulate. And then poof! No more places to go or people to see.

“See you in 2021!” a friend texted. Maybe so. I live in a state where because of COVID-19 more people have died than on 9/11. Within a month from now, more Americans will have died from COVID-19 than did during the ten or so years of our involvement in Vietnam.

Aside from teaching one class online, for about five years I have been retired. I am an introvert who lives in a 1100 square foot house with two aging but loving house cats. Before COVID-19, I grumbled at having to get up in time to get to the pool three days a week year round and to go to lunch the other two days.  I mean, I would have to stop whatever I was doing and get dressed and go out.  Did I pack my towel and swim shoes? The lock and key for the locker? Those days, going to the pool felt different until I got there and found the exercise invigorating. And then after class, I came home, had a second cup of coffee, and felt energized for the rest of the day. Every other activity was pretty much TBD, negotiable within what I now see as the framework of a small daily routine.  

Retirement meant choices and order: I made a list every night of what I wanted to do the next day, and usually I got to all those things sooner or later. Just as I had when I worked full time. These days I make a weekly list and some things get done and others don’t. I mean, when inhaling wrong in the post office or touching a gas pump without wearing gloves could prove to be lethal, then maybe a list that has hourly activities implied seems….foolish. Silly. As the student-inmates used to say when I taught in a state prison for men, “I ain’t got nothing to do but time.” That said, let me assure you: I am in no way in prison. At the most, I can’t come and go as I might like, but I can still come and go (even if I go out to where other people are maybe once every 10 days at a minimum).

I had been planning to use my frequent flier miles to go somewhere (destination undecided) this year; for two-plus months I had time to make my choice, to develop an itinerary. There was no rush. But now my passport is gathering dust. And when I do think of making reservations to somewhere, mostly just to make them…well, I take myself for a walk—walks that pass for exercise and that do serve to air out my head.

It’s hard not to want to plan.

I am in a fallout shelter of a sort with windows, electricity, heat, water, food, Wi-Fi and a house full of stuff to keep me occupied if I so desire. Still, this time has redefined “home alone” as well as “home sweet home”. For me this time is inconvenience, not catastrophe. I did finally locate some gloves online. I suppose if I thought about the situation the wrong way I might think that one of the few things between me and possible death is a bar of soap, basically. But I don’t freak out.

I just carry on in my own time zone in a kind of suspended animation.

So in the course of a few days I went from minimal out-of-house routine plus big laundry, groceries, errands, and never getting up before eight except to go to the pool to, these days, almost zero routine except for…. meals. Feeding the cats. No pool, so no reason to put on my Fitbit, really, except to go for a walk. I have plenty of clothes, and now that we don’t know when it will be safe to go forth as usual, this is not the time to Marie Kondo anything as far as I am concerned. In fact, I wish I hadn’t donated my ancient fuzzy and comfy bathrobe over the summer back when donations were still accepted. I could use it now.

Just about never in my life have I ever been bored, including now. I may not like the stay-at-home order where I am not as free to come and go without worry as I was a month ago, but I am not in dire social straits during this retirement on steroids. I have an income and health insurance. I am privileged and comfortable enough to know I am going to gulp hard when I open my most recent report on my very conservatively invested retirement fund, but I am not going to panic. The stock market goes up; the stock market comes down. 

Maybe in some ways I have been preparing for this all my life.

I mean, all things considered, it’s not too terrible to be a non-essential worker even if it comes with a little sensory deprivation.

It’s funny how even those small tasks, those boxes on the calendar, the items on the to-do list served a skeleton to hang the time of my days. No more almost-daily excursions, and every once in a while I have to stop and think what day it is. Tuesday I hold an online office hour and put out the garbage; other than that, my time is mine in a way it never has been in this time in which the outside-of-my-house has the potential to be a biohazard site. I used to get up at eight at the latest, but these days it’s sometime between eight and nine; after decades of getting up at six to go to work and being in bed by ten, I now stay up until midnight or later. The cats have figured out that something is up, I think; Moonbeam Drama Queen when she is awake brings me her favorite toy at least once a day and cries if I do not immediately lavish generous praise on her for providing for me. Swishy, on the other, hand has decided she needs to stay close to me all morning after breakfast, once we are both up and functioning—and she can’t decide if she wants to sit on her chair, on my chair in the kitchen, on the cat scratcher with the catnip, or on the table. (I have long tried to make her a lap cat, which would reduce her indecision, but I have learned yet again: she will never be a lap cat, always a next-to cat.)

I am in no way in a bad way in all this suspended animation; this is The Time of the Introvert. I have occasionally felt overwhelmed in loud crowds. But I was designed to succeed in situations like, this say-at-home-if-you-can, “social distancing” time, pre-, post-  and during pandemic life. Besides, I filled out the census form which took all of ten minutes and resembles nothing like the one I remembered doing in the past, but I was counted, and therefore I am. I still tend to sleep a little later on weekends than on the other five days, and when I do go out even for a walk, it is usually, still, at the retired person low-traffic hours at the supermarket: noonish, during feeding.

I am sure extroverts find this try-to-stay-home time as a shock to their systems (and those who do not know what category—introvert or extrovert--they fall into should find an online version of the Myers-Briggs Test and find out for sure). I do hope they survive to do the work to get things rolling again full-time and loud when the pandemic is over. In the meantime, let’s hear it (but at low volume) for peace and quiet. Maybe Pascal was right in some ways: “All men’s [sic] miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”

But in the meantime: the gyms, the bars and clubs are all closed. No more sports. So? My life is in some ways seriously the same except I can’t come and go as I like. And my modest destinations (pool, lunch, wherever else) are off limits in this time of suspended animation.

I mean, it’s not as though we are being asked to be our versions of Anne Frank here.

That said, somehow, sometimes, our leadership (and I do not mean Andrew Cuomo here) has seemed to be willing to decrease the surplus population. Maybe the observation attributed to Winston Churchill was correct: Americans always do the right thing, but only after they have exhausted all the other alternatives. Let’s hope we finally do.

After a couple modest pandemic pandemonium (food apocalypse now!) trips to the supermarket a few weeks ago, I likely have enough food for a month and then some.  I have to eat the perishable food first: apples, salad, or blueberries on oatmeal, before I go to the frozen blueberries under hot oatmeal, the blueberries al dente. I am not hoarding, but thorough: canned beans, salsa, bread, cheeses, eggs, pasta (and I am not one for pasta in normal times). Canned corn and green beans, many of the things my mother had in the cupboard except no Duncan Hines cake mix. Tuna and salmon in cans. I decided to try tater tots since there was no waffle or pancake mix in the supermarket, but I did see on the internet that you can make a waffle of a sort, pretty much, with sweet potato tater tots (and I already had several quarts of maple syrup that will need to be used). One can of Dinty Moore beef stew just because (but I drew the line at Spam). Sauces since I am not much of a cook. Nuoc mam and Vietnamese chili sauce. Rice. Laundry detergent and especially, especially, coffee and decaf and cream. Since it was evident that I would be inside through Easter, I did buy a small package of Peeps. Through the miracle of Chewy.com I have enough food for the cats, at least for now. The big stuff—comforter, cat beds--has made it through the super-duper washer at the laundromat.

On sunny days I go for a stroll around the neighborhood. My back gets stiff if I sit too long, so I snooze. (Rehearsal for this was fifteen months ago when I had to stay inside for two weeks after hip surgery. I was not as mobile and functioning then, though. These days, it is a little more difficult to be housebound when you are not recovering from surgery.) But hey, people from the northeast US are used to spending time indoors, though usually because of massive blizzards and roads unplowed for at least a few days. And this time is evidence that we can adjust: during yesterday’s trip to buy fruit and veggies after two weeks, I was masked and gloved and with purpose, but not with the drive of the first couple trips: I wasn’t back in what I think of as the pre-COVID-19 supermarket trance, exactly, but I wasn’t rushed, either.

Once I have room in the refrigerator, the plan is to order hot and sour soup from the Chinese restaurant and maybe even freeze some (if Google is to believed, this is possible). (IF the Chinese restaurants are still open, and rumor already is they may not be.) Plan B: tacos and chili.

Much of my current food stash would be appropriate for a fallout shelter during my childhood, but I am in no bunker. I have electricity, water, heat, a roof over my head, Wi-Fi, music, and good feline company, all of which without the amenities would make for a different experience. (Once the weather warms up and I open the windows, I am going to have to lower my voice so the neighbors don’t hear me talking to the cats, but that is a subject for another day.) I listen to podcasts including BBC Desert Island Disks, which seem appropriate, all things considered. I have finished bingeing Foyle’s War on Acorn. No need to duck and cover since no nuclear bomb is going to drop, and I am not going to have to plant a Victory Garden. I don’t have to start canning. One of my earliest memories is visiting an aunt when she was in an iron lung—polio was also caused by a virus, by the way--and it is not likely I am going to end up being the latest version of that if I am careful. If the Fates allow.

But now I understand why my grandparents had what looked like a huge Victory Garden and why, when we finally cleaned out her house in the 1990s, we found food my grandmother had canned as late as 1947 in her basement. It’s not difficult to understand putting up stores, borderline hoarding, when it feels more like providing for yourselves--trying to make sure in a time when any other certainly seems nowhere in sight. Provide, provide. Not exactly whistling in the dark, but…well, which way do you want to bet?

I am also trying to remember the context for a former biologist colleague telling me a good thirty years ago that it is likely we are all going to die from a virus. We could have been waiting for a meeting to start, but how the hell did we even wander on to that subject? He was also the person I asked about something I had happened upon in the college library in Jane Fonda’s book: yes, he confirmed, all the cells of the body are completely regenerated every seven years. Who knew?

Back to the present: I have a pile of books to read, as always.  I still have some of the books I didn’t read after hip surgery: The World According to Garp, for instance. A couple weeks ago I assembled the three adult books I remember being in the living room, between the bronzed baby shoes bookends, when I was growing up: Kenneth Roberts’ Boon Island, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar. Since the public library is closed, my book does not have to be returned right away: Daniel Levin’s Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives, a 500-page book which is proving to be…. slow going (and may be unreadable). For my birthday right before lockdown I got a volume of E.B.White’s essays. I have online subscriptions to the NY Times and the Washington Post. So I have no shortage of things to read or even to watch.

I have always washed my hands, but now I wash them even after I take the newspaper out of the plastic sleeve it is delivered in. It’s hard not to scratch my nose when I can feel allergy season beginning now that the snow has melted. I’ve made a mask out of a scarf, and I also have several dust masks I bought when I was in Lowe’s in late February, right before social distancing; Trump had just said there were many “elements of medical” (language so bizarre that it was in itself a flag) and said that all would be well. Yeah, right. So I bought dust masks.

Beyond those precautions, I can only wash the door knobs so many times.

I am not going to turn into Felix Unger about the surfaces in the house. But yes, they are cleaned more than they used to be. I may be living in Weimar USA, but I can’t gather in a crowd to protest.

Even if there is no immunity to COVID-19, I have to think I have reasonably good immunity built up.  My inoculations are mostly up to date--even typhoid, Hep A, Hep B, typhoid, polio, and Td/Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis). Right now my prescriptions are filled. I lived in Vietnam during SARS--and stayed put--because the closest person infected was 1000 miles away (and the closest one at home, had I been home, was in comparatively nearby Toronto. Granted, when I stopped in Hong Kong for a few days on my way home after SARS had pretty much faded away, I was one of very few tourists in the Hong Kong airport and in the hotel). I think of the developing nation hotels where I have stayed for $15 a night, the food I have eaten: the balut--fertilized duck egg--for instance, and the platter of chicken heads, all facing the same direction and looking something like Abraham Lincoln in their brown nuoc mam, and the dishes that were wrapped for me by others in rice paper, at the table--and I wrapped their food, too. The (occasional, I grant you) street food I have munched. Swine flu, bird flu. The squat toilets (and the toilets that seemed so much like Cholera Central that I decided that maybe my bladder was stronger than I thought it was, after all). This all by no constitutes immunity to COVID-19, I know, but still. So good, so far. 

Also, public service announcement: I have never had malaria, but the two types of prophylactic medicines have been so powerful (with bizarre side effects that started with nightmares) that I stopped them before I should have. I have never taken hydroxychloroquine but I would not unless I really had to. Anything malaria-related requires strength I may not have.

I had thought that the closest I ever wanted to be under house arrest had already happened when I was asked to stay within the walls of the school I was at in the Mekong Delta after a rumor—totally unsubstantiated—arose that the local Muslim pirates in the Bay of Thailand were planning on kidnapping the two Americans in town at the start of the war with Iraq. (And even as I was told this, I was also assured that the pirates did not kill anybody but just held people for ransom: “They are nice pirates.”) Every school is surrounded by a wall, and you are a “member” or not, and with help from the US Consulate, the compromise was for me to tell the guard at the gate where I was going, and, if possible, to take along a local. Just to be safe.

That was then. These days, the phrase “going viral” will never seem the same. I put on a mask before I go out. It’s sweaty under there. I don’t need to wear earrings or makeup. I tell myself the mask is a fashion statement. Indoor clothes, outdoor clothes.

And every once in a while this all still seems so surreal that it cannot be happening.

According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it seems that these days we are pretty much at the “Safety” level, far from the Self-Actualizing level. Or at least we are aware of that Safety level in a way I at least was not in the past. Then again, as they say on the internet: “Your grandparents were called to war. You are being called to the couch.”  How much we took for granted even a few weeks ago. That said, it is difficult to imagine that health insurance costs will not skyrocket. To their credit, my employer has done all it can to manage to keep even part-time workers employed, at least until the end of the semester. Other people are without work; people at work are being careful in ways they never imagined.

Speculation on Twitter and elsewhere is that nothing will ever be the same again after the pandemic; children who were born circa 9/11 are now coming of age. Will we again be forever changed?

Maybe so. Already I have heard that it seems that, looking back, we really didn’t need all those meetings after all—and a lot really can be handled by email! Maybe people who are rushing to hoard toilet paper might (I did say “might”) think more kindly of refugees who are in many cases fleeing for their lives, not hustling for (and with the means for and the luxury of) a 12 pack of Charmin. I hope that after these months we will all be beyond what I think of as the German Hamsterkaufe stage (“Hamsterkaufe” meaning shopping like a hamster cramming food into its mouth); we may not have been buying food before the virus as we did recently, but many of us were certainly were happy and regular customer-consumers.

Some say after this is over, there will be the big party of all parties. We will hug freely again. Nobody is predicting that people will be going, “Oh boy, back to the meetings that we replaced for a few months by email.” Maybe there will be less support for the Edifice Complexes of The Powerful and the accompanying reorganizations and remodeling of the many probably not-necessary levels of management, tasks completed mostly in an attempt to justify job and salary. Maybe.

And I hope we try to fix the things that we did to ourselves, the parts of our society that we broke, resulting in lack of (or criminally unfair) healthcare and employment compensation--and our relentless consumer culture. We had a serious lack of worst case preparation for the next pandemic.  (Note: this event is less like Pearl Harbor than it is like Chernobyl where the powers ignored the problem until it was too late to stop it. And there should be Nuremberg-type trials after this is over.)

The One Per Cent versus the Rest of Us. I know how modestly fortunate I am; I teach a variety of students online, many of whom always, still, represent the first generation in their family to go to college. They all work at least part-time. I have not, in the past month, been brave enough to go back to their first week online introductions where they told us all a little about themselves; I am afraid I would now find myself making an educated guess how many are now no longer employed. We live in discombobulating times: one of the best returning adult students whom I imagined as fairly unflappable recently handed in a writing assignment that was blank. (Of course I asked her to resubmit it.) Who knows how many will test positive and have to be hospitalized? The possibilities seem horrific. Viruses are shape-shifters.

Until the situation improves, to be safe, I am not being lazy so much as I am being energy-conserving (but getting exercise) just in case. I would like to postpone any currently avoidable trip to the doctor, to the veterinarian. I want to maintain some pandemic equilibrium, so to speak. I don’t want to catch a cold, pull a muscle. Please may I not need a plumber. Let’s hope the furnace doesn’t need fixing. It seems likely that the home repairs I had penciled in for this year (such as replacing the garage door) may have to be postponed since I don’t want somebody tramping germs around. So far the worst thing that has happened is the printer does not seem to be working, but that proved to be fixable with a USB cord. 

And even now in this time-with-little-structure there is still always something else to do, and if this retirement on steroids does not prove that work—any task—expands to fill the time you have for it, I don’t know what ever will. I get a few things done every day and call it good; the most ambitious pandemic housekeeping project I have undertaken is cleaning out my underwear drawer.

People bloom in different times and in different ways. Always have. We don’t know when or how we will come out of this. Maybe there will be dancing in the street (as opposed to in the living room), but maybe there won’t. Maybe just a sigh of relief and a move from a stroll to a having little more spring in the step. I look forward to driving where I want to—even through the potholes. I am hard pressed to believe I will be glad to navigate holiday rush hour traffic near Albany again, but maybe I will once I am free to come and go at will. I do know I will be glad to get my hair cut. To see my family and friends.

So be it. Truth be told, I don’t mind not having to accomplish too much. At least for now, the cats still sit on the book I am reading and even on the yellow pad I am writing on. I still text Dad jokes to my nephews. The laundry still waits to be put away longer than it should on the rocker upstairs for a day or two. Somehow the T-shirts still need touch up ironing and I have to admit there is (as I knew pre-COVID-19) a lot to be said for sitting around in sweat pants all day. Now that there’s less of a routine of sorts, it’s okay, although I do miss having to go out and see people. I miss the freedom to do whatever and not have to worry about getting exposed (or exposing someone) to something invisible and airborne that has the potential to kill me since I happen to be in what I think of as the “endangered species” (at risk) category per the CDC and Andrew Cuomo. I miss the whiff of chlorine as I rinse out my bathing suit in the sink three mornings a week. My guess is I will want to dress a little better than I used to before all this self-quarantine began, but after those first few days, I make no promises.

I started going to water aerobics because I wanted to get more exercise, exercise that I correctly assumed would be easier on my knees and hips, than, say, jogging—or anything that happened in non-water gravity. Water aerobics has the feel, sometimes, of splashy gym class, but most often, with the music, it seems as much like dancing in the low end of the pool than anything else. The locker room is rackety and crowded, with never enough room, the floor as often as not slippery. But once we get in the water, we (students, mostly women of a certain age) are visible only from the neck up. I don’t even get my ponytail wet. Being in the pool is like being in church in that we students each have our usual places in the pool to occupy: I am a low end of the pool kind of girl, and even there the water is almost up to my shoulders.

Nobody can tell if I am kicking as high as anybody else or lifting my knees halfway to my chin or not. For me, a non-swimmer in the low end of the pool, this is a non-competitive, low-impact, invisible, Zen activity. Still, I watch the faces of the other women as we form a circle around the teacher: my face, I like to think, is Zen but observing, counting the steps as in dancing school. Others also seem serious—or really focusing far more than I am—and a few always seem to be happy happy, what I think of cheerleader happy, as we go from jumping jacks to a 100 step cross country ski move. One student even once asked the lifeguard to take her photo as she smiled and posed with her weights as the rest of us bounced around in the blue waves and the bubbles. Esther Williams we are not.

In the water, collective as the activities are, nobody cares as long as you don’t go under (which I did, by the way, and went home to dose myself prophylactically with leftover atomic antibiotic, just in case). Go with the flow but not totally.  I now think of the pool as normal, inconvenient life, a place of fluid, splashy business.

Someone once told me that at the end of first grade, second grade looked scary. True enough even though a pandemic is not the same old same old, exactly. These days, my late morning/noontime routine is what I think of as Having Lunch with Andrew Cuomo, a person on a screen one I have never met, and a government official in a jacket and tie delivering mostly bad news in a way that does not make things sound, well, totally hopeless. At least somebody (technocrat that he is) seems to be as in charge of this much as anybody can be. In my little way I just have to live through it all. Still, I really do look forward to doing (or not) my regular everyday social distancing on my own terms again sometime; I’ll be glad when these kitchen lunches are over.

After he finishes, after I wash the dishes, I go for a stroll around a few neighborhood blocks. The air is spring fresh and the few neighbors—relative strangers--I see keep their distance and offer friendly small gestures. Their little dog strains to come over for a pet but they keep him close. We wave. We say the sun feels good. I don’t always recognize them, and I am not sure they recognize me, either, with my baseball cap, sunglasses and mask—and it doesn’t matter. I’m not even much of an outdoor person but all of a sudden I like being outdoors for that hour or so more than I used to. I can’t smile at anybody, and I can’t see anybody else’s smile, either.

I’m not exactly pounding the pavement, and I miss the buoyancy of the pool. I’d really rather be going there, to the pool, where we all weigh 15% of what we weigh on earth (or so I am told and as I choose to believe), where I bounce and stretch more easily in the flow and amid the bubbles and the waves, where the water is far more forgiving than gravity is or ever can be. And even at an inconveniently early time of the morning.

Four Plus Years Out, More or Less

Mostly I am grateful for reasonably good health, for my new hip, and especially to finally being able to see.

Beyond that, four plus years out after retirement, I have realized:

1. Napping is my superpower.

Naps are good. A half hour mid-afternoon nap doesn’t restart the day, exactly, but it does provide an energy boost. It is my retirement version of falling asleep sitting up while watching the 6 o’clock evening news, a workday habit for many years.

2. I never thought of myself as a cat mom before I retired. But after spending time with them every day, many hours, a cat mom I certainly am. In some ways, without the obligations and the other obligations of my work life, my life is more similar to theirs than I would have imagined, now that I think about it, but that is a subject for another day. In cat years, Moonbeam is my age and Swishy is middle aged. They take good care of me.

3.  I still don’t miss the meetings (not even ones I called) and even now I try to avoid anything even vaguely meeting-y. “Going out” some days means going out to lunch or to the pool or buying groceries, but then I have never been one for big par-tays anyway, so no matter. It’s nice to finally be able to let my introvert flag fly. Finally. In the relentlessly social workaday world, introversion is grievously undervalued.

As Neil Young sings, “Myself at last.”

If I were one to bother to advocate, to take on the world at this point of my life, I would make a loud public case for introversion to be recognized and valued far beyond what it is. The comparative peace and quiet of retirement has reinforced my notion that the world would be a better place if any number of extroverts SHUT UP. (You will never convince me that there is no obvious bias in the workplace for the terminally social.)

And when I hear just enough about how life is continuing just fine without me at my previous place of full-time employment, I am grateful to be gone.

4. That said, there are a few people from work that I miss if I stop and think about it, but I haven’t stopped to think about it that often. There is nothing keeping me from contacting or seeing them, but usually I don’t--even if I am really glad to see them when I run into them. And social media keeps us connected just enough. This one is doing this, that one is doing that.

This is a more recent version of my reaction to the people I knew in high school. I attended one class reunion maybe 11 years ago and that one surreal evening was enough. It was nice to see people (well, I remembered some of them) but I can’t say I have gone out of my way to see any of them again. Nor have they reached out to me.

Fair enough. I mean, it has been a very long time since high school.

That said, someone I knew for twelve years of childhood schooling—someone I have not thought about since never mind what year-- recently sent me a Facebook friend request and I found myself pleasantly surprised to accept and to see that he has done well for himself. Small world in a new way.

Nothing more or less than that.

5. Work, defined here as whatever it is you are doing in retirement, really can expand to fill the time you have to fill it. The time can be interrupted and delayed (as has the writing on this blog). Except, that is, if I am washing the floor or vacuuming it because the job is always fast and perfunctory. A good enough job. But other distractions can be….well, interesting.

6.   I have more time than I ever expected to have for myself and the quality of that time is different.  I have more time that is just mine to use. I have learned once again and very thoroughly that on some days I am excellent at doing nothing. So be it. Managed-enough procrastination is okay.

Twenty years ago I did not know that I would ever be my current age. And retired. I didn’t even think about retiring beyond socking money in my retirement account so that I might have enough money if (and only if) I decided to retire—if I were ever able to. How or when or even I might retire I had no idea.

More than anything, retirement equals time, time that is mine to use. For a change.

Morning coffee does not have to be rushed.

7. Many people have things far better than I do, but I do have things pretty good. Granted, these days I am not much of a material girl compared to many. I am also not going to jump on the fad bus of decluttering even though now and then I fill a bag or two for recycling or for the garbage. I just go and do things at my own speed. The difference between working full time and part time is the locus of control, and these days I really do live on Sandy Time.

BUT although I have thrown out 99% of my work clothes, I have discovered that, yes indeedy, from time to time even in retirement you do need to buy new clothes. A fifteen year old ratty sweater is a fifteen year old ratty sweater, after all. I think of new clothes as wardrobe maintenance. But these days the need is for warmth and comfort, mostly, with an occasional very brief glance toward fashion. (Because I recently attended wedding festivities, I now have two new dresses.)

Still, I am less and less a material girl. That said, over the years I knew I was approaching a no-definite-date retirement, I decided what I wanted: a dry sink, and later a roll-top desk, both of which I found used versions of. I have comfy shoes. I wear comfy clothes. I have long thought that a woman needs comfortable shoes and a good bra. After that, as the kids say: whatever.

 Comfort is underrated.

 Flannel is good.

8.  On the rare free association moment when I find myself looking backward, I am amazed (and sometimes horrified about workplace life) here and there during the Later Middle Ages: the three women faculty in a department of fourteen being assigned the eight a.m. classes until we spoke up; the new locally-grown supervisor (“stupidvisor” is a word I recently encountered) asking me where I went to high school after I had a Ph.D.  Many days I went from class to meeting to office to allergy shot appointment to supermarket to dinner to preparing for the next day before going to bed and getting up at six to go to work and start it all again. Work took up a lot of psychological space—and at the time I was happy to do it. And I was by no means the only person who lived that way.

The other day I found myself agreeing with Michelle Obama when she was asked what it felt like to find herself the only woman at a table full of men: she observed that you come to realize many of them are not terribly bright. (Not that all the women at the table were geniuses.)

Recently I threw out the final batch of souvenir documents I had for whatever reason saved from my workplace, and as I was ripping them up, I realized that I could not remember some of the things I had done. For instance, I found my signature—one of at least fifteen--on a memo to the CEO requesting that we middle managers be told why, since enrollment was up 11%, we were being asked to reduce our budgets by 3%. We asked to see the whole institutional budget to better understand what was going on. (We had a lot of responsibility and wanted more authority.)

I had to stop and think hard, but I don’t think we ever saw any results, really, but those of us who signed it, the fifteen of us, kept our jobs for a long time afterwards; I’m not sure this kind of event would happen these days (and certainly not without some kind of later deniable retaliation on the part of upper management).

And as a more experienced colleague told me very early in my management career, a lot of what people do on the job is what increases the chances that they will keep their job, not necessarily what is best for the institution or the students/customers (or what would now be called “brand”).

 That was then and there. These days: not my circus, not my monkeys.

9. People bloom in different ways at different times, and I am not sure how much of that blooming is predictable. Even in retirement—maybe especially in retirement.

I spent a career watching this happen in the classroom and out: the eighteen year old student who starts to bloom after she discovers—after four years of misery in high school—that she does indeed have interests and skills; the former factory worker (“I worked at the finger factory,” a place repeatedly cited for OSHA violations before the work was shipped overseas) who returns to retrain into nursing: “I never thought I could do this.” The person who has a transforming experience during an internship or a seven-day study tour to London or a community college class reluctantly taken during a stint as a prison-inmate.

We get interested in what we get good at. I was good at my jobs, but hey, to everything there is a season.

10.  Long ago a fellow student in grad school whose name I don’t remember beyond Laura Somebody from what I now know as Tom Petty’s hometown in Florida took a look at my palm and told me my quick fortune one afternoon in the student union. She began by looking distressed. Then she said, “There will be some problems early on, but then you will live a long and happy life.”

Why that bubbled up recently I don’t know, but I like it.

Age is relative. It has always been relative, especially when it seemed to matter less. I know people my age who are infirm and others who act like they are fifty (or far less). I am not going to bewail my age, or wish I were younger (well, not often, anyway). Age is what it is, and there is a good deal of truth that attitude and resourcefulness make a big chunk of difference.

Perhaps it is the case that age matters more during the younger and older years than it does during midlife, but then again, maybe not. Think of the difference between a ten year old and a fifteen year old. How old would I be if I could be any age? Maybe I would shave a few years off, but not many. Retirement is too good to go back to a younger age where I would have to go to work every day.

I’m not only retired; it’s a time of my life, not my total identity. That may be something many non-retired people do not see in our celebrity-driven, youth-worshipping loudmouth extrovert culture, but it is true. Still, even now the glow of retirement has not yet worn off, and recently I found myself driving past my former place of full-time employment singing “R-E-T-I-R-E-D” to the tune of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”. Again.

We make what we can of what we have. Never could I have predicted any of this, and although the Fates could reverse the turn of my wheel at any moment, these days I prefer to chug along, making my way through this time of year, this official season of giving thanks and of celebrating in both religious and secular terms two food holidays. Soon we will celebrate the birth of—as one person I know pronounces the name—“Baby Cheezits.” More than food nurtures us, and, as they say, any day above ground is a good day.

Ice, Ice, Baby

I feel so much better.

I am a little more than six months post surgery to replace my hip.

There is a lot to be said for aftermarket (and in some ways bionic) body parts: titanium, ceramic, and a little plastic. Like having cataract surgery or adopting an adult black cat with one eye, I have found more people have had the experience than I would have expected. The local surgeon—ranked as #1 for his low complications rate in all of New York state—had done 16,000 of them before he got to me, after all. What was new to me was routine work for him. (He did great work, especially for the first surgery on a January morning.)

There is nothing wrong with aftermarket body parts.

Looking back, it’s hard to say how long, one way or another, I limped and gimped, but it was at least a year, probably more. I do know that for a while my first steps every morning were like Frankenstein’s. And that gait became the morning new normal. And sometimes I walked that way, almost, later in the day.

For months last year I thought the problem was my knees—which it was to some extent and had been remedied by what I think of as medical WD-40 shots in my knees.

So before I agreed to the surgery, I got the knee shots, took ibuprofen until my ears rang, took glucosamine-chondroitin, used a heating pad, tried cider vinegar (too sour), turmeric/curcumin (too spicy), and fish oil (too burpy). I rolled on topical magnesium and CBD oil for leg cramps. I had perfect attendance in water aerobics three days a week for a semester (which I now think of as athletic overachieving even as I still attend). The pool was the one place where, almost gravity-free, nothing hurt for an hour. I read everything I could find about hips online (there are about 206 bones in the human body, by the way) and wished I had taken Anatomy and Physiology all those years ago instead of General Bio. For better or worse, my sense was that both knees and hips were too far gone for the experimental stem cell treatment not covered by insurance.  I went to twenty sessions of physical therapy until finally I went to a second (this one highly recommended) orthopedic surgeon for an opinion. On a scale of 1-10, what is your pain? At least a 7, maybe an 8. And the pain was exhausting.

The verdict: I needed hip replacement surgery. Knees were bone and bone, and so were my hips, one in particular. The physical therapy for my knees had been helpful but not exactly the point.

The orthopedic PA and I also discussed alternatives to try until I was ready for the surgery by a, well, genuine sawbones. Since I had fortunately never been in a hospital before, I exhausted all the other non-surgical possibilities first.

Until I realized the pain that was defining my life was not going to go away. My life as I knew it had been interrupted slowly and incrementally.  I was no longer who I had been, and not in a good way.

I hadn’t gone anywhere I didn’t have to. Pain tainted everything. Sitting in theater seats hurt. Walking hurt. Carrying a cat to the vet for a routine appointment was more difficult than I wanted to admit. Putting a sock on my left foot was…. excruciating. I went upstairs slowly in part because it was difficult to develop and sustain momentum, and stepping in and out of the bathtub required slow, careful moves. Clean out the garage? Forget it. I had a limited range of motion. I came to curse gravity and almost all life out of the pool. My physical therapist had told me “Motion is lotion,” but motion as often as not hurt. Still, I did my exercises at home twice every day anyway. (I am told most people go to physical therapy in part because they don’t do their prescribed exercises at home, but I certainly did them.)

I once was a walker, but no more. I trimmed the hedge, but I was too sore to carry the trimmer into the garage afterwards. I had to take the newspapers in small amounts out of the recycling bin to carry the bin to the curb. Sitting didn’t hurt until I got up, so I spent a lot of afternoons lying down on a heating pad even in the August heat. The other things I did not do: I didn’t go to Maine even for a day trip for the first time in decades; driving didn’t hurt, but walking afterwards did.  I didn’t go downtown to protest Trump’s visit. I didn’t go to any social event that required sitting in uncomfortable theater seats. Or in restaurant seats. Or standing at a bar. Bending over to pick up a penny in a parking lot? Forget it. Walking any distance was not possible.

My inability to function successfully in the world was collateral damage from an arthritic hip that needed replacement.

My passport sat unused.

My former quality of life was no more. (And when I used a cane a month before my surgery to attend a Christmas concert, ushers offered me a seat in the handicapped section, not with my family. I declined and hauled myself up to the elevator-less second balcony. The Americans with Disabilities Act goes nowhere near far enough.)

The pain just got so normal so slowly that I am not sure I appreciated—for a long time—how out of commission I truly was.

And yes, I know there are far worse things, life-threatening conditions, to have. But still.

And so surgery.

Approval from the insurance company happened overnight. Hip replacement counts as “elective” which apparently these days does not mean a nose job.  I went to an hour of pre-op joint camp. I went through the other required pre-op motions: my lungs were “unremarkable”. Primary care review, PT consultation, admissions meeting, and finally meeting with the surgeon. I chose to spend 23+ hours in the hospital rather than coming home on the same day, and in that time, I had at least three different nurses. New day, new shift, electronic records.

I discovered that I have very good health insurance. My surgery cost me a $500 copay for my hospital admission. Period. (That said, the current health insurance system in the US is criminally unfair. But thank you, Excellus Blue Cross Medicare Blue PPO.)

After my $500 surgery, the first thing I did in the hospital was stand up straight and without pain for the first time in I don’t know how long.

But before the surgery, I bought a cane and a walker. I cleaned even during the ten days pre-op without ibuprofen or aspirin at which point I realized fully how seriously bad off I was. On a scale of 1-10, the pain was pretty much a 10. And I came to understand the need—the urge--to provide, provide as you move closer to an event that you have little control over, after all.

 I would have to stay home for two weeks post-op, so I put up stores: easy-to-prepare food for two weeks, cat food and littler, clean clothes, extra pillows to support my leg. Boost and Zing bars. Flashlights. Motion-sensor lights so I wouldn’t have to even reach for a light switch. I bought a reacher device, a tool to help me put on socks, and a booster seat for the toilet. (Amazon was my good friend.) I put up stores as if for The January Apocalypse (and I still have some of those cans of soup). Despite the pain (no painkillers for ten days before surgery, remember), I cleaned like there was no tomorrow just in case. Floors. The bathtub. I rolled up the throw rugs and put them away so I wouldn’t trip on them. I got books to read during the first two weeks post op when I was going to have to stay home: John Irving’s The World According to Garp, Jacqueline Suzanne’s Valley of the Dolls, John Cleese’s Professor at Large. None of which I read more than a few pages of. (Later someone told me that the meds, especially the prednisone, makes for a certain lack of  intellectual focus.) On the bright side, I never had problems sleeping during any of this, not even the night before the surgery.

So after 23+ hours—one night—in the hospital, I was home on the new single bed in first floor dining room. I had ice packs. I had no problems sleeping at night, but during waking hours I was supposed to elevate my leg for 45 minutes and then move around for 15 minutes. (And I did.) My legs were elevated on a pile of pillows and I did ankle pumps and more ankle pumps to keep the blood flowing. I was to eat several small meals throughout the day, take deep breaths and use a fancier than usual peak flow meter and monitor my results.  I hydrated and hydrated. As pre-surgery PT taught me, I walked upstairs leading with my good leg and led downstairs (as if to hell) with my bad leg. I hooked my operated leg over the good leg to get myself out of bed. I lived in jammies and sweats. On a scale of 1-10, the pain was maybe a 3 or a 4 at the absolute worst.

There are many ways to replace a hip, it turns out, and mine was a minimally invasive one-hour robot- assisted procedure, anterior approach, that required no physical therapy follow up.  Muscles and nerves are stretched and contorted but not cut, so healing time and risk of infection are minimized. I went home with no restrictions. My body told me what I could do.  That said, though, I don’t want to think about how violent, how brutal  cutting of the hip and the pounding of the femoral stem into my bone was; I am just grateful for the anesthetic. I mean, the sawbones really did saw bones. Years ago I would have been in rehab for weeks if not months. Because of the anterior approach, there was little chance of dislocation even when I did 90 degree moves. I bent over to clean the litterbox two days after surgery. I was careful but not immobilized.

Now is not a bad time to be sick if you have to be sick. Some things can be fixed. Although there is a certain Zen to all this DIY figure-it-out but in its way highly structured recovery, for me it was a good match. I took an opioid pill only three times, and looking back, I don’t think I really needed those pills. My leg never looked like the telephone pole I was told it would; it was a little swollen and sensitive, certainly with dark purple and black bruises, but I was not completely disabled, really, and the black and purple turned to green and yellow as my leg healed. By taking the opioids I was trying to get out ahead of the pain, something which I did not need to do and which, actually, is standard medical thinking of a bygone age, or so I have been told.  Off the major meds for seven months now, I still monitor what might be too much and, equally importantly, too little movement. Sloth is not my friend. Motion is lotion; rest is rust.

I folded up the walker and put it away ASAP before it became a clothes rack. I was just loopy enough most of the time during those early weeks from the prednisone (steroid), the meloxicam (atomic NSAID) and acetaminophen for the swelling to know I was pleasantly but not dangerously loopy.

I was walking without a cane in the house three days after surgery but kept it close anyway. I went up the stairs on the third day, too.

I shoveled out the car after a blizzard six days after surgery. Most of the driveway I left as it was; sooner or later, all the snow melts.

I got in and out of the car, just to see, five days after I got home.

These days motion is lotion as long as I don’t overdo. Limpy and gimpy no more.

The staples were the worst part. As prescribed, I took the bandage off five or so days after surgery, but I could not believe the staples. Think of tiny staples used on carpet but that caught on the inside threads of my sweatpants; the nurse who later removed the staples (and there must have been 20-30 of them) told me my leg muscles were sewn together at least twice below the top layer, but that was not the point. To me they looked too much like carpet tacks (well, staples) to belong on my body.

The cats Dr. Swishy and Moonbeam Nightingale served as furry caretakers, probably welcoming the hours of warm body heat at home 24/7 during a January blizzard. Granted, they had to learn not to sit on my left leg. They were good sports in the solid two weeks of kitty time-sharing. Swishy snoozed next to my pillow, Moonbeam next to my hip (not on it). Never have I felt as bonded to any pets. Anyone who discounts the power of purring/feline nursing and even a badly timed nose touch just doesn’t know enough. (And even now when I think it might be time to adopt cat #3, I have to remind myself how attentive and caring they were and how a devoted middle aged and a loving geriatric cat would react to a stranger cat, and I set that adoption idea aside.)

I spent two weeks answering texts from friends and family. I did not want or need anybody hovering. The internet can be a helpful and successful time-suck when you need one. Not surprisingly, there is no shortage of hip replacement t-shirts available, none of which I have bought although I have to grant some credit for their predicable cleverness: “Real Hips Are So Last Month.” “I Make This Hip Replacement Look Good.” “Hip Hip Hooray.” “Got Titanium?” ”Hippy.” “I Just Had a Joint.” “Bionic Custom Parts.” (My parts are made by DePuy Syntheses, part of Johnson and Johnson.)

I grant you that staying indoors for two weeks even in January might not have universal appeal. In fact, it is not an overstatement to say that in the history of the world, there may never have been anybody better qualified than I to spend two full weeks in solitude—in comfy sweats, no makeup, no small talk. 

I just wanted to be home alone to heal. Plus, there wasn’t much for anyone else to do, really.  I slept. I iced and iced. I watched British mysteries on my iPad. I remembered to hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. I walked around for 15 minutes every waking hour and then iced, iced, iced. I read very little and I wrote even less except to keep the required written record of what pills I took when and what exercises I completed during every waking hour.

My renewed after-hip surgery philosophy: comfort is good. Convenience is vastly underrated.

That said, I was more eager than I expected to get the evil staples removed two weeks after the surgery. Outdoors! A car ride! Fresh air! In-person company! After the staples were removed and I got the okay to drive, I drove myself to the grocery store—and then came home and slept for a solid two hours. Another week later I got into the pool for water aerobics (and ditto the nap). Range of motion came back. Stamina increased and I no longer wondered if I were anemic. The surgeon said the operated leg is a teensy bit longer than the other, but I can’t tell the difference. The scar has faded more than I thought it would.

For the most part during surgery and recovery I have let my introvert flag fly and fly. I did my best to pace myself, maybe going out for lunch and running a few errands. A walk around the neighborhood is still—but only sometimes--a preface to a nap. But then I have always been a napper. And I have certainly always been an introvert. All this is not a bad way to live. Now and then I still ice. On a scale of 1-10, maybe some days for a short while the pain is almost a 1; if I am sore after working out in the pool, it’s a different kind of pain than before surgery, and I know it will go away after some ice and a little rest.

Medically the verdict was out on the value of post-op new shoes but since my gait has changed, I decided to give myself the benefit of the doubt and bought some new ones: Ryka, Easy Spirit, and a pair of Tevas to replace my sandals that had been worn for years in tropical monsoons. My brain was fried  for longer than I want to remember by the meds (and by the pain before the meds), but that has ended,  and I do what I can to help the healing along. I eat well enough (what I think of as The Healthy Shit Diet). Right before the surgery, I was given a 6 month handicapped parking tag for my car which I did use; it’s the kind of thing that it is nice to have if only on principle. I didn’t use it often, but I liked having it anyway even if the other people who have them seem to drive around with them hanging from the rear view mirror and I have to wonder in many cases what stupid driving move they made to result in that parking permit. I still try to avoid people who seem to be coming down with something if only so my energy can be spent on healing.

At first I was wise enough to try to accomplish one thing a day: a trip to the pool OR to the grocery store OR to lunch. Since then I have increased what I do, so much so that most days I don’t even tally what I am doing: I just do things until I need a nap. I pace myself. Not having to think about—focusing on—lifting one foot from the street to the sidewalk, for instance, means I have more energy.

Touch wood, my new hip is fine, fine enough for me to dance in the kitchen when the spirit moves. I am not expecting to do cartwheels and backflips—skills few people need, after all—but I am no longer limpy and gimpy. My other hip is far from perfect but doesn’t hurt yet. (The surgery was a positive enough experience that when I went back to see the physician’s assistant a month or so after the surgery, I asked when I could have the other hip done. “Does it hurt?” he asked as we looked at the x-ray. No, I told him, but we both saw the bone-on-bone on the x-ray.) My knees still get medicinal WD-40 shots every six months and they do still pop and crunch every once in a while, but I have had crunchy knees since I was a teenager. Back to normal, mostly—but I still keep the cane in the back seat of my car just in case. For now.  I still take glucosamine and chondroitin, and calcium, magnesium and zinc, and I still go to the pool water aerobics class to bounce around to “The Eye of the Tiger”. Other students in the class complain about the temperature of the pool, but I am grateful and more grateful, as I step off the ladder into the water, for the comparative weightlessness (15%) the pool affords me for an hour three times a week: blessed chlorinated weightlessness. I stretch and stretch some more and then we bounce around. Walking to and from the parking lot to the pool doesn’t hurt any more.

A body in motion tends to stay in motion. This is all still novel enough that I think of my life as BH and AH—before hip and after hip surgery. I still like having big chunks of time to myself and the cats are still often in Full Cozy Mode. Strength and range of motion are returning. These days, uninterrupted by pain and with most of my marbles back and functioning post-major surgery, I am back to following an idea where it will go. I am long back to making lists and starting to get things done. I like living in a way that does not require me to move (or do anything) on a prescribed post-op schedule. I have never bounded up stairs like a mountain goat and I don’t care if I do. But I can go up and down stairs with no pain even if I am still a little more tired at the end of the day than I remember being, say, a couple years ago.

For now, the new bed stays in the dining room just in case. The motion sensor lights still make a lot of sense: ease and safety in the dark.  My housekeeping has returned to its standard: good enough. I can haul around big bags of kitty litter when I have to, but right now I can’t imagine running with a backpack from one end of an airport to the other end (and somehow this is always necessary, no matter how carefully I schedule my flights) or hauling a suitcase up two flights of stairs in a beach hotel in Maine--but eventually I will be able to. I am still in the pool and I’m back functioning in gravity, too. I go for leisurely walks. I try not to sit any longer than I have to. I remember to stretch.

I am easing myself back into the world. I do care that I can walk and not worry about walking. I can look around. I went to the movies. I went to an Elton John concert. I go out to lunch, and if I haven’t driven to Maine yet (too much sitting makes for stiffness), I have almost gotten there. I don’t feel immobilized any more, but I am smart enough to be careful even though I have risked tempting fate and have moved the surgery-related pills (even ibuprofen and acetaminophen) from the handy top of the microwave to the back of the medicine cabinet. I use the hip surgery ice packs on my pulse points in the summer heat.

For the first time in a year and a half I got Chinese takeout.

I mean, this was major surgery, and the surgeon said it would take eight months to completely recover, which means mid-September. Even though that rule of thumb comes with a lot of it-depends-on-the-person caveats, I think it will prove to be right. Fingers crossed.

Looking back, I like to think that I already a brain and a heart and courage, and the surgeon gave me a new hip.  Other people pay for tattoos, but I have a four-inch scar, a fading decoration that I am proud of. (Thank you again, Excellus Blue Cross-Blue Shield Medicare, which yes, I do pay for.) I have learned that yes, really and truly motion is lotion and if you snooze (so to speak), you fuse—or at least get stiffness, not pain, in the morning.

The one thing I did not realize until very recently is the extent to which the surgery itself is just the beginning. What happens after is just as important: a matter of a way of life. And time.

And my new hip was a little more than a year after the gods gave me new eyes via cataract surgery that made my vision 20/20 without external lenses for the first time since maybe third grade. Yes, my eyes were always correctable. But really, a lens on your eye is not the same as one in your eye. It just isn’t. I had my cataract surgery right before Christmas 2017, and at odd moments I still find myself marveling at how much I can see even though I don’t mention all that I am amazed to see the way I did that first Christmas. (So much so that I was told to shut up, a very unfestive response.) I don’t know if I will ever be able to take my vision for granted the way most people do.

And maybe not my new hip, either.

I know that in January I will celebrate my hipaversary just as last December I had a glass of wine to celebrate the one year mark of my new replacement lenses—“my new eyeballs” as I think of them.

The gods gave me new eyes but then made it difficult for me to go anywhere without pain. And then there was a stretch of too-easy exhaustion despite a pain level of basically zero.  

Hmmm.

One morning during the first week, maybe the third day after the surgery, I tried sitting in a kitchen chair and moving my operated leg as if to depress a clutch. I could move my leg kinda sorta but it had little strength. I went back to bed.

A week or so later, though, I tried again, and my leg had more strength, enough that I decided that I could probably depress a real clutch. A few days later I went outside in the January cold and into the car to see if I was right.

I could depress the clutch.  And so I was certain that I would be able to drive again, maybe sooner rather than later and maybe not, and all I had to do, was…well, live long enough.

As I said, I still try not to sit very long if only because I feel stiff when I get up. I still hydrate and hydrate. I can tie my shoes and put on socks with far less pain (and the seconds of pain are lessening). I get in and out of the bathtub/shower without even thinking about it. Standing, I write on a yellow pad on the kitchen counter. Moonbeam sits on her chair near the refrigerator and Swishy is stretched out on the floor. My passport is stashed in its usual place; it replaced the one that I had to have extra pages put into a few years ago (a practice now discontinued, by the way) since there were just too many visas and stamps in it.

To answer the question I have been asked again and again, more than any other, especially since in retirement my time is finally in many ways my own: I don’t know exactly where—what places at any distance or even nearby--I am going to next in this world of gravity, but I know that sooner or later, after a little more time passes and assuming things go as I expect, I am going to be back to going.

And so yes: hip hip hooray, indeed.

Copyright Sandra Engel

July 2019

Vietnam 33: Reunification Palace

One way I know I am almost at my hotel--home--when I ride in from Tan Son Nhat Airport at midnight happens when I see the Reunification Palace on my right as my taxi goes down Nam Ky Khoi Nghia. Reunification Palace was the home of the President of South Vietnam during the American War.

There is a roof with a helicopter, of course, and in the basement  is a command bunker featuring original maps and an old General Electric (American-made) radio. There's a conference room, a banquet room, a kitchen big enough to feed a crowd.  More than one room of gifts to the various occupants. Time has stood still, as they say, with all its year-appropriate Naugahyde, although the building is still used for, say, meetings of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings.

Before tourists are allowed on the organized tour, they must watch a fifteen minute grainy black and white video on the history of the building.

And the view outside from the fourth floor could be of Paris.

Vietnam 32: A Cemetary

A cemetery next to a major road, next to a field. 

Just as a wedding is held on a day that the soothsayer says is a good day for a wedding, so too are the gravestones arranged as the soothsayer suggests. Symmetry is not the issue.

And why not?

Vitenam 31: Thien Hau Pagoda

Before the traffic in Ho Chi Minh City got exponentially worse, I used to try to visit the Thien Hau Pagoda in Cholon, Chinatown, early in the morning, usually toward the end of the visit. 

Why? Thien Hau is the saint of travelers, and, when the place is not mobbed, it is a pleasant if smoky and atmospheric place, the kind of place that is just modestly exotic enough that it suggests that Thien Hau probably can be helpful.

I mean, a visit is not going to hurt, and in a major city that has doubled in population and probably quadrupled in traffic, Thien Hau with its incense and its yin-yang roof, its relative quiet, is an oasis, a place that is another world in a city that I already think of as another (if familiar in many ways) world.

The first time I visited, I was asked to take a small piece of paper and write a wish on it. I seem to recall that I then hung it on a swirl of incense. On that last day before I was leaving, I wrote one word, in English: RETURN.